ThumMusic & IT’s MIS Bridge

Later today, I have my first meeting with a team of students from UT/Austin’s McCombs School of Business’ MIS Bridge. They will be working to define the technical infrastructure of the ThumMusic System’s online courseware. My objective for this first meeting is to scope out what they can reasonably be expected to do within the time they have available, given their existing knowledge and skills.

The general idea is for them to identify and specify the reusable software objects that must be developed in order for Web-based ThumMusic courseware to be developed and deployed using open source methods, such that the resulting courseware is highly interactive.

For example, the courseware should be able to use the computer keyboard as a musical keyboard; display any arbitrary piece of MusicXML in ThumLine staff notation, preferably in an interactive manner (for example, illuminating notes as when they should be played and/or when they are played); show animations of chord progressions, key modulations, etc. on the tonnetz in a manner similar to Mathieu’s excellent use of the tonnetz in his book Harmonic Experience, but interactively, and again driven by any arbitrary MusicXML file; and so on. The goal is not to have the students implement these software objects, necessarily, but rather for them to identify and specify them all so that they can be implemented by others. If the students can also implement some or all of the software objects, then all the better, if only to help them hone their specification skills.

I have suggested that the project be based on Moodle – a free, open source course management system (CMS) that appears to have attained critical mass. Using a free CMS will facilitate having the lessons themselves be free, and also facilitate having others contribute lessons for free.

Free, free, free. I love free. It’s my favorite price – and yours too, I bet. The freer the ThumMusic System is, the more rapidly and widely awareness of its benefits will spread, and ultimately the more Thummers I’ll sell. Thus does the Invisible Hand of economics direct our private actions to the public good.