Home   /   CSCI / CITA 284 – Digital Media Programming – Spring 2025

CSCI / CITA 284 – Digital Media Programming – Spring 2025

When/Where

MWF 12:30 – 1:20 pm / Harbor Walk East 300

Description

A course exploring code as a creative medium, including principles of digital media, computational art and design, computer music and sound, animation, live performance and interactive installations, and the algorithmic arts. Students will be exposed to several algorithmic arts examples, a scripting language, and develop several digital media artifacts.

Prerequisites

CITA 120 or CITA 140 or CITA 180, CSCI 220 with a grade of C- or better, or permission of the instructor.

Additional Course Requirements

  1. Bring your laptop to class.
  2. Bring headphones to class.

Course Syllabus

Course syllabus (PDF).

Class Discussion

Class discussion is available here.

Assignments

Homework #1.

Test Dates

  • Test 1: TBA
  • Test 2: TBA
  • Final Exam: 10:30am-12:30pm, Tuesday, April 29, 2025

References

  1. Ge Wang, Video – What Is Artful Design? (A Micro Lecture)
  2. Bloom’s Taxonomy – or how deep is your knowledge? – memorize, understand, apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.
  3. Roman Verostko // Steiner Lecture in Creative Inquiry, 11/24/2019.
  4. What is art?  Code vs. Photoshop vs. DALL-E.
  5. John Zelle’s Intro to Python slides – from SIGCSE 2003.
  6. Intro to JythonMusic slides – from SIGCSE 2016.
  7. Donald Duck – Golden Mean: The Golden Ratio according to Walt Disney.
  8. Cymatics
    1. How Sound Affects You: Cymatics, An Emerging Science.  It is the study of visible sound vibration.  It demonstrates and provides insight into the interchangeable / interrelated nature of sound, number, and matter.
    2. Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics, a process for making soundwaves visible. Useful for analyzing complex sounds, it also makes complex and beautiful designs, and demonstrates how the universe is full of “music” – actually, particles that vibrate in different frequencies, where sound is only a small subset of a much larger (universal) phenomenon.
  9. PerMagnus Lindborg, “Pacific Belltower:  A Sculptural Sound Installation for Live Sonification of Earthquake Data“, International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2017), Shanghai, China, October 16-20, 2017.
  10. TED Talk: How to read music – sheet music may look complicated, but once you’ve gotten the hang of a few simple elements like notes, bars and clefs, you’re ready to rock. Tim Hansen hits the basics you need to read music.
  11. Music Theory in 16 Minutes – the essentials of music theory in just 16 minutes! What is an octave? How do you make scales? What are intervals? What’s the difference between major and minor? What is the circle of fifths?! All explained in less time than it takes to make and eat a really nice sandwich!!!
  12. Online piano simulator – one of many…  very useful, when considering notes, pitch names, pitch distances / intervals, and scales.  Also, helpful with trying out quickly musical ideas, to see if they work or not…
  13. Intro to Pair Programming. This 3-minute video describes what pair programming is, and how to do it effectively.

Software

  • JythonMusic is an environment for music making and creative programming. JythonMusic provides composers and software developers with libraries for music making, image manipulation, building graphical user interfaces, and connecting to external devices, such as digital pianos, smartphones, and tablets.  JythonMusic is based on Python.  It is easy to learn for beginners, and powerful enough for experts.
  • Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping.
  • Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

 

Skip to toolbar