Overview

This course emphasizes developing apps for musicians on the iPad. The course will culminate in a final project where students would demonstrate their abilities through developing a number of prototype apps. The class will start with the Objective-C programming language and the iOS SDK. Music theory and music notation will also be emphasized early in the course. Students will learn how to access microphone data and low-level audio features, how to write directly to the display (for real-time rendering of the musical notes), utilize the APIs for storage, WebKit, geolocation, push button notifications, networking, data management, and multitouch. Prerequisites: COMP 40, Music literacy, AP Music Theory, MUSIC 10, 11, 64, or by permission. This course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:30 - 5:45 PM in Granoff 251.

Course Staff

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Lecture Notes and Examples

Syllabus

Date Topic Notes
Thursday, January 19th Course Overview and Expectations (PDF)  
Tuesday, January 24th and Thursday, January 26th Objective-C  
Tuesday, January 31st and Thursday, February 2nd Music Theory, Music Notation, and Sheet Music  
Tuesday, February 7th iOS SDK App 1: The Soundboard
Thursday, February 9th Guest Lecturer: John McCann, Tufts University Department of Music
Tuesday, February 14th User Interface and User Interaction (continued)  
Thursday, February 16th Testing on Hardware, Gestures  
Tuesday, February 21st Survey of Existing iOS Music Apps (Paul)  
Thursday, February 23st NO CLASS  
Tuesday, February 28th Project Proposals Music App Group Project
Thursday, March 1st Guest Lecturer: Paul Lamere, Director of Developer Platform at The Echo Nest
Tuesday, March 6th iOS Development Seminar in Halligan 111B from 3 - 6 PM. Please register at http://tinyurl.com/iOS5dev (it goes to a Google Doc)
Thursday, March 8th 2D Drawing and Networking App 2, EXTRA CREDIT: The Echo Nest API Hackathon
Tuesday, March 13th Multiple Views, Tables  
Thursday, March 15th The Accelerometer  
Tuesday, March 27th Data Persistence and Core Data  
Thursday, March 29th Project Check-In  
Tuesday, April 3rd Project Check-In  
Thursday, April 5th Concurrency  
Tuesday, April 10th Nested Views  
Thursday, April 12th Core MIDI Framework References
Tuesday, April 17th Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Filters (PowerPoint) Guest Lecturer: Brian Tracey, Research Professor, Tufts University Department of Electrical Engineering
Tuesday, April 24th Performance and Responsiveness Tuning, App-to-Production Preparation (PDF)  
Thursday, April 26th Second Review of Your App LAST DAY OF CLASS
Wednesday, May 9th Steinway Visit and Final App Presentation Time: 3:30 - 5:30 PM

References

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