Education Through Music Technology Matthew Prockup, Alyssa Batula, Brandon Morton, and Youngmoo E. Kim Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University fmprockup, abatula, bmorton,
[email protected] Abstract—Our music technology research group has developed to bring educational and cultural organizations together to a series of formal and informal education programs that motivate promote science throughout out the city of Philadelphia. both music and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and Additionally, we have developed a more formal education math) education through music and audio technology. The first program, called iNotes, is a collaboration with the Philadelphia program, the Summer Music Technology program (SMT). Orchestra. iNotes is a system which tracks the audio of a Over the past five years, we have developed a series of lessons live orchestral performance and uses acoustic features to align designed to introduce high school students to the engineering, the performance to the musical score. We informally educate science, and mathematics behind modern music technology. users by presenting real-time contextual information about the Each lesson emphasizes signal processing concepts, tools, and performance to a user’s mobile device, giving them a greater understanding of the piece as it’s performed. Our second, methods through hands-on activities that require minimal pre- more formal education program, the Summer Music Technology requisite knowledge. The activities, which were developed by program (SMT), is a week long summer camp that introduces signal processing engineers with musical backgrounds, focus the engineering, science, and mathematics behind modern music on different aspects of music technology and have learning technology.