# Composition Assistant: Project Overview

**Dr. Tim Thompson and Dr. Ivan Elezovic**

Composition Assistant is a pedagogical framework and accompanying web application for undergraduate composition instruction. Its central concern is how students come to recognize, articulate, and evaluate what is musically meaningful to them, and how structured interaction with AI might support that development. The student remains the composer and final artistic authority.

The framework organizes interaction around four stages: **Initiation**, clarifying intentions and establishing a workable direction; **Exploration**, investigating and comparing musical possibilities; **Creation**, developing and organizing the work; and **Reflection**, evaluating what the music has become and deciding what to retain, test, or revise. These stages provide a semester-level structure and recurring modes of working. Students may revisit them as their ideas develop. A separate **Open Studio** mode accommodates questions that span stages.

The application provides a private space for conversation about ideas, musical concepts, and work in progress. Students can upload MusicXML from their notation software, discuss the supplied passage, and request short notated examples or transformations. Examples can be viewed, heard through piano audition, revised conversationally, and downloaded for further work. The original uploaded score remains unchanged, and students continue composing in their own musical environment.

Compact working summaries support continuity, while optional checkpoints preserve selected snapshots. The proposed instructional process also incorporates progress reflections, which may be initiated by the student or assigned by an instructor. Students can review and choose what to share from their work. These records could help instructors understand students’ intentions, uncertainties, and reasons for musical decisions, informing subsequent lesson dialogue.

The current phase centers on faculty development and functional testing. Planned research will examine the contribution of the framework and application to student self-regulation, compositional judgment, and student–instructor interaction. Decisions about instructional milestones, submitted artifacts, evidence collection, and research procedures are still being developed. The project presents a pedagogical design and working application; it makes no claim yet about effects on student learning.