When
Thematic Session 1: Design and Interaction (Monday, 14:15)
Abstract
When teaching music composition, particularly Renaissance or Baroque counterpoint, instructors typically employ a range of written, aural, and music performative pedagogies, such as writing notation, transcribing, and performing at an instrument. They rarely include gross-motor, fully embodied learning activities, however. I incorporated such embodied learning activities were incorporated into an upper-level undergraduate counterpoint course. In short, I created exercises wherein students moved as the notes on a giant staff, transforming metaphorical sonic motion into physical motion.
However, the limitation of these exercises is that they have only been possible during class. Thus, learning outcomes related to embodied cognition are difficult for students to achieve, given they cannot complete embodied pedagogy exercises as homework. To address this constraint, we are developing a Unity-based augmented reality (AR)s app that will allow students to use their smartphones to complete homework and practice exercises similar to those in class. The AR app allows a student to walk along a virtual musical staff drawn on the floor via their phone's camera, recording their movement and voice for playback and assessment. A work-in-progress, this app promises to be an invaluable tool in bringing embodied learning into the music theory classroom in a fully integrated manner. For this presentation, we will show video footage of class activities and demonstrate how the AR app simulates these activities for students outside of class, combining embodied music pedagogy with AR technology.
Bio
Christopher Tralie received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University in 2011, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University in 2013, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from from Duke University in 2017. As a Ph.D. student, he was funded by an NSF Graduate Fellowship. He is currently a tenure track Assistant Professor of Mathematics And Computer Science at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where he teaches CS theory and CS applications, and where he researches a combination of multimedia signal processing and geometry processing, with applications in the digital humanities.