Software for Music Education

Learning to play musical instruments can require a large investment of both time and money for individuals since instruments can be expensive to buy and tend to have relatively steep learning curves. This paper describes one student's senior honors project: a software application called OffKey which aims to improve accessibility and education in music by allowing individuals to use a computer keyboard as an instrument for playing and composing music. The OffKey project encompasses both OffKey Studio, which facilitates music composition, and OffKey Play, which teaches reading music. Duy Nguyen OffKey Studio Introduction: As a Computer Science student, my interests have led me to independently develop software for my Honor’s Thesis Project. The purpose of the project is to create software outside of the classroom environment in hopes of applying knowledge acquired at the University, while at the same time introducing myself to topics that are not presented in class. For this project, I decided to cross subjects, interweaving my interests in music as well as computer science. This allowed me to produce software for a non-typical audience. While courses at the University focus on producing software for professionals in the field, this project requires producing software for a wider demographic. The project is coded in Java. I chose to use Java for various reasons. Java’s portability makes it easy to develop software for multiple platforms, allowing the software to be accessible to virtually anyone. At the same time, the vast amount of documentation and software libraries speeds up development. I am also most comfortable using Java, as it is commonly used in various assignments in my computer science courses. Through this project, I refined my programming skills, as well as developed new skills in user interface design, animation, research, and time management. Not only did I complete two applications during the course of the thesis, but I also submitted a paper to the 2008 Conference in Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). Premise: I believe that music is important, and I am sure that many people agree with me. Not only is music enjoyable, but listening and experiencing music (any kind of music) has been attributed to improve cognition and development [7]. Despite that, relatively few people have actually taken the time to learn to play a musical instrument. Lack of time and money can