Emily Marasco, Fine Arts and the Schulich School of Engineering

“Students learning a new instrument often get frustrated because they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong,” says Marasco, a second-year student in both the Faculty of Fine Arts music department and the Schulich School of Engineering. “I really wanted to help high school students be enthusiastic musicians by enabling them to improve their playing more quickly.”

To do this, Marasco worked with software that provides a visual representation of a student’s playing, and then overlays a professional musician’s sound pattern so the student can actually see how they differ. Marasco credits her time on this project for her new networking and marketing abilities – valuable skills that will help her in any career she may venture into.

“This project allowed me to demonstrate how science relates to music,” says Marasco. “It is especially interesting because these two disciplines are not often seen as related and we’ve shown how important that relationship can be. This modelling really helps students improve quickly while remaining interested and motivated to play their instruments.”

“It was so great to see the students respond,” says Marasco. “A lot of students in band programs don’t actually know how their instruments should sound. Once they could see what they were supposed to sound like, they were able to quickly improve the quality of their sound and that made them more interested in the music they were part of creating.”

Marasco is confident this project will help her pursue her interest in creating other compositional software. “Composers are often frustrated because the software currently available does not accurately imitate or reflect the real sound of acoustic instruments. This is an area that I feel my work could benefit in the future.”