Conceptually, starting this assignment began as an incredibly profound experience. As the last major assignment of my degree, I felt immense pressure in creating a project that meant something. As I explored different options, I kept coming back to thinking about my educational career and how it has transformed me. I began to think about the different skills I’ve learned and what that path exactly has been, thinking about some of my earliest memories in school. Having gone to a performing arts school for Cello, some of my most important memories in school have been surrounding music. In the Toronto District School Board, music education begins with the recorder.

     Being inspired by this idea, I started to think about how that foundation has affected my actions and where it’s led me. In my professional life, I  worked on a team developing a MIDI instrument called the Lumatone and as a result worked extensively with MIDI programming. In my personal life, I’ve developed a passion for robotics and how sound can act as a trigger. Finding a connection between something hard and concrete like coding and something much less predictable like music is an incredibly fascinating idea.

     I decided to bring together these two bookends of my educational career and began working on my interpretation of an automatic recorder accompanist. Facilitated by Arduino, the recorder will be capable of listening to music and harmonizing along with it in real time in an attempt to explore this idea of new skills replacing old ones.