Music Technology in the Classroom

The last twenty years have exhibited unprecedented growth of music technology in the fields of commercial music, professional recording studios, personal home studios, and music education in the public school music classroom. With the establishment of school district programs providing students with access to computer technology from state lottery monies, music classrooms are now receiving their own computers and music software. Music software in the marketplace provides challenges to teachers and their efforts to integrate technology to their classroom instruction. How music educators determine what software is needed, what is appropriate, effective, and within their music budget is still a daunting and questioning effort. This can be a deterrent to those band and choral educators, who are initially reticent about music technology from acquiring, learning, and using music technology in their classrooms. This project will address these issues, the changing roles of teachers, music technology\u27s effect on learning, use in the classroom instruction, National Standards, and philosophical viewpoints

Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation -- A Survey

This paper is a survey and an analysis of different ways of using deep learning (deep artificial neural networks) to generate musical content. We propose a methodology based on five dimensions for our analysis: Objective - What musical content is to be generated? Examples are: melody, polyphony, accompaniment or counterpoint. - For what destination and for what use? To be performed by a human(s) (in the case of a musical score), or by a machine (in the case of an audio file). Representation - What are the concepts to be manipulated? Examples are: waveform, spectrogram, note, chord, meter and beat. - What format is to be used? Examples are: MIDI, piano roll or text. - How will the representation be encoded? Examples are: scalar, one-hot or many-hot. Architecture - What type(s) of deep neural network is (are) to be used? Examples are: feedforward network, recurrent network, autoencoder or generative adversarial networks. Challenge - What are the limitations and open challenges? Examples are: variability, interactivity and creativity. Strategy - How do we model and control the process of generation? Examples are: single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, sampling or input manipulation. For each dimension, we conduct a comparative analysis of various models and techniques and we propose some tentative multidimensional typology. This typology is bottom-up, based on the analysis of many existing deep-learning based systems for music generation selected from the relevant literature. These systems are described and are used to exemplify the various choices of objective, representation, architecture, challenge and strategy. The last section includes some discussion and some prospects.Comment: 209 pages. This paper is a simplified version of the book: J.-P. Briot, G. Hadjeres and F.-D. Pachet, Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation, Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems, Springer, 201

Fifty years of the Psychology of Programming

This paper reflects on the evolution (past, present and future) of the ‘psychology of programming' over the 50 year period of this anniversary issue. The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) has been a key venue for much seminal work in this field, including its first foundations, and we review the changing research concerns seen in publications over these five decades. We relate this thematic evolution to research taking place over the same period within more specialist communities, especially the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG), the Empirical Studies of Programming series (ESP), and the ongoing community in Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). Many other communities have interacted with psychology of programming, both influenced by research published within the specialist groups, and in turn influencing research priorities. We end with an overview of the core theories that have been developed over this period, as an introductory resource for new researchers, and also with the authors’ own analysis of key priorities for future research

CC-interop : COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation. Final Project Report

As far as is known, CC-interop was the first project of its kind anywhere in the world and still is. Its basic aim was to test the feasibility of cross-searching between physical and virtual union catalogues, using COPAC and the three functioning "clumps" or virtual union catalogues (CAIRNS, InforM25, and RIDING), all funded or part-funded by JISC in recent years. The key issues investigated were technical interoperability of catalogues, use of collection level descriptions to search union catalogues dynamically, quality of standards in cataloguing and indexing practices, and usability of union catalogues for real users. The conclusions of the project were expected to, and indeed do, contribute to the development of the JISC Information Environment and to the ongoing debate as to the feasibility and desirability of creating a national UK catalogue. They also inhabit the territory of collection level descriptions (CLDs) and the wider services of JISC's Information Environment Services Registry (IESR). The results of this project will also have applicability for the common information environment, particularly through the landscaping work done via SCONE/CAIRNS. This work is relevant not just to HE and not just to digital materials, but encompasses other sectors and domains and caters for print resources as well. Key findings are thematically grouped as follows: System performance when inter-linking COPAC and the Z39.50 clumps. The various individual Z39.50 configurations permit technical interoperability relatively easily but only limited semantic interoperability is possible. Disparate cataloguing and indexing practices are an impairment to semantic interoperability, not just for catalogues but also for CLDs and descriptions of services (like those constituting JISC's IESR). Creating dynamic landscaping through CLDs: routines can be written to allow collection description databases to be output in formats that other UK users of CLDs, including developers of the JISC information environment. Searching a distributed (virtual) catalogue or clump via Z39.50: use of Z39.50 to Z39.50 middleware permits a distributed catalogue to be searched via Z39.50 from such disparate user services as another virtual union catalogue or clump, a physical union catalogue like COPAC, an individual Z client and other IE services. The breakthrough in this Z39.50 to Z39.50 conundrum came with the discovery that the JISC-funded JAFER software (a result of the 5/99 programme) meets many of the requirements and can be used by the current clumps services. It is technically possible for the user to select all or a sub-set of available end destination Z39.50 servers (we call this "landscaping") within this middleware. Comparing results processing between COPAC and clumps. Most distributed services (clumps) do not bring back complete results sets from associated Z servers (in order to save time for users). COPAC on-the-fly routines could feasibly be applied to the clumps services. An automated search set up to repeat its query of 17 catalogues in a clump (InforM25) hourly over nearly 3 months returned surprisingly good results; for example, over 90% of responses were received in less than one second, and no servers showed slower response times in periods of traditionally heavy OPAC use (mid-morning to early evening). User behaviour when cross-searching catalogues: the importance to users of a number of on-screen features, including the ability to refine a search and clear indication that a search is processing. The importance to users of information about the availability of an item as well as the holdings data. The impact of search tools such as Google and Amazon on user behaviour and the expectations of more information than is normally available from a library catalogue. The distrust of some librarians interviewed of the data sources in virtual union catalogues, thinking that there was not true interoperability

Advancing performability in playable media : a simulation-based interface as a dynamic score

When designing playable media with non-game orientation, alternative play scenarios to gameplay scenarios must be accompanied by alternative mechanics to game mechanics. Problems of designing playable media with non-game orientation are stated as the problems of designing a platform for creative explorations and creative expressions. For such design problems, two requirements are articulated: 1) play state transitions must be dynamic in non-trivial ways in order to achieve a significant level of engagement, and 2) pathways for players’ experience from exploration to expression must be provided. The transformative pathway from creative exploration to creative expression is analogous to pathways for game players’ skill acquisition in gameplay. The paper first describes a concept of simulation-based interface, and then binds that concept with the concept of dynamic score. The former partially accounts for the first requirement, the latter the second requirement. The paper describes the prototype and realization of the two concepts’ binding. “Score” is here defined as a representation of cue organization through a transmodal abstraction. A simulation based interface is presented with swarm mechanics and its function as a dynamic score is demonstrated with an interactive musical composition and performance

GlobalFestival: Evaluating Real World Interaction on a Spherical Display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor

The NEUMA Project: towards Cooperative On-line Music Score Libraries

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThe NEUMA project (http://neuma.irpmf-cnrs.fr) aims at designing and evaluating an open cooperative system for musician communities, enabling new search and analysis tools for symbolic musical content sharing and dissemination. The project is organized around the French CNRS laboratory of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France which provides sample collections, user requirements and expert validation. The paper presents the project goals, its achitecture and current state of development. We illustrate our approach with an on-line publication of monodic collections centered on XVIIe century French liturgic chants

End user programming of awareness systems : addressing cognitive and social challenges for interaction with aware environments

The thesis is put forward that social intelligence in awareness systems emerges from end-Users themselves through the mechanisms that support them in the development and maintenance of such systems. For this intelligence to emerge three challenges have to be addressed, namely the challenge of appropriate awareness abstractions, the challenge of supportive interactive tools, and the challenge of infrastructure. The thesis argues that in order to advance towards social intelligent awareness systems, we should be able to interpret and predict the success or failure of such systems in relationship to their communicational objectives and their implications for the social interactions they support. The FN-AAR (Focus-Nimbus Aspects Attributes Resources) model is introduced as a formal model which by capturing the general characteristics of the awareness-systems domain allows predictions about socially salient patterns pertaining to human communication and brings clarity to the discussion around relevant concepts such as social translucency, symmetry, and deception. The thesis recognizes that harnessing the benefits of context awareness can be problematic for end-users and other affected individuals, who may not always be able to anticipate, understand or appreciate system function, and who may so feel their own sense of autonomy and privacy threatened. It introduces a set of tools and mechanisms that support end-user control, system intelligibility and accountability. This is achieved by minimizing the cognitive effort needed to handle the increased complexity of such systems and by enhancing the ability of people to configure and maintain intelligent environments. We show how these tools and mechanisms empower end-users to answer questions such as "how does the system behave", "why is something happening", "how would the system behave in response to a change in context", and "how can the system’s behaviour be altered" to achieve intelligibility, accountability, and end-user control. Finally, the thesis argues that awareness applications overall can not be examined as static configurations of services and functions, and that they should be seen as the results of both implicit and explicit interaction with the user. Amelie is introduced as a supportive framework for the development of context-aware applications that encourages the design of the interactive mechanisms through which end-users can control, direct and advance such systems dynamically throughout their deployment. Following the recombinant computing approach, Amelie addresses the implications of infrastructure design decisions on user experience, while by adopting the premises of the FN-AAR model Amelie supports the direct implementation of systems that allow end-users to meet social needs and to practice extant social skills