Teaching Programming to Musicians

A new approach has been developed for teaching programming to musicians. The approach uses personal computers with music synthesis capabilities, and students write programs in order to realize musical compositions. Our curriculum emphasizes abstraction in programming by the early introduction of high-level concepts and the late introduction of programming language details. We also emphasize abstraction by relating programming concepts to musical concepts which are already familiar to our students. We have successfully used this curriculum to teach Pascal to children and we are presently using it in a university-level course for composers.