Many introductory computer science educational platforms foster student interest and facilitate student learning through the authentic incorporation of music. Although many such platforms have demonstrated promising outcomes in student engagement across diverse student populations and learning contexts, little is known about the specific ways in which music and computer science learning are uniquely combined to support student knowledge in both domains. This study looks at two different learning platforms for computer science and music (CS-plus-music), TunePad and EarSketch, which were used by middle school students during a week-long virtual summer camp. Using both platforms, students created computational music projects, which we analyzed for characteristics of music and code complexity across multiple dimensions. Students also completed surveys before and after the workshop about their perceptions of the platforms and their own backgrounds, and we interviewed some students. The results suggest that different connections between music and computing concepts emerge, as well as different progressions through the concepts themselves, depending in part on the design affordances of the application programming interface for computer music in each platform. Coupled with prior findings about the different roles each platform may play in developing situational interest for students, these findings suggest that different CS-plus-music-learning platforms can provide complementary roles that benefit and support learning and development of student interest.

Music information retrieval (MIR) has a great potential in musical live coding because it can help the musician–programmer to make musical decisions based on audio content analysis and explore new sonorities by means of MIR techniques. The use of real-time MIR techniques can be computationally demanding and thus they have been rarely used in live coding; when they have been used, it has been with a focus on low-level feature extraction. This article surveys and discusses the potential of MIR applied to live coding at a higher musical level. We propose a conceptual framework of three categories: (1) audio repurposing, (2) audio rewiring, and (3) audio remixing. We explored the three categories in live performance through an application programming interface library written in SuperCollider, MIRLC. We found that it is still a technical challenge to use high-level features in real time, yet using rhythmic and tonal properties (midlevel features) in combination with text-based information (e.g., tags) helps to achieve a closer perceptual level centered on pitch and rhythm when using MIR in live coding. We discuss challenges and future directions of utilizing MIR approaches in the computer music field.

SGLC is a recent set of extensions to LOLC, a text-based environment for collaborative improvisation for laptop ensembles. SGLC integrates acoustic musicians into the LOLC environment: Laptop musicians author short commands to generate real-time notation, and acoustic musicians sight-read it in performance. We describe the background and motivations of the project, outline the design of LOLC and SGLC, explain the use of SGLC in a musical composition by one of the authors, and evaluate the impact of real-time notation on a concert performance with the environment.