#147: MusicLOGO 2.0: A New Computational Representation for Music Learning

This paper introduces MusicLOGO 2.0 (ML2), a free online platform designed to engage learners in foundational musical concepts, such as melody, harmony, and form, through composing music with computer code. The platform introduces a novel interval-based representation that encodes music through relationships between notes. We report on a study examining how nine participants with diverse musical and coding backgrounds composed music in ML2 during an open-ended, think-aloud task. Participants’ approaches were shaped by prior musical knowledge, with the platform scaffolding the translation of musical ideas into code. Representing music via intervals encouraged reasoning in relative pitch, revealing underlying musical patterns. Throughout the process, code took on layered meanings—embodied, spatial, musical, and numerical—as participants coordinated them in composition.