Harmonia app brings music theory to life

Assistant+professor+Carlos+Carrillo+teaches+Music+Theory+and+Practice+II+at+Smith+Memorial+Hall+on+Monday.+A+new+app+could+help+grade+students%E2%80%99+theory+work.

Assistant professor Carlos Carrillo teaches Music Theory and Practice II at Smith Memorial Hall on Monday. A new app could help grade students’ theory work.

The National Science Foundation granted $225,000 to Heinrich Taube, a music professor at the University, to continue the development of his computer application for teaching music theory.

The application, Harmonia, which is already available for free on iTunes, can automaticly analyze music, grade it, determine harmony and anomalies and provide instant feedback of the user’s performance. The best way to think about it, Taube said, is that it is a multimedia version of a textbook, where the examples can change.

“It is like having your own teacher in a way,” Taube said.

Taube has been working on the program since 2001, he said, because the opportunities for grants in the arts are rarer than those for grants in science. The funding from the grant will go toward finishing the application by Fall 2015 and paying the salary of the instructor who will teach the class, as well as the statisticians who will run an analysis on the program’s effectiveness.

Students will be able to use the application for homework and practicing skills in music theory, while getting instant feedback. In that way, Taube emphasized that the application can help students learn better and more efficientlly.

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Traditionally, Taube said students look at their books and fill out their homework. When they get their grades after a week, whether good or not, the course has moved on.

With Harmonia, students can practice every night and then learn from instant feedback. Currently, the grading staff relies on the teachers, which Taube said consumes a lot of their time.

Carlos Carrillo, assistant professor of Music, agreed it takes him a long time to grade his students’ work. However, Harmonia will automatically grade students’ work based on the particular notations and musical syntax, which Carrillo covers in his Music 101 and 102 classes.

“What we are teaching is how this musical syntax works. So, we talk about how a specific course works within this syntax, how they follow each other and how they connect to each other,” Carrillo said.

Because of Harmonia’s automatic grading process, facilitators can concentrate more on teaching instead of worrying about grading, which Carrillo said would be useful. Because of this, professors will have more time to focus on teaching material.

Harmonia is currently in phase one, and Taube is working with the startup company Illiac Software to optimize the application.

“If we do well on phase one, and we show that there’s a large market out there and this can potentially make money, then NSF will give what’s called phase two, which lets the company actually commercialize it,” Taube said.

The Fall 2015 section of Music 101 will be the test bed for working interactively with the software.

“It will be some homework people do with computers, some homework they don’t. So, every student will get the opportunity if they want — they don’t have to,” Taube said.

Taube’s short-term goal for this year is to prove that if the students can practice more with the instant feedback done by the computer they will do better. More than that, his long-term goal is to finish the application and release it to the worldwide market. Eventually, he hopes the application will start teaching people music all over the world.

“In the long term we would see ourselves being a kind of a ‘hub’ or a website for all kinds of music learning where it’s done digitally. That’s the plan.” Taube said.

If Harmonia enters the worldwide market, Taube said he believes it would cost substantially less than a paper textbook.

Carrillo said he supports the use of technology in music education, but still appreciates the current system.

“I would like to work more with computers, but I believe that no matter how advanced we can get computer-wise, we do that for human beings,” he said. “I believe that the human contact element is very important.”

Liyuan can be reached at [email protected].