Students Present Results of Music Coding Workshop
2015-01-23
News
Yesterday, workshop leaders Antuan Tran, Evan Yao and Andrew Sheeler, sophomore students at Harvard, completed their two week beginner and advanced workshops at Tumo with a presentation of student projects.
Students participating in the beginner workshop had no previous programming experience. They learned the fundamentals of programming through building variations of web based musical instruments. They learned the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and created clickable and playable virtual instruments, and worked on the structure, style and interface of their web pages. Some students used a JavaScript library that allowed them to play MIDI files in the browser and highlight the keys on the piano accordingly, while others made a piano teacher or a piano game application.
Advanced students learned new ways of using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to add audio functionality to their web applications. They were given tools to create music files, listen to them in the browser and manipulate them. Students who had no musical background learned basic music theory to expand the potential of their projects. All participants created fully functional web applications. One group of students created a multiplayer game that recognizes who plays a given song better. Another group made a melody teaching tool which highlights the next key to be played to create a perfect melody. One group even made an application that allows users to input melodies and have the computer harmonize it and output a more complex track.
Antuan, Evan and Andrew expressed their excitement with the level of achievement of the students, and their desire to return in the future and teach further programming workshops at Tumo.
