Enabling creative collaboration for all levels of learning

About the ExCITe Center of Drexel University

We established the ExCITe Center in 2013 as a research institute to serve as a hub for transdisciplinary* collaboration. The center does not belong to any single academic unit but reports to the Office of Research, bringing together faculty and students from across the university for the following collaborative efforts.

• • Research: ExCITe is an incubator for faculty-led transdisciplinary research in emerging areas, such as smart “functional” fabrics, videogame design, music and entertainment technologies, and humanoid robotics.

• • Education: Faculty and students develop arts-integrated approaches to teaching and learning through novel STEAM programs.

• • Civic engagement: All ExCITe efforts emphasize public engagement, often in partnership with the community and civic organizations benefiting the Philadelphia region.

The center houses three faculty research laboratories (the Center for Functional Fabrics, the Entrepreneurial Game Studio, and the Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory) as well as a common collaboration space for affiliated faculty and students. Affiliated faculty members span Drexel’s Colleges of Engineering, Media Arts and Design, Computing and Informatics, Education, and Arts and Sciences. The center also hosts numerous education and public outreach programs. Some highlights from the brief history of the center are as follows.

• • Groundbreaking work in smart fabrics by Prof. Geneviève Dion and a leading role in establishing the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, a US National Network of Manufacturing Innovation Institute (go.affoa.org).

• • A Guinness World Record for the largest video game display for a city-wide playable version of Tetris on a Philadelphia 30-story skyscraper (Prof. Frank Lee; https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/making-a-game-larger-than-life/).

• • The magnetic resonator piano (MRP) (13), a unique augmented musical instrument developed by (then) postdoctoral fellow Andrew McPherson, which has been featured in performances in the United States and Europe. The MRP includes breakthroughs in both real-time electromagnetic control and novel keyboard sensors that provide a performer-friendly interface.

For the remainder of this paper, we focus specifically on the center’s arts-integrated, collaborative STEAM projects and activities, viewing outcomes from artistic, research, and learning perspectives. Many examples originate from the Music & Entertainment Technologies Laboratory (MET-lab), which has engaged in numerous arts–technology collaborative projects with renowned professional artists and arts and education organizations.

Extended Artistic Collaborations

MET-lab has worked with a variety of external collaborators on large-scale arts–technology projects. The laboratory partnered with the Philadelphia Orchestra to develop LiveNote, a system based around a smartphone app to provide audiences with additional information (musical and historical context) about an orchestral piece as it is performed (14). A team of graduate and undergraduate students also developed real-time acoustic visualizations for live musical performances, which were presented in multiple events with Grammy-nominated jazz musicians Marc Cary and Will Calhoun (drexel.edu/excite/news-events/events/2013-2016-events/Science%20of%20Jazz/). In 2016, undergraduate students from the center partnered with Parsons Dance of New York City to premiere a new work featuring human dancers with drones simultaneously on stage. Several of these projects have jointly advanced both art and fields such as machine listening and human–machine interaction, advancing artificial intelligence systems that recognize performer expression and perceived emotions in music (15).

Most recently, ExCITe researchers engaged in two separate extended (1 y or longer) collaborative projects with external artistic collaborators that were presented in 2017, which we describe in greater detail below. We then present interviews with the external collaborators to reflect on the process and assess the outcomes of these projects.

Sophia’s Forest.

Starting in the 2015–2016 academic year, we began collaborating with renowned composer Lembit Beecher (composer in residence with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and former composer in residence with Opera Philadelphia, which initiated this collaboration) to create novel musical instruments for a chamber opera through a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (Fig. 1). The objective of this collaboration was to create robotic “sound sculptures”—acoustic instruments that also composed the scenery of the opera, providing a spatial ambience to the work. Two types of instruments were developed: a vertically oriented glass armonica to produce a variety of sustained tones and a spinning wheel “drum” to generate percussive sounds. Designer Simon Kim and his students from the University of Pennsylvania also created enclosures for the instruments to further incorporate them into the scenery.

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Fig. 1.

Scene from Sophia’s Forest (September 2017) featuring soprano Keira Duffy and the Aizuri String Quartet. Visible at the edges of the stage are several instances of the mechatronic percussion wheel and vertical glass armonica instruments developed specifically for the work.

The design of these instruments was largely driven by the vision of composer Beecher, who had already conceived of the general theme of the opera with preliminary ideas regarding the instruments and sounds. However, throughout the process, the composer adjusted his pieces based on the sounds produced by the sculptures, while engineers adjusted the design and output of the sculptures to match the composer’s idea of the piece.

Sophia’s Forest premiered at Drexel University’s Black Box Theater in the late summer of 2017 to an audience of several hundred, receiving positive reviews (best of 2017 in concert halls: www.philly.com/philly/columnists/david_patrick_stearns/david-patrick-stearns-best-of-2017-in-concert-halls-and-in-mongolia-20171227.html). The performance integrated nine mechatronic instruments—four glass armonicas and five spinning percussive wheels—controlled by the composer through a musical instrument digital interface controller over a wireless network connection. The award-winning Aizuri String Quartet (string quartet in residence at the Curtis Institute of Music, 2016–2017: https://www.aizuriquartet.com) completed the instrumentation, and the lead role was sung by renowned soprano Keira Duffy (kieraduffysoprano.com/about/).

Drumhenge: An Artist-in-Residence Project

In 2016–2017, the ExCITe Center engaged in a unique artist residency project supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation to pursue the creation of new technology for live music performance (Fig. 2). In contrast to prior projects pursued in collaboration with professional musicians, this was the first initiated by ExCITe to start with a blank slate without a specific technology concept or objective. In this case, the project was designed to include the artist in residence as an equal voice in every phase of development from initial ideation through development to performance. This full-year residency was intended to enable a more participatory and iterative development process than engineering researchers might undertake working in isolation.

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Fig. 2.

A view of the Drumhenge: A New Musical Instrument performance (June 2017) featuring composer and codesigner Peter English (keyboard and vocals), codesigner J.G. (Drumhenge control), Max Cudworth (saxophone), Aaron Liao (bass), and Chris Powell (drums). The individual drums of the instrument surround the performers, lit mostly in blue (in addition to acoustic sound synthesis, each drum provides visual feedback through full-color LEDs).

From a range of competitive applicants for the musical artist residency, in early 2016, we selected Philadelphia-based composer, performer, music producer, and filmmaker Peter English to work in close collaboration with MET-lab electrical engineering PhD candidate J.G. (also a multiinstrumentalist). The codesign process with the artist served to better align technical advances with creative possibilities and affordances.

Although conversant with the technology of modern music and video production, English relied on feedback from J.G. regarding what was technically feasible and realistic. In that sense, the technical approach often illuminated possible artistic paths, with artist and engineer jointly selecting the particular avenue to travel. The compositional process progressed in step with the technical development, with each iteration testing and stretching abilities of both artist and engineer. On the codesign process, English notes:

It’s hard to even figure when the exact idea started, but there [were] creative ideas around and then Jeff pitched me a piece of technology and then I would look at it and go, “Oh my God, can it do this?”…And it just kept going…It was a real extension of both of our interests and both of our abilities.

Early on, multiple concepts were prototyped and discarded before the team settled on the design for their new instrument. The residency culminated in the summer of 2017 with a live performance at Drexel. Billed as Drumhenge: A New Musical Instrument, the performance featured a network of 16 acoustic drums (“Drumhenge”), each augmented with an electromagnetic actuator capable of driving the resonant membrane (the bottom “head”). Controlled by an onboard microcontroller, each drum becomes an acoustic synthesizer capable of producing a wide range of timbres (as well as lighting effects via embedded LEDs). The drums are connected via Wi-Fi, forming a networked ensemble instrument (16) where signals can propagate from one drum to another, an example of the “Internet of musical things” (17). In the performance, a four-piece band encircled by the network performed several original compositions and cover songs arranged to highlight specific capabilities of the new instrument.

One concern with research involving music performance is the difference between laboratory data collection and a live concert with an audience. A secondary goal of this project was to develop a system able to capture and extend a musician’s interaction with the instrument in an authentic performance setting. Similar to the MRP, the initial interface is intuitive to a seasoned performer (press a key or hit a drum) and can be used to capture interaction with high resolution (precisely how each drum is struck). While the potential of extended modes for expression (via proximity sensors and external computer control) may appeal to professional performers, such in situ performance data collection also requires close collaboration between artists and technologists. The design of Drumhenge is detailed in refs. 18 and 19, and videos of the performance are available online (www.drumhenge.com).

Artist Reflections.

In early 2018, we interviewed both of the external artistic collaborators: Peter English and Lembit Beecher (conducted by postdoctoral researcher K.E., who had no prior affiliation with either project or interview subject). Questions focused on comparing and contrasting their experience working with the ExCITe Center vs. their normal collaborative channels and creative processes. Although their stylistic backgrounds varied considerably—from English’s independent music leanings to Beecher’s formal background in classical and operatic composition—the interviews touched on similar themes.

Both noted that the experience provided a great learning opportunity, challenging them technically and creatively in new ways but finding strong parallels with their existing creative processes. English spoke to the process of asking the same types of fundamental questions that he normally does in his work but applied to a new domain with the assistance of experts.

Working with the ExCITe Center totally pushed me into new territory, but it did also show me that from an experience design standpoint and a product management standpoint, the questions are very similar…What does the audience need to be feeling? What do we need to make sure they know or don’t know? What do we need to make sure they know is allowed or not allowed? These are questions that are hugely technical but also very creative, and so working at ExCITe I had to apply these two very, very new areas for me.

Both felt that working with the ExCITe Center allowed their work to reach new audiences, with this aspect being a strong motivator for pursuing future collaborative work of this nature. Beecher noted:

I’m definitely very excited about this sort of work, partly because of the sonic and dramatic potential, but also because of the potential for providing an access point or an interest for people…There’s some immediate interest in this sort of unusual production of sound and a visual interest in these sculptures…I think that might be something that would intrigue people who have little interest in the words “opera” or “new music” or “classical music.”

English attributed a significant portion of his artist residency’s capstone performance audience to ExCITe’s network and the success of the event to assistance and domain knowledge from ExCITe students and staff.

I feel like it gave me the opportunity or the experience to be able to reach out to new audiences because of the work I was able to do and the reputation that the ExCITe Center and that Drexel have…the fact that I can say, “I collaborated with engineers at Drexel to build a new musical instrument using cutting edge technology,” that sentence works. People respond to that sentence.

Asked to reflect on the quality of their work with ExCITe, both artists were pleased with the result but expressed caveats that they or other artists should take note of before undertaking such a collaborative effort involving technology development. Beecher notes:

I think it made me convinced of the possibilities and the expressive potential. The cautionary note that I feel is that the complications of the technology often are greater than one would expect and achieving the reliability that one would like is always difficult.

Similarly, English spoke to limitations of time constraints, which can be exacerbated by uncertainties introduced by a technology development cycle, noting that “I feel like sometimes, in the argument of research vs. art, that the art won because, in part, the grant wanted an end product.” He further emphasized the ongoing nature of this work outside the span of the residency.

There’s a lot of conceptual questions, a lot of experiential questions, a lot of interaction questions that we just never got to. I don’t look at those as failings, especially because they’ve been opened to leveraging that technology for other things…There’s always things you want to do better and there’s always more opportunity that you want, but overwhelmingly I would rate it artistically as successful.

Regarding the sustainability of this type of work, whether undertaken independently or mediated by a research institution, both artists brought up the difficulty of obtaining adequate funding and support. English noted that, having gone above and beyond his estimated time commitment, he would pursue future opportunities only after careful consideration of impact on income and opportunity costs.

The amount of money that was provided, the tradeoff of what I was able to accomplish and what that does for my body of work and my reputation I would say generally was worth it, but over time it’s not a sustainable model. I couldn’t keep doing things at this scale at this time commitment and so that’s tricky.

Similarly, Beecher emphasizes the importance of the long-term aspect of collaborative work, which is not always supported long term.

I think like any art form, working with technology, combining opera or combining music and technology, will only reach its potential when the creators, most of the artists, the engineers, everyone involved, is able to iterate. And I think that’s somewhat at odds with the business model of a lot of performing art organizations that are finding that the subscription model—the idea that people buy a subscription for the season and go to whatever they want, go to every show—that’s sort of starting to die, and people want to go to special experiences.

When asked about the rarity of opportunities for collaborative work with technologists or research institutions, both artists suggested that there is a significant community of artists with technical leanings, but neither were aware of any other accessible opportunities for such open-ended and long-term collaboration. Beecher notes:

There are plenty of individuals doing one-off sound sculpture performance and installation projects, but not using avenues providing long-term collaborations with research institutions, aside from the MIT Media Laboratory.

English contrasts his ExCITe residency with his subsequent work with researchers at another university.

It was all off-site. I wasn’t doing a residency and I wasn’t doing a long-term, close collaboration. There’s a potential opportunity, but that feels more like an external project than embedding myself in an institution.

He further indicates a desire to keep pursuing partnerships with research institutions; however, he notes that ideas for collaborative work need to be more developed before initiating a project, suggesting a reluctance of institutions to pursue such collaborative ideation at the earliest phases.

Impacts on Student Outcomes

The projects described above involved a few Drexel students working closely with external artistic collaborators. Many more students at the ExCITe Center are engaged in transdisciplinary projects, often with internal collaborators (other researchers at Drexel). In this section, we examine these overall experiences in comparison with others at the university with regard to research and work experiences. The data presented were obtained in accordance and compliance with the policies of Drexel University’s Institutional Review Board (https://drexel.edu/research/compliance/human-research-protection/institutional-review-board/) with the informed consent of individuals (or their parents/guardians as appropriate). Aggregate student data from cooperative work experiences are provided with the permission of the university’s Steinbright Career Development Center (https://drexel.edu/scdc/).

K-12 Education Programs

Since its inception, the ExCITe Center has offered unique K-12 programs integrating arts and the STEM fields. One reason is that we have generally encountered fewer obstacles (and greater demand) for such interventions at the K-12 level vs. higher education. This is partly due to more widespread interest and support for arts-integrated STEAM education approaches in K-12 settings, which complement other progressive education efforts, such as project-based learning and the maker movement. The center’s mission includes STEAM advocacy both locally and nationally. Furthermore, effectively conveying one’s research to a nontechnical audience has always been a priority at ExCITe, and our K-12 programs provide graduate and undergraduate students with a unique opportunity to improve their communication and teaching skills with middle and high school students lacking prerequisite technical knowledge.

The center regularly incorporates work from current research projects into cutting edge workshops and programs for K-12 students, allowing them to explore nontraditional STEAM areas (music technology, video game design, etc.). Since 2007, the Summer Music Technology (SMT) program has introduced rising high school sophomores and juniors in the Philadelphia region to STEAM activities (21). Admitted students participate at no charge, and preferential admission is given to students in the School District of Philadelphia and city residents. The SMT curriculum (lesson plans, activity worksheets, and source code) is made freely available online for other educators’ use (https://drexel.edu/excite/engagement/summerMusicTechnology/).

During this 1-wk program, students are guided through several hands-on activities on topics such as loudspeaker design, instrument acoustics, and analog vs. digital representations of sound. For several years, we have collected pre- and postprogram surveys on SMT student participants’ attitudes and understanding of mathematics and engineering. Fig. 3 depicts how students’ perceptions of future careers in math and engineering are clarified (increases in both agreement and disagreement) during the program. This figure shows that students over multiple years report themselves as being more confident in their ability to be successful in engineering-based careers. It also shows that some of our activities, which require students to use mathematical equations, may need to be revised.

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Fig. 3.

Changes in perceptions of math and engineering between pre- and postprogram surveys from 2016 to 2018.

During the week, students also pursue an individual project (guided by a graduate student mentor) from four prepared topics, which we have evolved over the years. In 2016 and 2017, the project options were the following.

• • Amazing Apps: develop a custom iPad music app

• • Custom Controllers: design a custom electronic music interface

• • Hardware Hacking: create a synthesizer or sound effect using digital logic chips and analog electronics

• • Mechanical Music: build a robotic musical instrument

All SMT students present their projects during a public showcase at the end of the program. While these are short in duration, many students complete remarkable projects. It is difficult to quantitatively capture the success of these project experiences; in recent years, we have implemented an assessment using four external evaluators (unaffiliated with the program) using a six-category rubric (four-point scale in each category). These results, shown in Table 3, convey an overall evaluation that the projects are of high quality (the average score is over three, where four is the maximum).

In early 2018, the ExCITe Center used the core concepts of the SMT robotic instruments (“Mechanical Music”) project to develop a new curriculum appropriate for middle school students. Over the resulting 9-wk mini course developed in partnership with the Science Leadership Academy Middle School, students built simple actuated musical instruments of their own design using littleBits (https://littlebits.com), a set of electronic building blocks, and K’Nex structures (https://www.knex.com). Ten students from the Science Leadership Academy Middle School (a neighborhood school) were split into three groups of three to four students, each led by an ExCITe co-op student. At the end of the 9 wk, students performed a musical piece with their corresponding instruments in a showcase for teachers, parents, and other Drexel faculty.

Each week of the mini course, instructors assessed the middle school teams using a rubric (similar to that used for SMT projects). Fig. 4 provides the average assessments over time, pointing to overall gains in learning (knowledge and expression) over the mini course. Although these ratings were generated by program instructors, they were the ones most familiar with each of the students (and ratings are averaged across instructors). Week-to-week variation (potentially impacted by external factors, such as Philadelphia’s Super Bowl victory) reflects a commitment to objective assessment. The success of this pilot enabled ExCITe to commit to the program in future years, where we hope to further refine assessment methodology (Fig. 5).

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Fig. 4.

Aggregated rubric ratings for a 9-wk course on building robotic musical instruments.

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Fig. 5.

Final performance event (April 2018) from the 9-wk middle school mini course.

Conclusion and Future Work

The ExCITe Center is an unusual entity in higher education, an institute developed entirely around transdisciplinary collaborative pursuits with external partners. External artistic and education partners have played a crucial role in these efforts by presenting authentic challenges, contributing unfamiliar perspectives, and providing critical feedback. Although no single project or intervention provides irrefutable evidence of the virtue of such creative collaborations, we believe that the overall portfolio presents a compelling case for the value of such activities at all levels of learning.

Furthermore, we believe that the presented portfolio completes a unique “pipeline” of integrated STEAM learning activities: a middle school course, a high school program, undergraduate courses and research projects, and graduate and postdoctoral research projects (mostly in collaboration with external creative partners). Beyond the integration within activities, the portfolio creates opportunities to integrate knowledge across levels. For example, a project activity (robotic musical instruments) developed for the SMT high school program led to an undergraduate project course (Engineering Design: Robot Symphony), which built the underlying knowledge and systems for a fully staged opera performance of Sophia’s Forest (some of the control concepts also informed the Drumhenge project). Additionally, components of this theme were later deployed for the middle school mini course. While the specific tools and technology used at the different levels will vary, the creative concepts remain the same. This mixture of program offerings can create a virtuous circle of experience and inspiration.

In this setting, innovation seldom occurs in a straight path (where advances in one project directly lead to breakthroughs in another). We believe that arts–technology collaborations can facilitate, often indirectly, advances in science and engineering research. This occurs through multiple pathways: from domain-specific insights of artists about the nuances of professional musical performance to new systems and code developed for performances being used to scaffold other research projects. The communications and interpersonal skills reinforced in this environment differ from those generally emphasized through traditional academic training and may enable broader employment opportunities for graduates.

Although this paper has primarily focused on activities integrating the arts (particularly music) with STEM, there is some evidence of increased creative collaboration across the center leading to breakthroughs in research (new awards, joint publications, and the attraction of new students and faculty to the center). One of the most intriguing projects is a fabric-based capacitive touch sensor emerging from a collaboration spanning smart fabrics and robotics researchers (22). It is difficult to imagine such a project emerging without prolonged proximity between fabrics and robotics laboratories. We believe that such efforts will continue to cross-pollinate with other projects internally and externally. The impact of this form of transdisciplinary collaboration across research groups is perhaps even more difficult to measure than the learning-focused outcomes presented in this paper. This remains a topic of intense research interest of ours, and the methods described in this paper represent the foundation for a comprehensive, systematic evaluation process of the ExCITe Center currently in development.