SBIR-STTR Award

This SBIR Phase I project will culminate in an application which teaches beginners to compose their own music. Music is traditionally taught using physical instruments and sheet music, both of which are complex and present imposing financial and practical barriers to creativity. As a result, even though parents value music education highly and research has shown that studying music is beneficial to cognitive and emotional development, the majority of beginning music students drop out during the first year of instruction, before having a chance to express their creativity through music. By using mobile devices as modular teaching tools, the proposed solution will make composition accessible as a first step in learning music. Increasing creativity in beginning music education will decrease the dropout rate for people already studying music, and also make music education accessible for the millions of families nationwide who value music but cannot afford private lessons. By expanding a market for lessons that is already roughly $3 billion per year in the United States, this project has significant revenue and growth potential, in addition to increasing the accessibility and quality of education in the U.S. and worldwide.

This project uses an intuitive gestural composition interface to make it possible for beginners to compose music visually and hear it played back in real time. By using simplified representative block notation, the proposed software makes composition accessible even to those with no knowledge of music notation and no experience on an instrument. Using a musical system based on music theory and arranging concepts, the complexity of music composition is reduced at the beginning to make a user's first compositions sound good to them, encouraging them to explore further. More complexity is gradually introduced through a scaffolded, project-based curriculum as users learn musical concepts through creative exploration and engaging games. This curriculum includes a gradual step-by-step transition between simplified block notation and full traditional music notation. The curriculum will be developed in two phases: 1) piloting a modular teaching tool that allows music teachers to increase the creativity and individualization of their assignments by incorporating composition into their teaching, and 2) developing an autonomous teaching tool for the consumer market that combines free creation with educational games to teach musical concepts with or without the aid of a teacher.

This project will address the need for accessible, creative music education. Over 90% of Americans believe music education is valuable, but very few people ever learn enough to create their own music. Instrument lessons are a great way for some beginners to learn about music; however, instrument lessons are expensive and difficult, and focus on performance and technique at the expense of creativity. This project uses a simple audiovisual composition interface to empower music learners to create their own original music on mobile devices from the very beginning of their music education. By combining this intuitive composition interface with data tracking and analysis, this project creates the opportunity to provide music makers with personalized, adaptive feedback as they compose. Currently, $3 billion are spent each year in the United States on instrument lessons, even though they are unaffordable for many potential customers. By leveraging the proliferation of mobile devices worldwide, this project will deliver an accessible, low-cost digital music education option, creating a new market that includes customers who are currently priced out. Expanding participation in creative music education will increase the quantity and quality of music composed worldwide, while also building a sustainable, revenue-generating business and creating new jobs.Through data-driven agile software development, this project will address the need for accessible music education through the creation of a technology platform that delivers adaptive learning to musical beginners. Because the platform upon which this project is built is already empowering the creation of thousands of songs each week and collecting usage data from live users, this project is uniquely positioned to tackle the complex problem of providing algorithmic feedback on creative work at scale. Research and development will proceed in four stages: (1) expanding internal tools to allow for direct analysis of the thousands of songs being created on the platform each week; (2) developing an algorithmic approach to analyzing songs and reporting the results to users; (3) applying analysis to match users with relevant communities and collaborators; and (4) implementing adaptive learning approaches to help users more effectively learn to create music. This staged development process will result in an innovative and highly differentiated technology that enables beginners with no musical experience to compose their own music, and uses data to actively support their individual needs as they learn.