Tackling Engagement in Computing with Computational Music Remixing Brian Magerko 1 , Jason Freeman 2 , Tom McKlin 3 , Scott McCoid 2 , Tom Jenkins 1 , Elise Livingston 1 1 Digital Media Program Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332 001-404-894-2739 {magerko, tj399, elivingston3} @gatech.edu 2 School of Music Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332 001-404-894-8949 {jason.freeman, smccoid3} @gatech.edu 3 The Findings Group 1201 Clairmont Road, Suite 305 Decatur, GA 30030 001-404-633-9091 tom@theFindingsGroup.com ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe EarSketch, an integrated curriculum, software toolset, and social media website, grounded in constructionist principles, that targets introductory high school computing education. We hypothesize that the use of collaborative computational music composition and remixing may avoid some of the engagement and culture-specific issues that other approaches, both in music and other media, have had. We discuss the design of EarSketch, its use in a pilot summer camp, and the evaluation results from that pilot. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – computer science education. General Terms Design. Keywords Music, education, computing principles, remixing, collaboration. 1. INTRODUCTION Computing education in the United States currently struggles to engage students and motivate their further studies in the discipline [6]. This challenge is more pronounced with under-represented groups and particularly with African-Americans [4,29]. Previous research has attempted to increase minority participation in computing education by making it more relevant and engaging through culturally-specific technology [3,7,29]. Other approaches to engagement have turned to more general contextual motivators, such as the computational creation and control of movies, music, textiles, animations, robots, and especially computer games as an “in” for motivating students to study computing [5,8,11,12,16,22]. EarSketch, our approach to engaging students in computing principles through collaborative computational music composition and remixing, consists of an integrated curriculum, software toolset, and social media website. The EarSketch curriculum targets introductory high school computing education. The software toolset enables students to create music by manipulating loops, composing beats, and applying effects with Python code. The social media website invites students to upload their music and source code, view other students’ work, and create derivative musical remixes from other students’ code. EarSketch is built on top of Reaper, an intuitive digital audio workstation (DAW) program comparable to those used in professional recording studios. It is extremely practical for educational settings due to its low cost, cross-platform compatibility, and low processor and memory utilization. EarSketch is designed to enable student creativity, to enhance collaboration, and to leverage cultural relevance. This focus has created unique advantages for our approach to computing education. First, EarSketch leverages musical remixing as it relates to popular musical forms, such as hip hop 1 , in an attempt to connect to students in a culturally relevant fashion that spans gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. It does so by explicitly connecting the learning environment to popular music production software, by drawing from industry practice in the features it supports, and by visualizing computational output within standard studio paradigms. It also focuses on the level of beats, loops, and effects more than individual notes, enabling students with no background in music theory or composition to begin creating personally relevant music immediately, with a focus on higher-level musical concepts such as formal organization, texture, and mixing. Second, student use of the social media site allows a tight coupling between code sharing / reuse and the musical practice of remixing. Students can grab code snippets from other projects and directly inject them into their own work, modifying them to fit their idiosyncratic musical ideas. Third, unlike more graphically-oriented environments such as Scratch, EarSketch builds on professional development techniques using an industry-relevant, text-based programming language (Python), giving them concrete skills directly applicable to further study. 2. EARSKETCH 2.1 Technical Design EarSketch integrates three components into the Reaper software: an application programming interface (API) for controlling Reaper; a sound library of pre-composed audio loops; and utility scripts to seamlessly integrate with other EarSketch components. The EarSketch API leverages ReaScript, Reaper’s own Python API that provides low-level programmatic access to Reaper. We 1 Hip hop music has widely embraced the remixing of other artists’ musical works as a post-modern music composition practice since the 1970’s [25].