By Sabrina Malekzadah

LA Phil’s Music and Artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel believes, “music is a fundamental human right.” So for the first time Hack Music LA partnered with LA Phil Harmonic to create a hack-a-thon that brings technology and music together to find new and innovative ways to make music accessible. Students could apply as individuals or teams of three and were encouraged to work with partners in different disciplines, from musicians to animators to filmmakers.

SCA’s own Carolyn DiLoreto (Media Arts and Practice ‘18), Emily Halaka (Animation ’18), and Grant Singer (Production ’17) were winners of $1,000 and a mentorship with Kickstarter at the October event. In just two days the team had to come up with an idea and prototype it. Their final product was Amüse, “an augmented reality application for mobile phones that allows users to use music in everyday shapes and objects, objectively making everyone a musician” DiLoreto explained. Lines on walls and buildings could turn into music and colors could even turn into harmonies. The app is geared towards school-aged children who are beginning to learn more about music.

The group also met and worked with Molly Turner, a composition major at Rice University, who added to the team’s diverse backgrounds. “When Molly came in she really inspired us based on her knowledge of music theory to come up with the idea,” DiLoreto explained. The students used their different disciplines to contribute to the final presentation of the application. It was this interdivisional collaboration that led to the group’s success. Singer used his filmmaking skills to film and edit a kick-starter type video for the presentation, Halaka made the animations, Turner composed the music in the video, and DiLoreto created the code to detect parallel lines. “We used our design and storytelling skills to make our presentation impactful” DiLoreto said, “It was really inspiring to see what could be created in such a short amount of time.”

To learn more about Amüse click the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1SzdEs57XktNU1jV1BuTXpPVVU/view?usp=sharing