SBIR Phase I: Music Education Through Composition on Mobile Devices

This SBIR Phase I project will culminate in an application which teaches beginners to compose their own music. Music is traditionally taught using physical instruments and sheet music, both of which are complex and present imposing financial and practical barriers to creativity. As a result, even though parents value music education highly and research has shown that studying music is beneficial to cognitive and emotional development, the majority of beginning music students drop out during the first year of instruction, before having a chance to express their creativity through music. By using mobile devices as modular teaching tools, the proposed solution will make composition accessible as a first step in learning music. Increasing creativity in beginning music education will decrease the dropout rate for people already studying music, and also make music education accessible for the millions of families nationwide who value music but cannot afford private lessons. By expanding a market for lessons that is already roughly $3 billion per year in the United States, this project has significant revenue and growth potential, in addition to increasing the accessibility and quality of education in the U.S. and worldwide. This project uses an intuitive gestural composition interface to make it possible for beginners to compose music visually and hear it played back in real time. By using simplified representative block notation, the proposed software makes composition accessible even to those with no knowledge of music notation and no experience on an instrument. Using a musical system based on music theory and arranging concepts, the complexity of music composition is reduced at the beginning to make a user's first compositions sound good to them, encouraging them to explore further. More complexity is gradually introduced through a scaffolded, project-based curriculum as users learn musical concepts through creative exploration and engaging games. This curriculum includes a gradual step-by-step transition between simplified block notation and full traditional music notation. The curriculum will be developed in two phases: 1) piloting a modular teaching tool that allows music teachers to increase the creativity and individualization of their assignments by incorporating composition into their teaching, and 2) developing an autonomous teaching tool for the consumer market that combines free creation with educational games to teach musical concepts with or without the aid of a teacher.