Archive for February, 2009

New Music Performamatics projects launched for the Spring 2009 semester

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Performamatics LogoDuring the Spring 2009 term, two music performamatics projects will be underway at UMass Lowell. As part of a National Science Foundation CPATH grant several of my faculty colleagues from the Music, Art, English and Computer Science departments are allied in collaborative interdisciplinary projects designed to attract more students to computer science majors through arts-focused experiences.

This semester, I am collaborating with computer science professor Jesse Heines as part of a synchronized course. My General Music Methods II students will be working together with students from Prof. Heines’ GUI Programming II course on a project to collaboratively develop online music composing software with middle school students at the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell. Currently, the middle school students are coming up with ideas for music software they would like to have. They are sharing these with my General Methods Students, who have been working with them one day a week since September 2008. Once public beta versions of the software are up and running, I’ll post them here for you to try out and use with your students.

An additional structure for this project involves a social music component. Following the model of projects such as the UNESCO Sounds of our Water Project and CCMixter.org, the project will involve creating an online social music/sound repository where the middle school students can upload sounds and musical samples.  These sounds and samples will serve as the source materials for the software the computer science students will design.

This semester my music education colleague Gena Greher and computer science professor Jesse Heines are also collaborating on a general education course entitled Sound Thinking:
Course Description:
What is sound? How do we capture it, manipulate it, and harness it in the digital world? The field for multimedia applications is expanding, creating new challenges for artists, technologists, and educators as well as consumers. This course will explore the intersection of the arts with technology, where students majoring in the arts will interact with those in computer science to explore the art and science of digital audio from the perspective of basic end-user applications. The specific applications to be examined will be chosen based on their abilities to promote creative expression and exploration. We will also consider the underlying code that allows these programs to run and function. This course will use a learner-centered approach that emphasizes project-based experiences. It will provide students with multiple opportunities to explore, create, and solve problems with music technology. The concept of collaboration is integral to this course. As the workforce moves to a more collaborative structure, it is important that students learn to work in groups with others who may not share their skill sets and levels of expertise, and that they gain experience in problem-solving the myriad issues that arise when using technology.
Examples of class projects and student work will be posted here throughout the course.

Posted in Computer-supported Collaborative Learning, Announcements, Student Projects | No Comments »