Summer Email 1

I'm looking forward to working with each of you as a team this summer on a variety of research projects. I've waited until now to bring you all together because I know you're busy with end of the semester projects, concerts and finals. We have a number of cool projects that we will work hard on finishing up this summer!

I will be leaving this weekend to attend my brother's graduation from Med school later this week. I plan on being back around May 26. So, to keep things simple, let's plan on our work happening starting June 1 and going through July 31. If you have any travel coming up during those dates, please simply let me know now and we'll work around them. 

In the intervening last weeks of May, I hope you'll do some prep work for things. I am working on assembling this now and will get it to you ASAP. I've put an initial list of things at the end of this email.

In other news, I wanted to let each of you know that I've accepted a new position at NYU as a tenured Associate Professor of Music Education and Music Technology starting in September. It's an amazing opportunity for me and for my wife Anne. We'll be living in faculty housing in Washington Square in Greenwich Village, and I'll be launching a research center in music education and technology. The work we work on this summer will continue with me at NYU and I hope you'll stay involved to the degree that you'd like to. 

There are many opportunities for you all to help co-author some papers and co-present workshops and presentations at professional conferences. I'll talk more about that if that is something you'd like to do when we meet up in person in June.

So, I'm very much looking forward to working with you individually and as a team. I want you to get as much out of this experience as possible, so please reply to this email telling me some of your goals for this summer. Are there any specific skills or experiences you'd like to have? Any content you'd like to learn?

Stuff to take a look at to prepare yourself:

1. Familiarize yourself with the Noteflight.com forums - http://www.noteflight.com/forums

2. Familiarize yourself with the various music "hacks" at - http://labs.echonest.com/

3. Familiarize yourself with Music Delta - http://us.musicdelta.com/ (login with your Google account)

4. Familiarize yourself with our Performamatics research - http://performamatics.com/

Projects:

Our projects for this summer will revolve around the above listed sites and technologies. We'll be developing research tools for exploring the Noteflight.com forums, assembling computing+music exemplars from our Performamatics research, working with the new Scratch 2.0 environment (http://scratch.mit.edu), and developing some new tools and content for Music Delta. 

Once I hear back from you about your goals, I'll be better able to define your job description and work plan. The three of us will regularly join with 3 undergraduate computer science students and 1computer science graduate student. 

Please let me know if you have any questions!