Programming

Songs are developed to help students understand and retain introductory concepts in computing, as well as to complement more standard activities such as group work, programming labs, and lectures. These songs are reinterpretations of existing, popular ones, hopefully already familiar. Students are encouraged to contribute to the lyrics, and more recently the music itself.

In this session Merryl will describe how she evaded the KGB during the Cold War with a secret musical code and how that code, and indeed music are key to core principles of cybersecurity.  Merryl is working with CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency) to examine the preparation of cybersecurity professionals specifically how the arts matter in the field.

EarSketch is an online learning platform to teach Computer Science through music composition. It is a website which contains a full curriculum to introduce computer science, with Python and JavaScript, a code editor, a sound library, and sharing tools. When students code, they place sounds from the library in a Digital Audio Workstation, and they can add rhythms and effects. The samples were composed by Jay Z's sound engineer Young Guru and sound designer Richard Devine. This allows students to compose music in popular genres such as Hip Hop or dubstep.

Data sonification is the representation of data with sound. It can be the first step in data-driven music composition and song-writing, or can be used in information processing. In this workshop I'll introduce the concept of data sonification, show examples of how we have used it to create engaging music and infosonics about climate science, and give a short tutorial on how to sonify a simple dataset using python and garage band.