New Music Performamatics projects launched for the Spring 2009 semester

During the Spring 2009 term, two music performamatics projects will be underway. As part of a National Science Foundation CPATH grant several faculty at UMass Lowell 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 music education professor Gena Greher and computer science professor Jesse Heines are 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.

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Music education professor Alex Ruthmann is also collaborating with computer science professor Jesse Heines as part of a synchronized course. Ruthmann's General Music Methods II  students will be working together with students from Prof. Heines' GUI Programming II course on a project to develop online music composing software. Working together with middle school students at the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell, MA music education and computer science students will collaboratively develop new online music composing applications for use by middle school students. 

Gena Greher and Jesse Heines present Performamatics research at the ATMI 2009 Conference

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Connecting Computer Science and Music Students to the Benefit of Both


Gena Greher--University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jesse Heines--University of Massachusetts, Lowell

We present a hands-on, interdisciplinary project designed to help music education students think about how novices learn new symbol systems. The students design a musical instrument from a typical household object and create a musical composition for it. They then devise a notation system that others can understand well enough to perform their composition with little to no verbal or written direction. Given this notation system, computer science students create programs that implement it. The two groups of students interact during the "hand off" and when music students "try out" the programs developed by the computer science students. Both groups of students benefit from learning to communicate with others whose backgrounds differ significantly from their own and from understanding what it really takes to create a notation system and a computer program that can be used by people who don't share their perspective.