Different media, same relationships: What the Iris Piano Trio learned from the COVID-19 pandemic

The Iris Music Project is a non-profit dedicated to reimagining residential and healthcare communities as spaces of creative exchange. By February 2020, our chamber music group, the Iris Piano Trio, had developed a model for music programming at Charles E. Smith Life Communities (CESLC) in Rockville, Maryland (United States), that emphasized collaborative relationships between professional musicians and community members. The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted the Trio’s work and tested its model. In this article, we describe how the Trio remained connected and relevant to CESLC residents by experimenting with virtual programmes that adapted our model to a digital setting. We argue that our prior relationships with residents and staff enabled us to impact their lives throughout the pandemic despite the isolation created by COVID-19 closures. The pandemic strained, but did not fundamentally change, the Trio’s ensemble-in-residence model, suggesting its potential as a generalized model in the field of music and health.

Learning Programming Fundamentals via Music

This article describes a unique ongoing experience of learning programming via engagement in music programming of known melodies. Seventh and eighth graders participated in 10 lessons of weekly activity. Via the programming of melodies, using the Scratch 2.0 environment, they became acquainted with basic concepts of programming such as methods, variables, repetition and control commands, parallel processes, and more. The study was conducted in the form of an action research. The study units were designed in the spirit of the spiral learning method, in which the learning concepts are revisited several times while their level of complexity rises. From the data analyzed so far, four categories emerged: enjoyment, interest, gaining programming knowledge, and experiencing feelings of success. The students were enthusiastic during the learning lessons, and they were curious to learn and use advanced concepts. The music programming provided them with practical meaning for the learned programming structures and concepts.

Coding “Hip Hot Cross Buns” with Sonic Pi (Beginner)

The purpose of this lesson is to learn how to code the song “Hot Cross Buns” with the software Sonic Pi. Learning outcomes of this activity include: 1) how to create and call functions to trigger sequences (algorithms) of notes or samples, 2) how to use “sleep” to create timing separation between notes or samples, 3) how to use repeats to loop a musical phrase, and 4) how to use parameters and effects to shape or change the sonic characteristics of the notes and samples. Because the song being coded will be recognizable to many students, learners can hear if they are on the right track, which can be a fun way for them to receive feedback while engaging in the music programming process.

Algorithmic Modeling of Arts and Other Hard-to-Formalize Subjects

This article is devoted to open questions related to modelling and using of modelling in various areas that hardly can be formalized, such as arts, creativity process, and some hard cases in natural science. We are discussing here the advantage of using modelling and the global question: why we need modelling in such areas and why. Several music and scientific centres across the globe are studying the ways of modelling the logical laws of creativity, by exploring generalized parameters of works of art including music. In recent years, Russian scientists have become more interested in modelling the process of musical creativity and music programming. Most frequently, these works are applied in the computer analysis of works of art, to determine the author or the period of creation, to attribute the work of art to a particular school or group. Fewer papers provide a deeper analysis, including psychological aspects of the perception of art (in particular, music). The authors have developed a method to construct models in subject areas difficult to formalize, applying it to create a model of musical creativity based on the structural analysis of musical texts, the cyclical structuring of statistical data, and the structural analysis of statistical information. This approach allows creating texts that satisfy the previously obtained or manually provided parameters.

CONTENT TARGETS WORK: A PRACTICAL EXAMPLE OF CHANGING BEHAVIOURS AND PROCESSES IN PROGRAMMING WOMEN COMPOSERS

In September 2015, ABC Classic set a target of 5 per cent women composers on air as the beginning of a push to combat serious gender imbalance in the works broadcast on the network. This target has gradually changed broadcast culture, encouraging content makers to champion women's music and allowing for major programming events and goals, and it has led to an increase of women composers broadcast from 2.2 per cent in 2015 to 9.9 per cent in the 2018/19 reporting cycle. This article examines our journey over this time, arguing for targets as a means to enact change and establish concrete outcomes. It explores the ways in which a target has encouraged us to consider gaps in the content offered along with new opportunities to present music by hitherto under-represented composers. It also reflects on the work ahead, acknowledging the ongoing importance of targets in moving towards better gender representation in classical music programming.

Idiomatic Patterns and Aesthetic Influence in Computer Music Languages

It is widely accepted that acoustic and digital musical instruments shape the cognitive processes of the performer on both embodied and conceptual levels, ultimately influencing the structure and aesthetics of the resulting performance. In this article we examine the ways in which computer music languages might similarly influence the aesthetic decisions of the digital music practitioner, even when those languages are designed for generality and theoretically capable of implementing any sound-producing process. We examine the basis for querying the non-neutrality of tools with a particular focus on the concept of idiomaticity: patterns of instruments or languages which are particularly easy or natural to execute in comparison to others. We then present correspondence with the developers of several major music programming languages and a survey of digital musical instrument creators examining the relationship between idiomatic patterns of the language and the characteristics of the resulting instruments and pieces. In an open-ended creative domain, asserting causal relationships is difficult and potentially inappropriate, but we find a complex interplay between language, instrument, piece and performance that suggests that the creator of the music programming language should be considered one party to a creative conversation that occurs each time a new instrument is designed.

Combining Effects in a Music Programming Language based on Patterns

HMusic is a domain specific language based on music patterns that can be used to write music and live coding. The main abstractions provided by the language are patterns and tracks. Code written in HMusic looks like patterns and multi-tracks available in music sequencers, drum machines and DAWs. HMusic provides primitives to design and combine patterns generating new patterns. The objective of this paper is to extend the original design of HMusic to allow effects on tracks. We describe new abstractions to add effects on individual tracks and in groups of tracks, and how they influence the combinators for track composition and multiplication. HMusic allows the live coding of music and, as it is embedded in the Haskell functional programming language, programmers can write functions to manipulate effects on the fly. The current implementation of the language is compiled into Sonic Pi [1], and we describe how the compiler’s back-end was modified to support the new abstractions for effects. HMusic can be and can be downloaded from [2].