I’m a proud member of the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, a research group that crosses the disciplines of music education, technology, and design. Here’s an overview of our many ongoing projects.
Performance interfaces
My personal baby is the Groove Pizza, an outgrowth of my NYU masters thesis. It’s a prototype circular rhythm interface that we’re shaping into a powerful math teaching tool. Try it yourself:
My other major personal involvement is in the aQWERTYon, which turns any computer keyboard into a futuristic MIDI controller.
You can choose from a variety of scale and chord mappings, and then jam or compose with the confidence that you can’t play a wrong note. You can use our built-in sound library, or you can play software instruments from Logic, GarageBand, Ableton, and so on.
Music theory
The aQWERTYon and Groove Pizza are core components of a new learning tool called Play With Your Music: Theory, part of the Play With Your Music series. They were originally conceived as MOOCs, but have since evolved into online learning communities. All of the recording, mixing, editing and performance interfaces run in the web browser, so you don’t need any additional hardware or software to participate.
Conferences and workshops
The MusEDLab lab hosts regular meetups, hackathons, and the annual IMPACT conference. Here’s the sizzle reel for last summer’s conference, in which you can see me awkwardly breakdancing!
Hip-hop education
The lab has a close relationship with the Urban Arts Partnership. We’re creating web tools in support of Fresh Ed, an amazing initiative that teaches various humanities subjects using hip-hop. We’re talking to them about incorporating the Groove Pizza into their work as well. And we play host to Smartbomb Labs–last summer a kid designed a biology game starring a character named Homie O. Stasis.
Chamber music
Other folks in the lab are working with the Chamber Music Society of Detroit to create a set of chamber music engagement tools. I’m particularly fond of the extreme POV string quartet videos, giving you the chance to see and hear a Haydn performance from the players’ perspectives. There’s also a cool musical puzzle card game.
Finally, lab director Alex Ruthmann has been consulting on a new multitrack audio format called OOID, which lets you hear a song’s instruments and vocals in isolation or the mix of your choosing, and also layers in video, lyrics, and even guitar chords. It’s sadly not available in the US yet, but if you’re in Europe, you can download away.
How can I help?
If you are an educator, coder, or designer, and you want to get involved, be in touch. If you’re a philanthropist or grantmaker and you want to support us, definitely be in touch. Also, we’ll be spinning off a business arm this winter; if you’d like to become an investor, be in touch as well.