Live Coding Ensemble as Accessible Classroom

William C Payne, Matthew Kaney, Yuhua Cao, Eric Xu, Xinran Shen, Katrina Lee, and Amy Hurst

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

In music and computer science classrooms, Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) learners are often not given alternatives to visual technologies and materials. FiLOrk, an ensemble at the Filomen M. D'Agostino Greenberg Music School, is made up of five BVI high school learners who studied and performed computer music using the live coding language Tidal Cycles over the course of a semester. To make FiLOrk approachable and accessible we wrote a new curriculum featuring audio/tactile learning materials, and we designed a collaborative web editor for use with learners' assistive technologies, including screen readers and braille displays. In this article, we describe findings from classroom observations and interviews. We highlight how learners wrestled with persistent accessibility challenges, connected pre-existing music knowledge with Tidal Cycles concepts, created a culture of respect and support, and made suggestions for improving FiLOrk. We conclude by discussing opportunities to make live coding ensembles accessible to both BVI people and high school learners.

Citation:

William C Payne, Matthew Kaney, Yuhua Cao, Eric Xu, Xinran Shen, Katrina Lee, and Amy Hurst. 2023. Live Coding Ensemble as Accessible Classroom. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11189248

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{nime2023_64,
 abstract = {In music and computer science classrooms, Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) learners are often not given alternatives to visual technologies and materials. FiLOrk, an ensemble at the Filomen M. D'Agostino Greenberg Music School, is made up of five BVI high school learners who studied and performed computer music using the live coding language Tidal Cycles over the course of a semester. To make FiLOrk approachable and accessible we wrote a new curriculum featuring audio/tactile learning materials, and we designed a collaborative web editor for use with learners' assistive technologies, including screen readers and braille displays. In this article, we describe findings from classroom observations and interviews. We highlight how learners wrestled with persistent accessibility challenges, connected pre-existing music knowledge with Tidal Cycles concepts, created a culture of respect and support, and made suggestions for improving FiLOrk. We conclude by discussing opportunities to make live coding ensembles accessible to both BVI people and high school learners.},
 address = {Mexico City, Mexico},
 articleno = {64},
 author = {William C Payne and Matthew Kaney and Yuhua Cao and Eric Xu and Xinran Shen and Katrina Lee and Amy Hurst},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.11189248},
 editor = {Miguel Ortiz and Adnan Marquez-Borbon},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {May},
 numpages = {9},
 pages = {463--471},
 title = {Live Coding Ensemble as Accessible Classroom},
 track = {Papers},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2023/nime2023_64.pdf},
 year = {2023}
}