Composing Pieces for Peace: Using Impromptu to Build Cross-Cultural Awareness

Music has long played a role as an ambassador for peace and understanding between cultures. Yet, there is little research that gauges how creating music aids in the development of cross-cultural awareness. Given today’s tense political climate post-9/11, further investigation of the role that music can play in fostering cross-cultural awareness is needed. Using a sociocultural constructionist framework, this study investigated how 22 youth (12 girls and 10 boys) from the United States, in communication with youth in Tel-Aviv, Israel, analyzed and composed music steeped in traditional Hebrew, Arabic, and Western traditions using the computer program, Impromptu. Participants took part in pre-tests and post-tests to measure their awareness and respect for Israelis at the start and end of the study using the Cross-Cultural Awareness Drawing Task (Bar-Tal & Teichman, 2005). Using qualitative techniques, the researchers analyzed the written reflections of participants on their music composition process over the course of the intervention. Findings suggest that the music composition and analysis exercises had a positive impact on the development of crosscultural awareness over time among American students, helping to counter the common misconceptions about the Middle East fostered in today’s media

A Brief History of Music, Computers and Thinking: 1972–2015

The inaugural issue of the International Journal of Computers and Mathematical Learning (IJCML) appeared in 1996. Now, nearly 20 years later, Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education (DEME) arises like a Phoenix from its ashes. I would like to use the occasion to reflect, on the travels of Logo and specifically MusicLogo beginning with the 1970s when it was first taking shape in the Logo Lab at MIT, through its status as reported in the 1996 IJCML. Then, looking back from here, 20 years later again, the scene looks quite different: MusicLogo has disappeared having morphed into Impromptu, and Impromptu is now available on an iPad. But this journey is just a small instance of related travels that I hope will be pursued by others—for example why did Logo, the original progenitor, disappear as it morphed into Scratch, Netlogo, Boxer and more

The Luxury of Necessity

This paper was originally written as an address to a conference of the National Association of Schools of Music on "The Music Consumer". Posing a series of questions which point to fundamental issues underlyin the LOGO music project, the paper goes on to describe some of the specific projects with which students have been working in an effort to probe these issues. Emphasis is placed on "modes of representation" as a significant realm of enquiry: just how does an individual represent a tune to himself, what are the differences between formal and informal modes of representation ??at features and relations of a melody does a representation capture, what does it leave out? What is the influence of such modes of "perception", how do they effect strategies of problem solving, notions of "same" and "different" or even influence musical "taste"? Finally, there are some hints at what might constitute "sufficiently powerful representations" of musical design with examples from both simple and complex pieces of music as well as a probe into what might distinguish "simple" from "complex" musical designs

Development of Musical Intelligence II: Children's Representation of Pitch Relations

The work reported here is an outgrowth of studies in the development of musical intelligence and learning that have been underway for about four years. Beginning as one of the activities in the LOGO Lab (a part of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) the research has expanded to include more theoretical work in the MIT Division for Study a nd Research in Education

The Act of Listening

4-Jan-8

Capturing Intuitive Knowledge in Procedural Description

Trying to capture intuitive knowledge is a little like trying to capture the moment between what just happened and what is about to happen. Or to quote a famous philosopher, "You can't put your foot in the same river once." The problem is tha tyou can only "capture" what stands still. Intuitive knowledge is not a static structure, but rather a continuing process of constructing coherence and meaning out of the sensory phenomena that come at you. To capture intuitive knowledge, then means: Given some phenomena, what are your spontaneous ways of selecting significant features or for choosing what constitutes an element; how do you determine what is the same and what is different; how do you agregate or chunk the sensory data before you