Music Tech and Gaming Come Together to Teach Students About Composition

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Image of CompositionCraft Building Blocks

Music education students from the Department of Music and the Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design collaborated to create a modification to the popular video game Minecraft called "CompositionCraft." Daniel Abrahams, assistant professor of music education, and David Fredrick, coordinator of the Tesseract Center, served as faculty project managers.

Minecraft is a video game that has sold over 35 million copies since it launched in 2009. For children, Minecraft is a fun and addicting video game they can play alone or together with friends. For educators, it's a learning environment, design tool, and activity that fosters 21st-century skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. The platform is a three-dimensional building game and is essentially an infinite interactive online Lego set.

CompositionCraft links three-dimensional space and musical composition within the world of the video game. Lead computer coder, Adam Schoelz created a Composition Block which is new to the game. This newly created block is centeral to the Mod serving as a control station as well as the starting point for creating a musical composition. From there, every block in the gaming world is equal to one-quarter note of musical notation which forms the base 'unit.' The world, then, provides the rest — stack blocks vertically and they form a musical staff.

Abrahams said, "Today's students live in a world where the majority of their time is spent playing video games. One of the most popular is Minecraft. We began exploring the notion of developing a third-party Minecraft modification (Mod) connecting two types of 'architectures' – spatial-visual structure (building an online world using Minecraft) and musical structure (composing and improvising in music)."

Abrahams hopes CompositonCraft will serve as a crosswalk linking children's experiences playing video games, in particular, Minecraft, and learning to create musical compositions in a new and unique way. He explains that reviews from teachers and students have been favorable. One such teacher is Mellissa Salguero of the New York City Public Schools. She explored the CompositionCraft Mod with her music students at P.S. 48 in the Bronx, New York, and noticed "students are very willing to compose this way. And, this is an amazing link we needed to make composing accessible to all."

The project has secured support for copyright registration, and the university will now begin the process of finding a licensee for the software.