guys dont copy

Rise of the Oscar

“Lets go to Claremont”

Logan Noack, while in Claremont.

Discussion

We explained to Alex what it is that we had designed and implemented her feedback into our project. Taking in other peoples ideas who think differently than us and have different knowledge proved to be very usefull. Kat & Eleanor told us that we should work on making the softwares UI more intuitive and aesthetic.

Reflection

ORIGINAL STRATEGIES:

1: Assume a beginners mindset

2: Interview Preperation

3: Point of View Mad-lib

Assuming a Begginers mindset proved to be a very important strategy because our target audience is children, some of the feedback we got from Alex in our QAT was to lengthen the lessons out because children need more time to develop their skills in new concepts.

Interviews also proved to be quite usefull to figure out what type of content we should include in our lessons, we learnt what they weren’t already learning in school and we included that in our lessons.

The point of view mad lib really helped us improve our artificial design in the front end JavaScript part of the development of the synthesiser. Although there were little bumps in the road we ended up in a better place because of our vigorous usage of the strategy. In the end everything turned out successful and conclusively we gained many positives.

To create a more intuitive UI we went over our code and created more design based code instead of what we currently have which is purely functional.

We modified our lesson plan so that each lesson would take up a full hour instead of the previous 20 minutes as this would give time for the children to really understand all of the content and have time to revise each lesson.

Thanking the Groups

We simply said “thank you” and gave them emotional compensation. This proved to be an effective use of our time.

Photos of our design thinking process

“choc-oak-chill-dog”

Attack of The Max

“Lauren”

Lauren Tilley, when asked what she had ordered.

Lessons:

Lesson One: Notes

A note is a sound of a constant pitch, for example an A4 note has a pitch of 440hz.

In modern western music we arrange notes by using the letters A – G. There are also sharps and flats inbetween these notes, think of the as inbetween notes.

This is called the chromatic scale and it contains all the notes of a western scale.

These notes are…

A A#/Bb B C C#/Db D D#/Eb E F F#/Gb G G#/Ab

(Where there is a slash indicates that the notes sound the same but are named differently, e.g. A# is the same as Bb)

The # symbol means sharp, a sharp means the note has been raised by a semitone.

The b symbol means flat, a flat note means the note has been lowered by a semitone.

Semitones & Tones

On the chromatic scale we can see all the main notes of modern music. If we move up or down this scale by only one note that is called a “semitone”. If you move up two notes on the chromatic scale it is called a tone (or whole tone).

For example looking at our chromatic scale again…

A A#/Bb B C C#/Db D D#/Eb E F F#/Gb G G#/Ab

If we move from an A to an A# that is a Semitone, if we move from an A to a B that is a whole tone.

Octaves

So the notes of the chromatic scale actually go on forever, but they repeat themselves.

The note that comes after a G# (the highest note of the chromatic scale) is a A, this A is an octave higher than the last A, this means that it is twice as high.

Lesson Two: Chords & Scales

Notes can be combined to create chords, these are very important in making songs and make up the main parts of them. The main most common type of chord is called a triad. A triad skips every second note to create a chord of three notes. For Example a C Major Triad has the notes C, E, G. (Theres intervals inbetween these notes but thats too complex.)

The main types of chords are Major chords and Minor Chords.

Minor chords are the same has major chords but have a flattened third which means the chord contains a minor third instead of a major third.

When creating a song it is good to stick to a scale

The C Major Scale is the most common scale as it contains the notes

C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C

The Chords in the C Major Scale Are

C Major, D Minor, E, Minor, F Major, G Major, A Minor, B Diminished

This is because these chords contain some of the notes inside of the C Maj Scale

Every Maj scale follows the same pattern with chords of Maj,Min,Min,Maj,Maj,Min,Dim

Every Minor Scale follows the same pattern with chords of, Min, Dim, Maj, Min, Min, Maj, Maj

To write chords in a scale we use roman numerals, if they are uppercase it means they are a major chord and if they are lowercase they are a minor chord.

The Main Chords that are used in the majority of popular songs are the I, IV,V, vi chords.

In C major this would be the chords, C Maj, F Maj, G Maj, A min.

Lesson Three: Rhythm

Notes are held for different amounts of time depending on what type of note it is. Some notes are only held for a very short amount of time like notes in many guitar solos, but some notes can be held for whole bars or even longer, for example held chords.

Notes are named after the fraction of time they take up in a 4/4 bar. For example, a quarter note takes up a quarter of a bar, while a half note takes up half of a bar. This can theoretically go forever, but the shortest notes we’ll have to deal with for now are eighth notes, which last for one eighth of a bar.Time signatures are given in the form of [number of beats in the bar]/[type of beat to count]. For example, 4/4 represents four quarter notes in a bar, while 3/4 represents three quarter notes in a bar.

Description of The Prototype & How We Built it.

Our prototype is a digital synthesiser written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It uses an oscillator combined with front end web development and a waveform generator. We have combined this with a series of interactive written lessons that have been developed specifically towards the needs of our target audience and what we have learnt that they want from our previous interviews.

How we built the Prototype

We put our various skills together when creating this prototype. Max created the software because he is highly talented in computer science and programming. Oscar created the lessons because he has a rather extensive knowledge in music theory and Azimuth was the councillor along the way, providing support and ideas along the way.

Feedback

We interviewed Alex, a fellow musician. From her personal experience with a seven year old sibling who is part of our target audience, she noted that our lessons ares very compact and could be spread out because otherwise the children will find the lessons very overwhelming as there is too much content in a very short space of time.

Teamwork

We as a team worked really well together. All our individual skills came together to make our prototype and educational lessons a reality. Our effectiveness and level of efficiency was not of optimal standard and could have been maximised by meditating at the start of every lesson to get our minds in a working state and not being distracted by other people or our laptops.

Oliver Cavill (Slimetube), Mosman Park Primary School

We asked Oliver Cavill from MPPS about his music education at his school and we found out a few things, his schools “music” education was mainly about drama, they learnt only how to sing (no instruments) and there was pretty much no “music theory” education. This is not to say that the schools music education is bad but that it lacks in some fields. The main one that we decided to look into is the music theory part. His primary school really taught no music theory, we believe that by creating our program and synthesiser we can improve the music education of MPPS.

Ptolemy Steele, North Fremantle Primary School

We also asked Ptolemy Steele from NFPS about his music education and he told us that he is only learning music notes and learning how to play the recorder. We then asked him if he was learning chords or music theory, which he said he wasn’t. He also said it wasn’t much fun.

Return of the Azimuth

“It’s like the rope is clipping through the map”

Max Cutlyp, while rock climbing.

Primary school students need music education resources because they deserve a quality education in all fields, including music. In our attempt to create a solution for our problem we decided to use a few strategies. These strategies being…

1: Assume a beginners mindset

2: Interview Preperation

3: Point of View Mad-lib

Assuming a beginners mindset is a very important for our task in particular because the target audience are primary school students. We must assume a beginners for primary school students because a lot will be beginners and will be overwhelmed if we try and do anything too creative.

Interview Preparation is also quite important for us to consider because although we were once primary school students we no longer are, so interviewing our target audience would be very beneficial for us because they would then get what they want and not what we think that they want.

I don’t really know what a point of view mad lib is but im sure it will help? (https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/22e39/POV_Madlibs.html)

Ideation Process

-Azimuth Setho

-Interview children and teachers at primary schools to better understand their needs.

-Two Sections: A learning area and a “playground” area.

-Sampled instruments

-WebApp (HTML and JS)

-App (Swift and Xcode)

-Coming to schools and giving personalised music education

-A “musical playground” which is unrestricted but helpful

-A synthesiser made for students (restrictive)

-A book

Our Chosen Ideas

We have decided that we are going to work on creating a synthesiser with a guided teaching program. We choose this because we believe it really fits into the success criteria of our goal. It also has room to combine some other ideas to make it really successful. It will teach primary school students basic music theory as they gradually move along the different lessons. By the end they will have learnt basic music terminology, all the main parts that make up a song and how to create basic beats for their music. We may also consider using this program in a classroom situation where we guide the students along it with extra help while explaining everything.

Smart Goals

1. To give a quality understanding of Music to primary school students.
2. Create a working synthesiser.
3. To create a wide range of lessons on the basics of music.

Group Reflection

Our group has been working together quite compatibly with all of us working on seperate tasks so that the work can be done more efficiently. One of us was creating the start of the synthesiser while the others were researching and doing more ideating.

Design Pictures

“You can’t be gay, you have a boyfriend.”

Azimuth Steelehouse, to a recently single girl.

The Problem that we decided to tackle in our local community was Quality Education of Music. This problem is connected to the UN’s 4th Global Goal of Quality Education. In our local area there are many primary schools that we believe this goal could affect. To be clear our goal is Goal 4: Quality Education and the context of our goal is primary schools in our local area. Our group all have a passionate interest in music and we have noticed that the music education in the primary schools we attended were fairly limited. These days we have noticed from our primary schools that computers and tablets are being used for education in music quite a bit. However we believe that the applications that schools are using to teach their children music could be greatly improved. We came to this idea when we looked at Azimuth’s younger brother “Ptolemy” who attends music at his primary school. We have researched what applications and technology are available for schools and although they do have quite a few good powerfull DAW’s (Digital Audio Workspace) to work with inside of their price range, all these programs have a common problem. They don’t teach music, you have to already know how to play music to use these applications. Although this isn’t a problem for their target market of people who can play music, it is a problem for students using the software for education. Seeing that there are not really any alternatives for these students, we have decided to take on the challenge of creating an easy to use application which teaches music to primary school children. It will be a good tool for teachers to use and it will go through the basics of music theory and the role of different instruments. We have created a few smart goals that will help guide us towards our vision. These smart goals are 1: Write down a lesson for each topic. 2: Create an aesthetic ui. 3: Create a digital keyboard. For goal 1 we are going to create a variety of lessons that will explain the basics of music and then implement them into our application. For goal 2 we will draw up a good looking and easy to use user interface so that it is easy to use the app. For Goal 3 we will sample multiple instruments and put them in our app so they can be used by the students.

Our Design Process

Group Reflection

We have been working effectively as group because we have split the tasks between each other. There have been a few hiccups so far with the quantity of work between team members however it has been running fairly smoothly.

This site was created by Osker Elpers, Azzymuth Steelhouse & Macks Cutlip