Computer Examples and Simulations in the Psychology of Music
Dr Alan Marsden, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University
Disciplines: Music
Status: Current
Start date: 1/9/2004
The outcome of the project will be a set of simple and small pieces of software, written specifically to be as widely usable as possible, which provide demonstrations of phenomena in the psychology of music (especially its perception) and simulations of experiments. Good printed materials exist for this subject, but modern teaching methods rightly also demand materials of other kinds which enrich the student’s experience and learning environment. In this subject in particular, Music students often encounter descriptions in books of phenomena and situations which appear to them unnatural and sometimes inconceivable. Making these real in demonstrations is of enormous educational benefit.
Three kinds of software are planned: demonstrations, explorations and simulations. Demonstrations will simply produce output in order to demonstrate a particular phenomenon. There might be little interaction with the student other than to start and stop the demonstration. In essence, these pieces of software will do the same thing as examples already available on CD. However, a principle throughout will be to try and provide visual information in parallel with audio, but bearing in mind where this might destroy the audio phenomenon.
Explorations extend this by allowing the student to adjust parameters to control the output. The precise phenomenon in question can thereby be heard to emerge and disappear with variation of the precise conditions. The student can thereby obtain a better understanding of the phenomenon because it does not appear as an isolated experience but it is seen in relation to its conditions.
The experiments will be ‘quick and dirty’ and intended not to provide sound scientific data, but rather to allow a more structured exploration of a phenomenon, allowing the student to discover its limits. In addition, they will allow a student to gain some insight into what happens in conducting an experiment, into experimental design, and into the analysis of results. The student will be required to make a set of responses to the software, which will analyse and graph those responses. The possibility of collecting and presenting responses from a group of students via a network will be explored.
The software is to be written in the programming language Java, making use of its recently introduced audio and MIDI capabilities. This means that it should be usable on most computers found in HE institutions without any extra facilities other than the freely available Java Run-time Environment.