Musiclab


Musiclab is a set of tools that can be used for pedagogical and experimentation purpouses, and it aims for a different approach on how to teach and enjoy music.

One part of the project is more traditionally pedagogical, as it tries to connect several centers thourgh a videoconference system with a main studio from where a musician performs a masterclass. In this case students from any of the connected centers will be able to ask questions and interact with the musician at the end of the class. Another modality of this more pedagogical part of the programme are the online auditions, which are short concerts from musicians who can interact with students as they play songs.

The other part of the Musiclab project is more experimental. We try to deal with issues that come up when trying to do music over the net. An example of this is latency, or delay, which we know is inherent in any connection. There are some phyisical aspects of playing online which will never disapear, like sound and light propagation times. Despite this, we believe it is possible to find new ways of playing music that can overcome this difficulties. We don’t just experiment the technical issues, we believe music can be crucial in order to bring cultures together and a way for breaking cultural barriers that other artistic disciplines won’t break. The universal language of music is key for understanding between cutlures; for example we have found patterns that connect such folkroic styles like the spanish flamenco, or the south korean pansori, and we have been able to jam together, each one in their own musical language, despite the obvious cultural differences. S4A is a Scratch modification that supports simple programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform. It provides new blocks for managing sensors and actuators connected to Arduino. There is also a sensor report board similar to the PicoBoard. It has been created to attract people to the programming world. The goal is also to provide a high level interface to Arduino programmers with functionalities such as interacting with a set of boards through user events.

more on the wiki…