Teaching Projects

Herbstakademie 2025 took place from 22 to 24 October 2025. This interdisciplinary academy is a collaborative initiative that supports particularly talented, motivated, and curious pupils. It unites schools from the Osnabrück region with Osnabrück University, the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, the Pupils Research Center (SFZ) Osnabrück, as well as the City and District of Osnabrück. This year’s programme included hands-on workshops on immersive music and media technologies, giving participants the opportunity to explore state-of-the-art XR devices such as the Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro. The sessions introduced pupils to creative and scientific perspectives on extended reality, spatial audio, and human-computer interaction.

Herbstakademie 2024 took place in October 2024. The Herbstakademie is a cooperation of schools in the Osnabrück region with the University and the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück. Its aim is to promote particularly talented and high-performing pupils in the upper school. The selected participants will create own songs, then produce them in the MTDML recording studio and lab and finally perform songs together in a VR environment using HTC Vive HMDs and suitable controllers/sensors.

The availability of musical instruments for hands-on demonstration in organology courses is often limited to widely used and accordingly available instruments, which means that many rarely used instruments and musical instruments from other cultures cannot be adequately considered. In the Virtual Organology project (funded within the LehrZeit programme), students will work in groups to create 3D models of various previously studied instruments using a 3D scanner and collect audio material of the musical instruments using 3D Audio recording technologies. The digital copies will be placed in a virtual environment that users can access with the help of VR glasses.

In the project VILLA VR ("Collaborative interactive teaching and learning environment for music technology in virtual reality") a virtual environment for the application of theoretical basics of (digital) music technology will be created. Teaching content such as the functionality and nature of synthesizer modules will be transferred to virtual space. One focus is on concepts of electronic sound generation, sound processing and processing of audio signals. Put simply this is done by developing new tools for interaction with the virtual (acoustic) environment, e.g. in addition to haptic input devices also via eye movement or facial expressions. Of particular importance in this context is the implementation as a multi-user environment, in which several course participants can produce music together in the virtual environment. The project is funded withinin the "Freiraum" program of the "Stiftung Hochschullehre".

The MTDML is responsible for the technical design and implementation of a virtual reality-based conducting station within a project led by University Music Director Dr. Claudia Kayser-Kadereit (funded within the InnovationPlus programme of the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture): The artistic-practical training includes the area of orchestral conducting, for which hardly any real practice situations can be created, because hardly any orchestra is willing to make itself available for the preparation of a student conductor. Rather, it always expects an optimally prepared conductor. A new interactive and flexible learning, practice and analysis concept with a permanently installed VR based station for conducting simulation is intended to provide a solution to this problem.

The teaching project "Object-based music production" (OBM) takes place from May 2022 to February 2023 (funded within the InnovationPlus programme of the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture). In the OBM project, students will create sound productions in which musical objects (instruments, sounds, people, etc.) can be freely placed and used in a virtual or augmented (acoustic) environment. The underlying technology has not only been the focus of research at MTDML for several years, but is also directly relevant to practice, e.g., for virtual acoustic environments for concerts or for collaborative rehearsals with people in different locations.

Herbstakademie 2022 took place in October 2022. The Herbstakademie is a cooperation of schools in the Osnabrück region with the University and the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück. Its aim is to promote particularly talented and high-performing pupils in the upper school. The selected participants will create own songs, then produce them in the MTDML recording studio and lab and finally perform songs together in a VR environment using HTC Vive HMDs and suitable controllers/sensors.

The teaching project "Musical Interfaces" took place from October 2020 to September 2021 (funded within the LehrZeit programme).  An interdisciplinary project group - consisting of musicologists and computer scientists - designed and conducted a seminar on the use of digital technologies for music practice. In the actual course, musicology and computer science students worked together to develop individual concepts for new musical interfaces and put them into practice.

Herbstakademie 2019 took place from 16 to 18 October. The Herbstakademie is a cooperation of schools in the Osnabrück region with the university and the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück. Its aim is to promote particularly talented and high-performing pupils in the upper school. The selected participants learned to produce and perform music at MTDML with the live coding environment SonicPi and recorded and mixed a pop-song.

In the teaching project HörWissen, students and teachers of German studies, history and musicology jointly design and implement a radio play seminar (funded within the LehrZeit programme). In the recording studio of the MTDL students get to know the processes, forms of organization and working methods of cooperative project and team work directly and acquire technical know-how.