Music Education Hack 2013 saw the presentation of 44 hacks created by around 200 participants throughout the event. As explained in my first post about Hack Days, not every hack (or presentation of the hack!) is successful. However, there is never a shortage of cool, new, and innovative ideas. Some appear at the demo session fully realized, yet others remain mere glimpses of what might come in the future. Nonetheless, it’s an exhilarating experience to just attend one of these events, let alone engage as a participant.
Here’s a list of my 14 favorites, in no particular order: (Note: Not every hack has a working demo).
- Exemplify – (FIRST PRIZE – $10,000) – Online tool for teaching students around a streaming piece of music. Exemplify uses a variety of APIs to automatically provide historical context articles about the piece of music or composer, provides a built in comment or quiz tool to be tied to specific times within a song, and enables teacher to pause song, etc.
- Poke-a-Text – (EchoNest API PRIZE – iPad Mini) – Teach grammar while listening to music. The user selects a favorite song and the app presents streaming phrases from the song’s lyrics with varying degrees of grammatical correctness. The user selects the version of each lyric line they think is grammatically correct and their choices are graded. Scores can be sent back to the teacher to monitor progress.
- Rock Steady – Mobile phone app for pulse/rhythm training in the context of your favorite song. Using the built in accelerometer in your phone, control the tempo of your favorite song or try to follow along. Keeps accuracy score. A cool way of practicing pulse in a contextually meaningful way.
- JamAlong – This is a Spotify app that creates a simple diatonic xylophone interface that automatically maps onto the key of your favorite song within Spotify. It queries the key and mode of the song using a variety of APIs, and maps out the diatonic scale that best matches the song. The user can “jam” with their favorite tunes automatically through playing a virtual diatonic xylophone mapped to the solfege of the particular mode with their computer mouse.
- Spotifact – This app enables a teacher to create affinity groups based on musical preferences. Have multiple friends go to the demo and enter “hack” as the class code. The app links to Facebook and joins users together into groups based on listening preferences as identified in Facebook. Use this to form groups within large gatherings of people. The app can run on mobile devices in the web browser.
- Map That Music – App for learning geography through music and vice versa. Listen to a Spotify song and guess the country of origin. Also, explore a world map to hear songs from that particular country. A concept similar to a prior Music Hack Day hack by Paul Lamere: Roadtrip Mixtape.
- RosettaTone – (THIRD PRIZE – $1000 in Amazon AWS credits) – Teaching a foreign language through music videos. Users watch foreign language music videos with live lyric translation in original and second language.
- Kashual – Trigonometry functions mapped to music synthesis, with interactive performance controls. See the actual functions for various musical samples, and adjust the mathematical function values to create new tones. Play those tones on a virtual keyboard. Inspired by a direct request from a NYC high school math teacher.
- Parrot Lunaire – (Peachnote API PRIZE – $100 gift certificate to Carnegie Hall) – Search the classical musical score corpus by singing or playing in the theme.
- AirTrainer – Leap motion kinaesthetic tone matching program created with Max/MSP. Move your finger up or down in the air to play and match tones by ear and hand.
- SuperTonic – Active listening app with Noteflight. Students click a button during “interesting” parts of a song. Creates an interactive graph for the teacher to use to document listener engagement.
- Teach Beats – App for linking buskers in NYC with students who want to take lessons from them.
- TapeTest – (NYU SPECIAL PRIZE to an Educator/Hacker – Nick Jaworski – a MaKey MaKey kit) – a simple web-based app for teachers to assign students to record and submit playing tests for individual playing assessments.
- Remixing Your Musical World: The MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit – (SECOND PRIZE – $2000 in Amazon AWS Credits & 25 hours of mentoring from NYC Dev Shop) – A musical construction kit based on the MaKey MaKey and MIT’s Scratch visual programming language. The hack completed at Music Ed Hack was the MaKey MaKey Chord Board – a demo project for exploring chords and their inversions creatively.
My role at the Music Ed Hack event was first as a prize sponsor. My research group at NYU along with MaKey MaKey sponsored an educator/hacker prize of a MaKey MaKey kit awarded to the educator(s) who served as active collaborators on a great hack. I wanted to especially encourage and award educators who got their hands dirty in providing active input into the development and realization of a hack. Congratulations again to Nick Jaworski for his involvement in the Tape Test app! In addition, all educator participants were invited to participate in my research group’s Music Technology Educator Meetup (link coming soon) to be held monthly at NYU starting in October. Each educator who actively participated in Music Education Hack and attends the monthly meetup will also receive a MaKey MaKey for use in their classrooms.
I also attended as an observer and as an informal mentor at the event. Spotify and the NYC Department of Education assembled a great team of formal mentors, including music educators Barbara Freedman from the Greenwich, CT schools, Robert Lamont from Gramercy Arts High School in NYC, and Darla Hanley from Berklee. A full list of mentors can be found by scrolling to the bottom of this page: http://musicedhack.com/.
I am also extremely proud of my summer co-op scholar research students Graham Allen and Matt Cohen from UMass Lowell! Their hack won 2nd price for their MaKey MaKey Chord Board, a part of the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit that my research group is currently developing. What’s significant about their hack from my perspective is that they did all of their development using a MaKey MaKey kit ($50), $12 worth of common household items, and did all of the software programming using Scratch 2.0 – a free web-based visual programming environment developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab for kids. All of the materials they assembled for the hack are meant to be remixed and reused by students. All of the code and hardware they created can be viewed and customized by students freely, encouraging users to think and create musically, computationally, mathematically, while exploring engineering design. Graham and Matt competed against professional developers using professional tools from all around the country and came in 2nd with their project and great presentation.
Their project is as much STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) as it is Music and Design. I think it’s a great interdisciplinary model for educators of all levels. The Scratch environment enables K-12 educators to bring the process of Hack Days to their own students. Not only are students exploring creating, performing, responding and connecting (the new Arts Standards framework), but they are also working as instrument builders, designers, and engineers. If you are interested in other ideas for exploring expanded and reformed visions of music education pedagogy and curriculum, check out Evan Tobias’s work exploring ways of teaching popular music through producing, songwriting and composing. Our Experiencing Audio research group plans on releasing the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit plans as a completely open-source, open-hardware project, while also making it available for purchase in the near future. We’re also working with various Music API providers to create custom Scratch 2.0 blocks enabling Scratch users to “hack” their own music apps using commercial APIs.
I really hope that Music Education Hack will become an annual event.