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Table 3: The 9 final projects and their musical features.
# Name Timbres Harmony/Elements Model
1 Jazz Improvisation Drums, piano, double bass, sax Jazz harmony Accompanied melody
2 Inno alla Gioia Piano, organ, flute, double bass Tonal harmony Accompanied melody
3 Grandcanon Harp, brasses, sax, guitar Tonal harmony Polyphony
4 Timbri in scala Random timbres C major scale Scale
5 Pachelbel canon Strings Tonal harmony Polyphony
6 Cum santo Vibraphone, harp
Band, crazy harp, melody
Original musical form
7 Pachelbel canon
Trumpet, french horn, flute,
harpsichord, piano
Tonal harmony Accompanied melody
8 Halloween
Space voice, woodblock, ocarina,
warm pad, vibraphone, square wave
Band, melody and line Original musical form
9 Polovtsian Dances Piano, random timbre Twisted melody Polyphony
3.3 Qualitative Assessment
Qualitative assessment is based upon the analysis of
the final assignments of the course. The 43 students
were subdivided into 9 groups with the aim of produc-
ing an original musical project composed of a com-
mented Pure Data patch and written presentation. The
aims of this final assignment were:
1. to foster creative thinking;
2. to assess if the students are able to master the pos-
sibilities offered by the patch modules;
3. to offer the possibility of experiencing collabora-
tion and communication in a working group.
According to Sternberg and Kaufman (Sternberg and
Kaufman, 2010) creativity is a relative concept, which
depends on the interaction between the stimulus and
the receiver. Moreover, the evaluation of creativity
may be biased by cultural constraints, because a prod-
uct can be thought to be creative in one historical era
and insignificant in another. In the context of this
course we started from the implementation of sim-
ple musical structures such as scales, melodies and
polyphony, with explicit reference to the tonal lan-
guage. At the same time, however, we have pro-
posed computational structures which – in addition
to implementing the aforementioned models – also
have the power to undermine the perception of these
same structures, transforming them into something
new. This entails the application of divergent think-
ing, i.e., the ability of producing many alternative re-
sponses to the same task (Runco and Pritzker, 2020).
Thus, in order to evaluate creativity in the musical
projects presented by the students, we list the main
musical features that characterise them, i.e., the tim-
bres employed, harmony or musical structure, and the
model that inspired the project. All these elements are
summarised in Table 3.
4 RESULTS
In this section we analyse the results obtained from
the applied methods. We present quantitative pre- and
post-course data for questionnaires and exercises, and
qualitative data for the final assignments of the course.
4.1 Quantitative Analysis
Figure 4 reports the median scores obtained for the 26
questions in each questionnaire. Notice that the large
majority of these scores is stable around 4, denoting a
clear agreement with the corresponding questions and
therefore highlighting generally positive expectations,
outcomes, and opinions on the course and on its po-
tential to improve students’ critical thinking, creativ-
ity, collaboration and communication skills. Given
the typical distribution of Likert scale data, we chose
to apply non-parametric tests to look for statistically
significant differences between paired pre- and post-
test data. Therefore, twenty-six separate Wilcoxon
signed-rank tests, one per questionnaire item, were
run.
In the expectations and outcomes question group,
the post-course items Q02 and Q04 significantly
ranked higher than the corresponding pre-course
items (Z = −2.068, p = .039 and Z = −2.095, p =
.036, respectively). For what concerns the self-
perception question group, the tests highlighted no
significant difference between the outcomes of the
pre- and post-course items except for Q11, where
scores were significantly higher in the post-course
questionnaire (Z = −3.166, p = .002). The items that
showed statistically significant differences in the per-
sonal opinions question group are Q13 (Z = −2.118,
p = .034), Q16 (Z = −3.082, p = .002), Q17 (Z =
−4.709, p < .001), Q19 (Z = −3.089, p = .002), Q22
(Z = −2.054, p = .04), Q24 (Z = −2.586, p = .01),
Q25 (Z = −2.228, p = .026), and Q26 (Z = −2.184,
p = .029). All the related scores were significantly
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