This Fall I will be teaching a graduate course at NYU called Designing Technologies and Experiences for Music Making, Learning, and Engagement. This course is heavily inspired by the Hack Day process, but applied over the span of a semester-long course. Students from across the many programs within the NYU Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions will work together individually and in teams to develop a technology and/or experience that that they will iterate at least twice over the course of the semester with a specified audience/group of stakeholders. Students will read articles about and case studies of best practices in music education, meaningful engagement, experience design, technology development and entrepreneurialism, and meet regularly with guest presenters from industry and education. At the end of the course, students will present their projects to a panel of music educators and industry representatives for feedback. Selected students will have the opportunity to compete for scholarships to work within my research group and some of the industry sponsors during the Spring 2014 semester to potentially license and commercialize their ideas and projects.
In this course, we will be implementing a research & development process designed by Andrew R. Brown called Software Development as (Music Education) Research (SoDaR). This process was piloted and used throughout the development of the Jam2Jam networked media jamming software project led by the late Steve Dillon. This process actively involves the end users of a particular piece of software in the design process at all stages. The field of music education technology is just now starting to move toward this end, where in the past educators were often marketed music technologies designed for professional musicians (e.g., professional keyboard synthesizer, Finale, Sibelius, Reason, ProTools, Ableton, etc.). It’s notable that relatively new technologies Noteflight, MusicFirst, and MusicDelta have engaged educators in the design and refinement of their tools, and see music educators and students as their primary user audience.