This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am excited to be teaching it. My syllabus is below. I expect it to evolve a bit as the course goes on, especially toward the end of the semester as I adapt it to the needs and interests of the students. The reading list draws extensively on the same body of research and practice that informed Will Kuhn’s and my book Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity.
Tag Archives: design
New book chapter on the Groove Pizza
Springer just released this new edited volume on human-computer interaction in music contexts. It includes a chapter I coauthored with Sumanth Srivinasan on the design and pedagogical philosophy behind the Groove Pizza. Check it out!
The aQWERTYon pitch wheels and the future of music theory visualization
Update: we have implemented these changes to the aQWERTYon, try them here
Try the scale wheel visualization here
The MusEDLab will soon be launching a revamped version of the aQWERTYon with some enhancements to its visual design, including a new scale picker. Beyond our desire to make our stuff look cooler, the scale picker represents a challenge that we’ve struggled with since the earliest days of aQW development. On the one hand, we want to offer users a wide variety of intriguing and exotic scales to play with. On the other hand, our audience of beginner and intermediate musicians is likely to be horrified by a list of terms like “Lydian dominant mode.” I recently had the idea to represent all the scales as colorful icons, like so:
Read more about the rationale and process behind this change here. In this post, I’ll explain what the icons mean, and how they can someday become the basis for a set of new interactive music theory visualizations.
Learning music from Ableton
Ableton recently launched a delightful web site that teaches the basics of beatmaking, production and music theory using elegant interactives. If you’re interested in music education, creation, or user experience design, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
Designing a more welcoming aQWERTYon experience
This post documents my final project for User Experience Design with June Ahn
Overview of the problem
The aQWERTYon is a web-based music performance and theory learning interface designed by the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. The name is a play on “QWERTY accordion.” The aQWERTYon invites novices to improvise and compose using a variety of scales and chords normally available only to advanced musicians. Notes map onto the computer keyboard such that the rows play scales and the columns play chords. The user can not play any wrong notes, which encourages free and playful exploration. The aQWERTYon has a variety of instrument sounds to choose from, and it can also act as a standard MIDI controller for digital audio workstations (DAWs) like GarageBand, Logic, and Ableton Live. As of this writing, there have been over 32,000 aQWERTYon sessions.
Affordances and Constraints
Note-taking for User Experience Design with June Ahn
Don Norman discusses affordances and constraints in The Design of Everyday Things, Chapter Four: Knowing What To Do.
User experience design is easy in situations where there’s only one thing that the user can possibly do. But as the possibilities multiply, so do the challenges. We can deal with new things using information from our prior experiences, or by being instructed. The best-designed things include the instructions for their own use, like video games whose first level act as tutorials, or doors with handles that communicate how you should operate them by their shape and placement.
QWERTYBeats research
Writing assignment for Design For The Real World with Claire Kearney-Volpe and Diana Castro – research about a new rhythm interface for blind and low-vision novice musicians
Definition
I propose a new web-based accessible rhythm instrument called QWERTYBeats.
Traditional instruments are highly accessible to blind and low-vision musicians. Electronic music production tools are not. I look at the history of accessible instruments and software interfaces, give an overview of current electronic music hardware and software, and discuss the design considerations underlying my project. Continue reading
The evolution of the Groove Pizza
The Groove Pizza is a playful tool for creating grooves using math concepts like shapes, angles, and patterns. Here’s a beat I made just now. Try it yourself!
Inside the aQWERTYon
Update: try the Theory aQWERTYon!
The MusEDLab and Soundfly just launched Theory For Producers, an interactive music theory course. The centerpiece of the interactive component is a MusEDLab tool called the aQWERTYon. You can try it by clicking the image below. (You need to use Chrome.)
In this post, I’ll talk about why and how we developed the aQWERTYon.
User interface case study: Patterning
The folks at Olympia Noise Co recently came out with a new circular drum machine for iOS called Patterning, and it’s pretty fabulous.
The app’s futuristic look jumps right out at you: flat-colored geometric shapes with zero adornment, in the spirit of Propellerhead Figure. There’s nothing on the screen that doesn’t function in some way. It’s a little dense at first glance, but a complex tool is bound to have a complex interface, and Patterning reveals itself easily through exploration.