UMass Lowell TUES Performamatics Project : Publications

Greher, G.R. and Heines, J.M. (2014). Computational Thinking in Sound. New York: Oxford University Press. [Please see www.compthinkinsound.org for links and purchase information.]

This book demonstrates to music fundamentals educators how the range of mental tools in computer science — for example, analytical thought, system design, and problem design and solution — can be fruitfully applied to music education. While technology instruction in music education has traditionally focused on teaching how computers and software work to produce music, Greher and Heines offer context: a clear understanding of how music technology can be structured around a set of learning challenges and tasks of the type common in computer science classrooms. Using a learner-centered approach that emphasizes project-based experiences, the book provides music educators with multiple strategies to explore, create, and solve problems with music and technology in equal parts. It also provides examples of hands- on activities that encourage students, alone and in interdisciplinary groups, to explore the basic principles that underlie today’s music technology and expose them to current multimedia development tools.

Ruthmann, S.A. (2013). Exploring New Media Musically and Creatively. In Burnard, P. & Murphy, R. (eds.), Teaching Music Creatively, pp. 85-97. London: Routledge.

This book chapter provides an introduction to projects and tools for exploring the creative dimensions of new media with primary pupils. I begin with an introduction to creative musicianship with new media, followed by an overview of tools for creating and being creative with new media. These tools are discussed in the context of practical projects and creative strategies for teacher and pupil exploration within primary classrooms.

Ruthmann, S.A. (2012). Drive-By Workshop: Designing Learning Experiences for Kids at the Intersection of Computing and Music. Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 7, 2012.

This Drive-By workshop will engage participants in discussions and hands-on work exploring models of experience design for kids at the intersection of computing and music. We will explore the use of the Scratch visual programming environment (MIT Media Lab, scratch.mit.edu) as a tool for teaching children aspects of computer music, live coding, hardware interfacing, and computational thinking.

Heines, J.M. and Greher, G.R. (2012). Getting into the Digital Music Game With Scratch. Scratch@MIT 2012. Cambridge, MA, July 25-28, 2012.

This workshop introduces participants to Scratch’s music-generating capabilities and shows how they can be used to teach computing concepts to students with a wide range of music and computing experience. The workshop demonstrates techniques that we use in “Sound Thinking,” a university General Education (GenEd) course open to all students in all majors. Participants will receive an extensive handout with links to our teaching materials, and they will have the opportunity to create music-generating programs themselves using a variety of Scratch constructs. The workshop will conclude with a mini concert in which some participants will play the music that they created.

Ruthmann, S.A., Greher, G.R., & Heines, J.M. (2012). Real World Projects for Developing Musical and Computational Thinking. 30th International Society for Music Education (ISME) World Conference on Music Education. Thessaloniki, Greece, July 15-20, 2012.

Music and the arts are engaging contexts for students to learn, integrate and apply computational concepts and thinking strategies. Our demonstration will begin by sharing our process of interdisciplinary collaboration, following by exemplar integration projects and examples of student work integrating musical and computational thinking developed through our research. These projects were designed to reflect the real-world collaboration skills, disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings needed in the development of music and arts technologies today and in the future.

Heines, J.M., Greher, G.R., & Ruthmann, S.A. (2012). Techniques at the Intersection of Computing and Music. 17th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). Haifa, Israel, July 3-5, 2012.

Our work on Performamatics aims to enhance students’ computational thinking (CT) by engaging them in fundamental concepts that unite computing and music. Our approach leverages students’ near universal interest in music as a context for rich CT experiences. The techniques we share are used in a General Education course open to students in any major called Sound Thinking, which is now being offered for the fourth time.

Ruthmann, S.A. (2011). Movement 1 – Pärt [DVD and program notes]. Computer Music Journal 35(4):127-128, DVD Track 17, December 2011.

Movement 1 – Pärt (2010) is an excerpt from a suite of live-coding pieces, Scratch Etudes, exploring the live, interactive coding capabilities of the Scratch visual programming environment (scratch.mit.edu). Taking inspiration from the musical organization of Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater and a live coding performance by Andrew Sorensen within his Impromptu software, Movement 1 – Pärt utilizes live manipulation of visual code chunks, blocks, lists, and variables through mouse and keyboard control in a crcative exploration of the Aeolian mode. An additional minor pentatonic solo layer was performed live over the drone using an IchiBoard sensor interface (bit.ly/ichiboard) developed by Mark Sherman in the Engaging Computing Group at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Video of live coding performance

Heines, J.M., Greher, G.R., Ruthmann, S.A., & Reilly, B. (2011). Two Approaches to Interdisciplinary Computing+Music Courses. IEEE Computer 44(12):25-32, December 2011.

The intersection of computing and music can enrich pedagogy in numerous ways, from low-level courses that use music to illustrate practical applications of computing concepts to high-level ones that use sophisticated computer algorithms to process audio signals. This paper explores the ground between these extremes by describing our experiences with two types of interdisciplinary courses. In the first, arts and computing students worked together to tackle a joint project even though they were taking independent courses. In the second, all students enrolled in the same course, but every class was taught by two professors: one from music and the other from computer science. This course was designed to teach computing and music together, rather than one in service to the other. This paper presents the philosophy and motivation behind these courses, describes some of the assignments students do in them, and shows examples of student work.
Abstract in IEEE Computer Society CS Digital Library
- with link to full paper as published (requires member login)

Ruthmann, S.A., Heines, J.M., Greher, G.R., Laidler, P., & Saulters, C. (2010). Teaching Computational Thinking through Musical Live Coding in Scratch. 41st ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on CS Education. Milwaukee, WI, March 12, 2010.

This paper discusses our ongoing experiences in developing an interdisciplinary general education course called Sound Thinking that is offered jointly by our Dept. of Computer Science and Dept. of Music. It focuses on the student outcomes we are trying to achieve and the projects we are using to help students realize those outcomes. It explains why we are moving from a web-based environment using HTML and JavaScript to Scratch and discusses the potential for Scratch’s “musical live coding” capability to reinforce those concepts even more strongly.

Heines, J.M. & Ruthmann, S.A. (2010). The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning – Sound Thinking: An Interdisciplinary GenEd (presentation video). 1st Annual Faculty Development Conference. Lowell, MA, April 9, 2010.

This session presented “Sound Thinking,” an interdisciplinary course that explores the intersection of music and computer science. We offered this course for the second time in the Spring 2010 semester, and we made significant changes based on student feedback from the first offering. Any faculty interested in teaching an interdisciplinary course, particularly one designated as a GenEd, will benefit from hearing about our experiences. We cover course planning, maximizing benefits to students in different departments, teaching and learning style differences, preparing a GenEd proposal, addressing different departmental definitions of “scholarly activity,” and impacts on professors.

Ruthmann, S.A., & Heines, J.M. (2009). Designing Music Composing Software with and for Middle School Students: A Collaborative Project among Senior Computer Science and Music Education Majors. Association for Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI) 2009 Conference. Portland, OR, October 23, 2009.

What might be learned through a collaborative project bringing together middle school students, pre-service music educators and senior computer science majors in the development of new web-based music composing software for middle school students? This question framed a collaborative project undertaken by music education majors enrolled in General Music Methods II and senior computer science majors enrolled in GUI Programming II. Our demonstration will share examples of the software developed through the project as well as student compositions created by the middle school students who designed and tested the software. The challenges and surprises faced during the collaborative development process will be shared detailing our implications for future collaborations among our students. We will also present the rationale for our decision-making as professors. Finally, the lessons learned and insights gained by the middle school students and the music education and computer science majors will be shared and discussed.
Additional Co-Presenters
- C. Holly Johnston, Music Teacher, Stony Brook Middle School, Westford, MA
- Marie Gleason-Tada, Instructional Technoloty Specialist, Parker Middle School, Chelmsford, MA
PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)

Greher, G.R., & Heines, J.M. (2009). Sound Thinking: Conceptualizing the Art and Science of Digital Audio for an Interdisciplinary General Education Course. Association for Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI) 2009 Conference. Portland, OR, October 22, 2009.

What is sound? How do we capture, manipulate, and harness it in the digital world? Thus began our journey into the creation of a general education course focused on the intersection of art and technology, exploring how sound is integrated into computer applications. Our goal seemed simple enough. We were going to have students explore the art and science of digital audio, from the basic end-user applications that promote creative expression and exploration, to the underlying code that allows these programs to function. Once we began to examine what this means from the perspective of a total novice, and began to think about the software applications we would work with, as well as the projects we would assign, we began to reevaluate and question our own assumptions about the purpose of general education courses and the challenges posed by teaching students outside of our respective disciplines.
PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)

Heines, J.M. (2009). Interdisciplinary Computer Science Courses: Lessons Learned. Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) 2009 Conference. Athens, Greece, July 27, 2009.

In 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded 19 “Community Building” awards intended to “bring stakeholders together to discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in transforming undergraduate computing education, and to identify creative strategies to do so.” Our “creative strategy” has been to develop interdisciplinary courses that bring Computer Science (CS) majors together with Art, Music, and Theatre majors to work on joint projects in the area of exhibition and performance technologies. We call this strategy “Performamatics,” because the common thread in these projects is that “many tasks, performed by multiple people, must come together on a tight schedule by a specific date to achieve a desired result. Performamatics also implies that each team member must ‘perform’ his or her task in a way that can be integrated into a final product, regardless of whether that team member participates visibly in the culminating event.”

This presentation discusses the successes and failures we have experienced in trying to implement Performamatics courses over the last two years. In that time we have experimented with two pedagogical models: (a) “synchronized” courses in which students in different disciplines come together at strategic points to work on joint projects, and (b) “hybrid” courses in which all students enroll in a single course that has two instructors, one from Computer Science and one from Art, Music, or Theatre. Our presentation will describe the content of these courses, provide examples of student work, and suggest ways in which both the student and professor collaborations could be improved, all with the intent to provide others with solid guidance on implementing similar strategies at their own institutions.

Martin, F., Greher, G.R., Heines, J.M., Jeffers, J., Kim, H.J., Kuhn, S., Roehr, K., Selleck, N., Silka, L., and Yanco, H. (2009). Joining Computing and the Arts at a Mid-Size University. 2009 Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges -- Northeastern Region (CCSCNE 2009). Plattsburgh, NY, April 24, 2009.

This paper describes two NSF-funded collaborations among faculty members in the Computer Science, Art, Music, and English departments at a public university in the Northeast USA. Our goal has been to create undergraduate learning opportunities across the university, focusing on connecting computer science to creative and expressive domains. In past publications, we have focused on student learning outcomes. This paper reports on the motivations, opportunities, and challenges for the faculty members involved.

Heines, J.M., Greher, G.R., & Kuhn, S. (2009). Music Performamatics: Interdisciplinary Interaction. 40th ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on CS Education. Chattanooga, TN, March 7, 2009.

This paper describes how a graphical user interface (GUI) programming course offered by the Dept. of Computer Science (CS) was paired with a general teaching methods course offered by the Dept. of Music in an attempt to revitalize undergraduate CS education and to enrich the experiences of both sets of students. The paper provides details on the joint project done in these classes and the evaluation that assessed its effect on the curriculum, students, and professors.

Heines, J.M., Jeffers, J., & Kuhn, S. (2008). Performamatics: Experiences with Connecting a Computer Science Course to a Design Arts Course. International Journal of Learning 15(2):9-16.

Our work is based on a partnership between the a Computer Science (CS) and Art, Music, and English departments in the area of exhibition and performance technologies. We define these areas broadly to encompass all CS applications in the creative and performing arts. These areas not only resonate with today’s media-rich culture, but reinforce the fact that virtually all computer applications now require the integration of creative elements. CS majors must learn to work with specialists in areas where the perspective is often quite different from their own. We believe that computer scientists have much to learn from those trained in the arts and vice versa. The common thread in performamatics projects is that many tasks, performed by multiple people, must come together on a tight schedule by a specific date to achieve a desired result. Performamatics also implies that each team member must “perform” his or her task(s) in a way that can be integrated into a final product, regardless of whether that team member participates visibly in the culminating event. Our paper reports on initial attempts to couple CS courses and integrate CS elements with courses in Art, Music, and Theater. We describe the techniques we used that were designed to increase the scope and level of creativity in student projects and the impact these techniques and the presence of interdisciplinary teams had on those projects. We discuss changes we will make to improve the experience for both groups of students in the future and suggest new techniques we may try to better achieve our goals.

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