TunePad Playbooks: Designing Computational Notebooks for Creative Music Coding

Abstract

This paper describes the design of an online learning platform that empowers musical creation and performance with Python code. For this platform we have developed an innovative computational notebook paradigm that we call TunePad playbooks. While playbooks borrow ideas from popular computational notebooks like Jupyter, we have designed them from the ground up to support creative musical expression including live performances. After discussing our design principles and features, we share findings from a series of artifact-centered interviews conducted with experienced TunePad users. Our results show how systems like ours might flexibly support a variety of creative workflows, while suggesting opportunities for future work in this area.