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“Children may draw a fish or a house and listen to what they have made and correct it. They can learn, progressively through designing, to think musical composition without being tormented by solfège or by incomplete mastery of a musical instrument.... But as they are led to construct rhythms, scales, and more complex things, they are also forced to combine arithmetic and geometric forms : music. From whence comes an interdisciplinary pedagogy through playing." (Xenakis in Lohner, 1986).

The innovative invention of Xenakis’ UPIC or POLYAGOGY(1977) has opened many discussions on its pedagogical value as a tool for the exploration and creation of the sound. This environment exalts Xenakis’ pedagogical and compositional approach, but also opens new directions in the conception of virtual music instruments, and especially on interface design as a medium between performer and computer and the interaction between image and sound.

In this presentation we will present visionary Xenakis’ scientific thought on the conception of “polyagogy” (1977) through the dual interactive morphogenesis of the sound to image and the impact that this tool has in the age of “cyberagogy” and education communities.

We discuss Polyagogy as a technological tool and product of a scientific research which has been a paradigmatic inspiration platform for developers of sound design graphic software. We discuss also the pedagogical issues of the UPIC interface proposed by Iannis Xenakis in the 80s by introducing an hybrid low-cost system for interdisciplinary research on sound exploration and creativity in primary school.

Our main concern is to rediscover the holistic educational approach of Iannis Xenakis, which is relative to the modern issues of the interdisciplinary ICT education through creativity.

Finally, we propose a methodology which combines a freeware software which is based on the idea of polyagogy combined with the use of the interactive whiteboard in the classroom, in order to educate children through playing and designing by linking the symbolic elements of music to its audio aspects.

The last ten years, music education in all levels is strongly affected by the advent of new interactive information and communication technologies, which play a crucial role in linking music education to other curriculum in school. These practices broadly spread in USA and UK, are slowly spread in European school education and have a huge impact on teaching procedures as also on the way in which children learn. Cognitive researches and learning theories are in evolution in order to understand better in which way the new technologies influence the mathisis and creativity, where the challenge is to make an interdisciplinary approach through ICT277. Indeed, more and more researchers suppose that ICT is mostly familiarized to children through a game concept. In this way, ICT could easily act as an interpreter of the musical elements (theoretical and practical) to a comprehensible ‘game language’ to children for their musical education. It has never been easier for students to compose, improvise, arrange, and produce music and music-related projects than with today’s technology. (Watson, 2011)

Being fascinated since the beginning form the Xenakian interactive architectural –musical table, of the 80s, we have really seen it something that could awake children in new values which are connected to sound paths of knowledge which have been introduced by the composer.

In this paper, we will discuss the pedagogical issues of the UPIC interface proposed by Iannis Xenakis in the 80s by introducing an hybrid low-cost system for interdisciplinary research on sound exploration and creativity in primary school.

Our main concern is to rediscover the holistic educational approach of Iannis Xenakis, which is relative to the modern issues interdisciplinary ICT education through creativity. How can we explore the educational possibilities of a poly-instrument like these of the UPIC, in order to educate children through playing and designing the transformations of geometrical shapes or forms linked to nature ?

Among the traces of the spiritual heritage that Xenakis left to us is the fact that he has achieved to combine his humanistic thought to the logical systematical thought required by computational methods. Through the computational methods described in his radical book Formalized music (Xenakis, 1992), which is the bible of algorithmic music, he has tried to introduce visual forms of sound knowledge and has redefined the connection of computing to aesthetic provocations.278 UPIC appeared in the context of efforts that Xenakis made throughout his life to express in his work of abstract forms he considered not to belong to a particular medium, any more than they were the exclusive domain of science or art. Xenakis goes further in his researches concerning the connection between the visual and the audio, overpassing the sound dimensions of the abstract film, the futuristic dreams of figurative sounds of the 20’s and the visual music of J.Whitney in the 60s ; his attempts are merely concentrated on the scientific basis of the sound based on the principles of music acoustics and not to the arbitrary correspondence of sound parameters to painting parameters.

Through the term polyagogy he declares that this tool has the same root as pedagogy : sound paths of knowledge in multiple directions.

Which paths ? The paths that are linked with the ideas and musical theories which gave birth to these methods and systems ; paths that have their sources in ancient Greek philosophy as those of Pythagoras, Aristoxenos, Parmenides, Plato and other ?

Paths that bring to surface forgotten theories on the mathematics of Ancient Greece and medieval Byzantine music ? Paths that lead to the comprehension of modern mathematics through the implication of probabilities and group theories in music ? Paths that drive to the understanding of history through sound ?279 How someone can transfer all his knowledge and experience through the design of a tool ? In which way can this tool be used and adapted to the needs of the user ?

Which paths can we reiterate through sound in order to teach young children eternal values that are presented in physics, mathematics and music ?

How can we introduce them meaning of synaesthesia, and the translation image and sound in relation to the question of Xenakis’ music ?280

In order to answer to all these merging questions, we will present some aspects of a discussion that have been merged since the use of the UPIC environment in his first real-time version of the 90’s with children.

During the decade of 80’s and 90’s many children experienced UPIC environment in Greece and France. During this period, it was really a big challenge for young children aged from 8-12 to listen their drawings after some seconds. The sound miracle of drawing a house or a car was exciting but at the same time deceiving as this figure couldn’t produce the expected sound or no sound at all. The pedagogical approach of this period was inadequate to provide the basic concepts about physics and acoustics, as well as to introduce the children to the secrets the system’s user interface. Literacy about using computers as also literacy on music acoustics and sound technology was in the beginning281.

The ones who could be able to make the demonstration were mostly composers in Greece and France who have used the UPIC system and have followed a certain methodology. This methodology was based on the drawing of the geometric macro-form of the music “out of time” and on the selection of frequencies, intensities and timbres to assign to the musical drawings or arcs as they are called when played by the computer “in time”. Next step was followed by the selection of the duration assigned to the musical page that is drawn.282 Peter Nelson was one of the first who has written on the pedagogical value of UPIC where he underlines that the conceptual basis of the UPIC system combines the original thought of I. Xenakis, to the science of acoustics and to the development of an intuitive graphic imagery (Nelson, 1997). In his article he exposes practical arrangements for a number of different workshops for composers using the UPIC system in the late ‘80s and discusses the evaluation of the outcomes of using the system in this way. Gerard Pape, as head of CCMIX (continuation of CeMaMu) has also been implicated in expanding UPIC as an educational tool. According to Pape’s experience to introducing UPIC to children in the 1990s, is that young children, aged 5-7 years old, could draw and listen to what they had drawn with UPIC without deciding or seeming to care whether their result was “music” or not. On the other hand, 10 to 12 year olds were already concerned if what they had drawn was “music” or not and asked how to draw Mozart with the UPIC system. (Pape, 2010).

Thus, the evaluation concerning the use of UPIC by children usability shows that varies upon the age and the music education of the children and it is difficult to instruct them in which is the “right way”, to express themselves. This instruction could be directed by an idea or by the connection with another curriculum. Of course, Xenakis was not so naïve so as to think that his UPIC system was going to turn all amateur children and adults into “composers”, but he did have the idea that a “polyagogic” computer music approach to musical pedagogy was much more likely to stimulate the individual curiosity and creativity of composers and amateurs alike, much more than a traditional conservatory approach.

In 1987, the first real time version283 of UPIC was developed and a replica of that has been installed at the center of Contemporary Music Research in Athens (KSYME) where many young composers, scientists, architects, painters and musicians have experienced it. It was at this moment that UPIC could become not just a composition tool for composers, but also a pedagogical “polyagogic” teaching tool for adults and children alike who wanted to learn something not just about music, but about sound more generally. These experiments have taken place at the place where the UPIC device was installed, so the pedagogical praxis was limited to space and time, and the contact with this environment had more the sense of a visit in the museum than a well-framed education on music and graphics.

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Fig. 1. The Upic system in KSYME284, 1987.

After the ‘90s many software have been developed based on the idea of the UPIC : Upic (1992), Phonogramme(1998), Metasynth (1998), MIR (2002), Hyperscore (2004), Soundpaint (2005), Iannix (2004), ΗighC (2008) and other (Lemi, Georgaki, 2007). The problem is that all these software the haptical dimension linked to the kinesthetic option is lost : the haptic combined with the movement gives another perception of the architectural surface and the design of the forms. So, the performativity of the software tool is been restricted to the mouse pad or other interfaces, which are connected on the screen.

The last years the use of interactive whiteboard has been broadly spread in Greek schools has given the opportunity to multiple multimedia choices in knowledge through a kinesthetic approach. (Leontis, Daglilelis, 2010).

In this way, our initial idea was to bring UPIC into the school classroom through another form which is an hybrid combination of the freeware software HighC285 (Baudel, 2006), which represents the initial space and function of UPIC and the hardware interactive whiteboard which gives the opportunity to young children to have an haptic Polyagogic system (through their fingers) and listen to their sound in real-time.

Through this hybrid and cheap combination we can construct a new method to explore the sound properties in order to initiate children from 9-12 years old to the basic concepts of the graphical sound, the physics of the sound and the mathematics of music.

We can also expand this program to High schools in order to introduce young musicians to the basic concepts of microcomposition286 and macrocomposition287 in a graphical form as also to present them the unknown world of Iannis Xenakis music through an interdisciplinary approach of Music to physics and music to mathematics.

The relationship between teaching, learning and development of music notion, excluding its sound dimensions, which is based in the researches of the last 30 years, has an interesting history in psychology, characterized more by a shifting of attention and prioritization between these processes than by a focus on their inter-relationships. With some notable exceptions, such as the work of John Dewey288 on one hand and Vygotsky’s289 on the other, these relationships were largely ignored in psychological theories at the beginning of the last century.

The challenge of using the polyagogic concepts in the classroom brings us close to theories that argue pedagogical evolution and include consideration of the potential contribution of sociocultural, post-Vygotskian Activity Theory (AT)290 to overcome some of the problems that have plagued both music educational theorizing and practice and enhance creativity and synergy through internet. It lead also to a big discussion, that must be carried out by music educators and cognitive scientists on the interconnection of formal and informal learning.

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Fig. 2. Role of the student through Polyagogy according to the activity theory (AT).

The originality of the methodology that we propose in order to familiarize children to the Xenakian world through Polyagogy by using the hybrid model of the interactive board and the HighC free software has to do with a procedure that combines both mathisis through graphisis as the hand adds inner richness and charm (Xenakis and al, 1987).

By the use of this hybrid polyagogic system we can invite children to learn basic concepts about music through visualisation291, trigger their imagination to create new forms linked to geometry or physics and initiate them to basic notions that are related to philosophy, physics and mathematics.

Another challenge, one step beyond, could be also to initiate young students in the Xenakian world where the micro is related to macro and the physics is related to the ontology of sound. The challenge is to bring students closer to Abraham Moles consideration of the “sonic message,” whose dimensions vary from one composition to another and go through the grammar of knowledge. (Moles, 1973)

It is important to encourage children to create new forms which are connected to another kind of information, to improve and expand pupils’ cognitive and artistic skills, reinforce the collaborative learning, and evaluate the different levels of understanding. This sonic message can vary from simple melodic curves and rhythmic patterns to complex forms as “sound masses” and clouds” and glissandi.

The speculative approach of the polyagogy is premised on the idea that a work is constituted in an interpretation enacted by an interpreter. Thus children can learn through a kinesthetic approach basic forms that deal with melodic curves and sound masses or glissandi. The relation between graphic representation of a musical parameter and its sonic result can be as veritable tool for music acoustics and psychoacoustics pedagogy can be introduced later in students of High school or at the University.

In primary school is basic to teach them how can close is frequency with period and the sound identity with the dynamic evolution of the sound (ADSR).

In this paragraph, we will restricted to the use of the Polyagogic concepts as sound paths of knowledge to the primary education as a first attempt to show the multiple benefits of such an environment in performing, appraising, listening and composing.(fig.3)

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Fig.3. Polyagogy through a combination of developmental processes.

The polyagogic concept of such an environment deals with the comprehension of the basic elements of music and the basic parameters of sound, which could be related to natural phenomena or geometric aspects.

a) an artefact which is extension” of the traditional five-line staff in two axes (the pitch and time continua) and the cartesian space of XY. The children can understand the basic structure of the melodic and rhythmic patterns in a interactive audiovisual environment.

b) An instrument where the children can test their creativity related to music or to painting. In the first case they design with a logical sequence melodic patterns or glissandi and listen to them. In the second case they give more attention to drawing and painting with different colors and they listen to the result.

c) As a model of exploration : In this case children understand the basic notion on the basic waveforms and the structure of timber through the sound synthesis. Xenakis initial aim by designing UPIC was to create a more direct more direct way of seeing and hearing the microstructure of sound(frequency, intensity, ADSR, duration).

d) As a tool for the interdisciplinary approach of music through image and vice versa to other related discipline (natural phenomena, physics, geography, geometry, astronomy, etc.).292

This approach may help the children to go the second phase which has to do with the action and let them develop their imagination by unlocking their creativity towards Synesthesia, as also develop their logical thought on the mathematical structure of a music composition.

Through this project children could have multiple benefits from the system as the polyagogic concept of the system can be expanded according to the Gardnerian model293 not only to the development of the visual-acoustic-spatial and Kinesthetic abilities but also to the synergistic benefits of technology on musical creativity.

The procedure that we propose includes 4 different phases and has been tested partially in different Primary Greek schools during the period 2012- 13 :

a) Listening : to Xenakis’ piece (Metastaseis)294 in order to make the difference between the sonorities, the form and the style (by showing a visual interactive score).

b) Understand by drawing : the melodic patterns of a motivic structure of melody (a simple melody) and the antithesis in the continuum by drawing glissandi like in Metastaseis (this can be expanded to show other characteristics of music)

c) Performing : ask from the children to create similar melodic patterns curves related to the first piece and other children to create the glissandi that they have listened to Xenakis metastasis as also the percussive sounds and the sound masses.

d) Exploring the parameters of sound : pitch, intensity, spectrum, duration, density.

e) Composing : Initiate children to the basic of traditional music writing (melody, rhythm, harmony) as also to electroacoustic music composing by the structure from children to recreate their own piece according to their music background .

f) Constraints :We must also instruct them to the constraints of the system : they must draw from right to left following the axe of time and that vertical lines can not be heard unless they design clouds of dots.

a) Exploration and contextualization of sounds through theory. We can invite children to explore and contextualize natural sounds (rain, wind, cicada and other) by combining graphic representations and symbolic forms.

b) Discrimination of continuity–discontinuity (interdisciplinary area) through the design of groups of notes in sound masses or glissandi lines and let them explore natural sounds that have these properties…

c) Interconnection of the visual to the audio depending on the form of the piece. Encourage children to improvisation

d) Exploration of the cartesian space an relation to Geometry (frequency, time)295

d) Interdisciplinary approach of music to mathematics through the introduction of space.296

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Fig. 4. Lesson about the Christmas star and the micro-macro form (first primary School of Argos, January 2013). [The original is in colour]

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Fig. 5. Ιntroduction to glissandi (Ecole Franco–hellénique St Paul, 2012).

In this paper we have presented an educational application which can re-introduce to the polyagoagic paths of UPIC through the use of the HighC free software on an interactive whiteboard (a hardware system which is available in almost every European school).

The first experiments on the HighC- interactive board environment have taken place in several classes of the Franco-Hellenic primary school St.Paul in Athens during the school year 2012-13, and afterwards in many other Greek schools. Our initial approach was to introduce children to the unknown world of Iannis Xenakis by underlining his interest in the interdisciplinary combination of philosophy, music and natural sciences. Part of our presentation included listening o Xenakis’ main works, explaining and designing glissandi and clouds to the interactive board.

The experiments were mostly carried out in order to explore the applicability of the system. Observations on the pedagogical benefits of the system are expected to be done in future projects by music educators in order to evaluate it through a framed educational policy : understand and design the parameters of sound, create through playing, create a collective composition, invent a symbolic language, plan a story-game, create geometrical forms, etc. For example one of our observations is that children aged from 9 to 12 years old combined a variety of visual and narrative sound techniques to create increasingly complex compositions as they became more experienced with the system. We hope that this environment can be useful to music educators for researching the interrelationship between creativity (as an essential human attribute lying at the heart of all learning and as processes of making something new) and technology (as tools that mediate how creative activity occurs). The challenge of the system is also to introduce children to treat sounds as symbols and thus get in contact with the power of language into music creation activity.

On the other hand, music educators should be instructed to teach music not only through symbolic traditional forms but also through its sound acoustic parameters. Sound pedagogy in primary school could be taught as an interdisciplinary path of the polyagogic system combined with the sound lessons of Physics (cognitive approach) and with the lesson of painting (artistic approach).

We hope also that the careful design of a music curriculum, which adaptively couples music teachers with pupils, could establish an innovative didactic landscape with many beneficial effects in the music education. Encourage students to unlock their creativity and reinforce the collaboration around the interactive board, which can be used as a laboratory of sound and music exploration. The proposed environment is also excellent to improve and expand pupils’ cognitive and artistic skills as we have mentioned above. Most of the activities described above can be carried out by novice users with free or low-cost music applications. Last, one of the advantages of the system is the e-learning connection in the notion of cyberagogy as it helps the synergy between different communities of children who create music through the HighC polyagogic environment.

The system can also be useful to introduce children to new aspects of interactivity where the user learns a ‘hand-eye-ear’ coordination as an ‘interdisciplinary pedagogy through playing.”(Xenakis, 1987)

In the era of digital school that pedagogy needs the paths of polyagogy within the avenues of cyberagogy, the HighC interactive whiteboard environment is a proposal among other, for introducing children to Xenakis’ sound approach which has a dialectical synthesis of automating and informating (Hamman 2005).

This approach brings students closer to the democratized dream of Xenakis’ through technology by “tearing down this iron curtain, thanks to the technology of computers and their peripherals.”297

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278 We could claim that Xenakis is one of the pioneers of digital humanities in music : Digital Humanities are an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.

279 For example, Xenakis has eventually transformed events of the resistance movement against Nazi in Greece that has kept deep in his memory into timbre groups and theories.

281 Photo-visual literacy, reproduction literacy, branching literacy, information literacy, socio-emotional literacy.

282 Changing the duration of the page did not change the frequency or pitch of the individual arcs. The frequencies or pitches of the arcs were independent of the duration of the musical page.

283 Which meant that one could draw and then hear the result of the drawing right away

284 KSYME, Athens : (Center of Contermporary musc research founded by Xenakis, Vassiliades Papaioanou in the 80s.)

285 Thomas Baudel is the creator of High C : “The concept behind HighC and UPIC, what I call ‘graphical audio synthesis’, is very simple and powerful. An audio composition is represented as a set of marks on a score sheet, where the horizontal position and span of the mark represent the time at which they occur and the vertical axis represents the evolution of their pitch. In a way, it extends and generalizes traditional music notation by making scores continuous and drawn in a linear space” (http:highc.org).

286 Microcomposition refers to the generation of timbres by the creation of waveforms. These waveforms vary in kind from standard types, such as the sine, triangular, and square waves that are basic to electronic sound synthesis, to complex, quasi-random waves that may be designed graphically by the user.

287 Macrocomposition refers to the organization of sounds in pitch and time. This organization takes place independently of the choice of waveforms and results in the perceptible structure of the music, which is generated by the composition of a graphic score.

288 Dewey’s particular version of pragmatism, which he called “instrumentalism,” is the view that knowledge results from the discernment of correlations between events, or processes of change. True to the name he gave it, and in keeping with earlier pragmatists, Dewey held that ideas are instruments, or tools, that humans use to make greater sense of the world. (Shook, 2000)

289 Vygotsky introduced mediated action as a concept to explain the semiotic process that enables human consciousness development through interaction with artifacts, tools, and social others in an environment and result in individuals to find new meanings in their world. Vygotsky assumed that relationship among artifacts, tools, and social others were not constant and that they changed over time (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010).

290 The social cultural approach to learning has been extended through Activity Theory and I find that interesting in the context of comparing formal education and the use of tools compared to informal learning in social networks. Within an activity system tools or instruments – including technologies – are considered to be mediating elements.

291 Think the interactive board space as cartesian system of the original five-line staff and teach basic mathematical structure of music through melodic motives and rhythmic patterns.

292 For example in one of our experiments we have asked the children to observe the mountain lines outside the window and draw them on the HighC interactive whiteboard. The result was amazing !

293 Gardner, H. (2004), Changing Minds : The art and science of changing our own and other people’s minds, Harvard Business School PressMultiple intelligence : by incorporating Gardner’s MI theory into our instructional approaches, we can maximize cognitive development and thus expand the Zone of Proximal Development.

294 The music of Xenakis is received at first glance by the listener as a blending of sounds (masses, clouds, galaxies, glissandi), in a flux of sonic events proposing its own sort of logic and functionality, however hard to discern.

295 According to Xenakis :« ¨Explore Cartesian products of sets of points taken from the spaces of sound characteristics, using the structures of finite and infinite groups. Example : take a subset of clouds (configurations) of points (notes) or of designs made on the UPIC and consider the Cartesian product of these points with the points taken from a three-dimensional space (e.g., intensity, duration, density), but taking as a model the hexahedral group of the cube (subset of couples of Cartesian products provided with symmetries of transformations distinctive to the cube). (Χenakis, 1987).

296 “It is also time to found a new science of general morphology that will deal with forms and architectures of these diverse disciplines, studying their invariant aspects and the laws of their transformations, which have in some cases lasted millions of years.”( Xenakis, 1987).

297 “ I think up music as composer, craftsman, and creator, it is first necessary to study solfège, notation, music theory, and even an instrument over a long time. And since, in addition, musical creation is considered superfluous, very few people are able to attain it. Thus the individual and the society are deprived of the formidable power of free imagination that musical composition offers them. We are able to tearing down this iron curtain, thanks to the technology of computers and their peripherals”.

Sound Pedagogy Through Polyagogy : Initiation to Xenakis’ World in Primary School Through the HighC Interactive Whiteboard