Author: Cecilia Roudabush

Becky Ogilvie, an Iowa City Schools elementary music teacher, gave us the best Christmas and New Year’s gift–a joy-filled video of her talking about her experience of sharing Hyperscore with her in-person and online 5th and 6th grade students! Four of her students chose to share their pieces with Parent/Guardian permission and we will be debuting these pieces over the next couple of weeks. A big THANK YOU to Becky for being a Beta pilot tester, to all of her students for completing the pilot and for those students who were willing to share their work!

Take a peek “behind the curtain” at the history of Hyperscore by visiting the Resources page on our website under “Hyperscore: In-depth“. With New Harmony Line’s upcoming launch of Hyperscore as a web-based, user-friendly composition tool, we think it is important to acknowledge the students who wrote the program, Morwaread “Mary” Farbood and Egon Pasztor, who were in the Opera of the Future Group at M.I.T. Media Lab, and Kevin Jennings, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin. Please enjoy a look back at 2004 when the original Hyperscore creators were profiled in this IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications article.

Here they write: “The fundamental idea of Hyperscore is that anyone can perform two key creative activities without musical training: compose short melodies and describe the large-scale shape of a piece. Providing graphical means to engage in these two activities forms the basis for Hyperscore’s functionality.” This powerful insight by the original creators explains why Hyperscore has enduring appeal and remains unique to this day among music technologies for education.

Currently, Egon is Founding Engineer of Relyance AI. Mary is an Associate Professor and Associate Director of Music Technology at NYU. Kevin is Global Director Talent Development at Study Group, an international education provider.

IEEE is the not-for-profit Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers with the mission of “advancing technology for humanity”.

New Harmony Line announces that Group 3 has started the Beta test model of Hyperscore. Our group includes teachers in Iowa, Canada and Portugal. Our first high school Adaptive Music class is learning to use Hyperscore. I am thrilled to visit them this afternoon as I was their teacher last year before I retired!

Hyperscore Beta testing will continue into the winter and spring. Please let me know if you have any interest in a free subscription with materials and support! Contact me as Director of Education at: cecilia.roudabush@newharmonyline.org.

What an incredible adventure Kickstarter gave the New Harmony Line team and board these past few weeks! First, we were chosen as a #ProjectWeLoveKickstarter for the program’s “brilliant creativity”. We received daily emails on our goal progress, a big motivator. Finally, to read the email announcing that we had met AND exceeded our goal was the ultimate thrill! Thank you to our backers, those who shared the project with friends and family and those who took the time to watch the videos or check out our sites. We hope we’ll be making music with YOU!!

New Harmony Line has 5 days left in its $10,000 Hyperscore Kickstarter Campaign. Check out #ProjectsWeLove! Of course, I love Hyperscore so much I want everyone to have the opportunity to use it after teaching thousands of students to compose with it. In the mid 2000’s, my 12 year-old 7th grade Music Tech student at North Central arranged this piece using Hyperscore. She used the motifs in the Library and combined them in such a sophisticated way. If you’re out there Randalette, I want you to know that you’ve inspired many students to start making music! If you find us, I’d love to feature your WHOLE piece on our website and YouTube! Contact me at cecilia.roudabush@newharmonyline.org.

https://videopress.com/v/dKGOhg2D?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata

Blogging and posting can be a lonely past time if you think your words are just flying into the wind. However, this week I got a shout out from someone!! Amazingly, he is a music teacher NOW, but got to use Hyperscore when he was in 6th grade. He’d written 51 pieces and independently uploaded them to the old H-Lounge website for Hyperscore composers.

After recently seeing a post for Hyperscore on Facebook, he wrote a comment hoping to find a way to retrieve those pieces since H-Lounge doesn’t function anymore. Who ‘ya gonna call when you need help with Hyperscore? PETER TORPEY!! Yes, our Chief Technology Officer Peter was able to retrieve the teacher’s work to share with his General Music students. Of course, I’m recruiting him to Beta test with his General Music and Band students! I piqued some interest when I reminded him that a Hyperscore composition can be exported into notation–he had not realized that in the old version! Wouldn’t a nice composition, written, notated and played by his students be awesome for his spring concert? New Harmony Line thinks so!!!!

How could I have let a whole week go by without shouting out that Kickstarter chose Hyperscore as a #ProjectWeLove in recognition of its “…brilliant creativity”!!?! The Kickstarter is 50% funded as of today with 17 days to reach our goal of $10,000. Check out our progress at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hypescore/hyperscore-a-new-way-to-compose-music/posts/3332240

We also received a shout out from MusicFirst’s Director, Dr. James Frankel:

Thank you to everyone promoting Hyperscore to their friends and family who love music!

New Harmony Line would like to thank our Beta pilot teachers at Northwest (Mrs. Garringer), North Central (Mr. Wagner), and Southeast Junior High (Mr. Debes) in the Iowa City Schools and Allen Elementary (Mr. Cushenbery) in Kansas. They were the first to complete the Beta testing of Hyperscore. We also want to acknowledge the many students who learned to make music in a new way and said “thank you” and “you’re welcome” when we expressed our appreciation for their help, comments and suggestions!

We have 224 students in Group 1. Sycamore Canyon and Kirkwood Elementaries in California and Iowa are still creating music. Group 2 began last week with schools in Iowa, Massachusetts, Canada and Germany preparing to take the Interest Survey. The word “cool” is the most common positive found in the Interest and Exit Surveys–that’s music to our ears!