User Analysis:
Music students lead very busy lives: going to class, working to support themselves, and performing and attending other performances, and working to support themselves. One student, enrolled at Tufts and the New England Conservatory, spends a lot of time commuting between the two schools. Another student is very conscious of paying for his education. Many students attend shows several times each week as part of their education. Another student is very conscious of paying for his education. Like all college students, they struggle to balance their time to meet all of their commitments and lead healthy lives.
These students all have short periods of downtime throughout their day: during their commutes, waiting for shows to start, and free time at work or during gigs, and waiting for shows to start. They can be thinking of their assignments, but due to the environments, they cannot easily compose if they think of phrases. However, if they do not write it down, they risk losing the that idea. Their busy lives confine their productive creative processes to time when they are sitting at their computer or at a desk with a pen and staff paper or their computer.
We will focus on developing for college students studying music. We assume they own an Android smart phone.
Task Analysis:
We plan to address three, high-level tasks that students can do with our app:
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- Composing music sketches on the fly: Users need to create new sketches, sketch out themes, bass lines, or rhythmic patterns. The app will balance detail of their composition, simplicity of a theme, and space limitations posed by the mobile phone’s screen size. Users will want to: Compose Music Sketches
- Select meter and pitch of the phrasesketch
- Choose clef for the staffDivide into measures
- Place notes on a staff (choose which staff)
- Divide staff into measures
- Modify notes with sharps, flats, accents, note length, ties, slurs
- Add dynamic and expression markings
- Play each note as it is placed on the staff Pitch could be played when a note is added so the user can make sure they are accurately transcribing the phrase. (We will assume that the user has headphones they can use if they are in a noisy environment and want to use this feature. This is a safe assumption because most people use their phones as their music players, too.)Unlike
- Add dynamic and expression markings
- Recall music that was composed: The user would like to listen to the entire sketch to remember what it sounded like. It may also help them as they transcribe it to their computer or a piece of paper, and help them return to the frame of mind they were in so they can easily expand the sketch into a composition. To accomplish this, the app can accurately play back the phrase to remind the user of the sound and help them resume their train of thought about the phrase when they come back to it.the sketch, using the specified key signature, time signature, tempo, and note lengths.
- Organize the sketches stored on the phone: The user needs a way to organize their sketches on the phone, select a previously saved sketch to edit it or listen to it. They want to:
- Create new sketches
- View the sketch names of the files the
- Create a new file
- View the file names the user has stored on the phone
- Select a file to view again, brings up in main viewsketch to edit or play back
TA Feedback.
As we discussed in our meeting, this project in this submission is not a stretch at all. Make sure you focus on something that's not just for MIT students, and that isn't just a layer over a database.
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