SBIR Phase I: Geometric System for Music Composition

This SBIR project's broader and commercial impact of this project is a benefit to society, because it will help more people learn and experience music in a new and fun way. This project will share concepts from upper division and graduate mathematics graphically with the general public. By helping people through the learning curve for music writing, it opens up commercial potential for new economic interactions?allowing users to sell each other content they create. The marketplace for online music applications has grown by a factor of 10 in the last 2 years. As an example, one major music application now has 250 million users, up from 10 million users 2 years ago. This project provides an opportunity to compete in this space. This project can impact society by helping transform the internet from a market of advertisers to a more desirable market of content producers, and simultaneously advance the state of the art in distributed computing. This SBIR project addresses the following problem: to write music, students must learn to understand music notation. Music notation is based on a centuries old system which obfuscates the mathematical structures present in music, and complicates the learning process. This project advances the knowledge of the student and/or composer using 3 dimensional views and color systems to construct a higher dimensional spatial representation of music. This representation removes obfuscations, and enables user interfaces for intuitive musical expression, helping the student learn faster. The research objectives for are to complete the user interface design to enable artistic expression through the tool, to identify software architecture features for optimal system performance, to design and partition a domain and data model to enable user to user commerce across the cloud and social network, and to define appropriate interface points to external systems for full functionality. Research will consist of mathematical modeling by the principal investigator, combined with graphic design for user interfaces by a senior investigator. These results will refine and integrate with existing and new interfaces for the system, in a prototyping process. The results of the research should include a completed system specification and/or system prototype.