“Oh, that’s Daisy Rae floating on a cloud, and she meets a friend, and who’s the friend?” Odd and fantastical images and sentences flowed freely in our January Second Sundays workshop, where we combined snippets from Shostakovich and Saint-Saens with original motifs to create the idiosyncratic theme song of a day in the life of a forest fairy with a southern drawl. Our guest Haleigh Overseth’s vibrant imagination has produced a bevy of multimedia material including podcasts, paintings, and a novel, all featuring vivid original fantasy settings and characters. After making contact with Haleigh, we decided to base our January workshop on writing music inspired by one such character, the bubbly fairy Daisy Rae.
The idea for this workshop’s theme began with an email exchange between the New Harmony Line Team and Haleigh, where she shared some of her musical stylistic inspirations for her character Daisy Rae the fairy. Specifically, she named Waltz No. 2 by Shostakovich and Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens. The Hyperscore team then prepared some iconic excerpts from these pieces as Melody Windows in Hyperscore. The plan was to collaboratively rearrange these motives in the Sketch Window to create a brand-new piece that evoked Daisy Rae’s idiosyncrasies.
This workshop ended up being a vision of collaborative storytelling through a back and forth communicative process of composition, interpretation, and translation. Haleigh and frequent Hyperscore collaborator Derek Thorn provided compositional ideas for Peter to translate into Hyperscore – flexing and morphing the motives from Shostakovich and Saint-Saens into exciting new configurations.
Watch the resulting composition below, and join us for the next Second Sundays workshop to share your ideas!
For our Second Sundays workshop, we will often focus on a particular feature of Hyperscore to highlight, but perhaps our favorite way to take advantage of these composition workshops is to challenge ourselves to find different ways we could approach Hyperscore than we are used to. For our September 2024 Second Sundays, we had this in mind when we decided to narrow in on a single melody window, using the Sketch window to layer in the single motif on several harmonic levels. Our motif in mind was an iconic segment of Pachelbel’s Canon, a tune known for its round-like structure of interlocking and repeating melodies.
We started out by roughly transcribing a familiar melodic segment from the famous canon into a Melody window, experimenting and correcting it by ear when we noticed it didn’t sound quite right. Then we proceeded to draw lines in the Sketch window to represent that motif. Viewers will notice that unlike some sketch windows we’ve created, the lines in this one are all very uniform in length, direction, and color. We chose this to emphasize the potential of working with a single motif of the same duration to flesh out an entire composition. We placed these red lines at different vertical positions in the window, which causes the Sketch window to transpose the melody to start on different pitches. In this way we were able to create harmonic form and key changes in our piece. We intentionally did not follow the way that Pachelbel constructed the progression, but experimented to find other ways in which the melody could be juxtaposed against itself. Here’s what the piece looks like at the end of our workshop:
Now, take a listen to “Canon Fodder”:
Excitingly, due to the lack of a large number of complex motives, this piece came together very quickly but still felt very harmonically and melodically satisfying. This exercise serves as a starting point for encouraging Hyperscore users to start simple and experiment with all the different things you can do with just one or two motives. Delight and surprise yourself with your song-making skills
To see more tips and tricks for composing in Hyperscore, check out our other previous workshop recordings on our YouTube channel, and read more of our workshop highlights here on our website. What excites you about working in Hyperscore, and what would you like to see us highlight next? Let us know and join the conversation by signing up for the workshop series and composing with us!
Beats are the backbone of so much great music. We can feel them in our bodies, and they inspire lyrical genius and earworm melodies. Whether we bob our heads along listening on a pair of headphones, or dance along in a crowded concert venue, beats are infectiously fun. Luckily, they’re quick and easy to put together in Hyperscore, too!
In our new tutorial video “How to make a beat in Hyperscore”, we walk you through one process of making a quick four-bar percussion loop. We starts with a few ideas in mind that we wants the beat to sound like – “energetic” and “dance-y” – and use that anchor to inform further decisions in editing the beat. Much of the process is just placing random notes and listening to how they sound, and selectively cutting back based on that. There’s nothing like just diving in and playing around to build one’s musical intuition!
Watch the full six-minute tutorial below. With plenty of room for experimentation, improvisation, personalization and play, you’ll be making your own beats right away. Happy composing!
How do our brains process music and video together? What makes a soundtrack to a piece of media fitting, or not? Depending on the angle one takes, these questions have innumerable answers – in some ways, they are the questions that any participant in the Hyperscore Challenge sets out to answer when they compose a piece to accompany a video clip.
Near the end of the January edition of our Second Saturdays Hyperscore composing workshop, we raised these questions ourselves. We played our composition simultaneously first with the prompt video that inspired our piece, before then comparing to how it sounded alongside other videos. Surprisingly, the music fit disparate clips very well, in ways that illuminated different sides of the composition each time. The audio and video mutually transformed each other and our perceptions of them just by playing at the same time. This fascinating effect highlights the exciting power of engaging with creative practice. Just by, for example, dropping in some notes and playing them back, you can evoke worlds and scenes that unfold and transform over time with subsequent listens. Using Hyperscore, getting started with this practice becomes all the more accessible.
In our January workshop, we started with inspiration from the Challenge prompt of undersea scenes, and built out several melodic and rhythmic themes that for us represented each “player” we saw. The kelp had its own percussive backdrop, and the silver school of fish was accompanied by overlapping plucking guitars. Like this, we arrived at one answer to what soundtrack might be fitting for the video we saw. Any other group of composers would surely arrive at a different answer – how thrilling! Perhaps to those people, our composition might bring different images to their minds, and so the process of creative inspiration continues…
Express your creative inspiration at our judgment free, no experience required composition workshops – register here! Watch our full workshop, as well as the full composition “Hyperschoool” created during our session, in the videos below.
The full "Salsa Song" as seen in the Hyperscore workspace, written by the students of Odysseas Sagredos
As we have written about on our blog previously, there is a great deal of creative artistic potential in the act of collaborating with other people. Hashing out decisions and coming upon points of resonance as well as disagreement can be both a frustrating but immensely rewarding experience. Collaboration can nurture incredible creative leaps, but sometimes it can be hard to find that cooperative dynamic that clicks just right.
This is perhaps especially true in classroom settings. Differences in preferences and motivation between students can make group projects unbalanced. It’s a hard thing to encourage students to engage with creative classwork genuinely – let alone work together effectively with peers in this process! Given all the stress and pressure put on educators and students alike, it’s no wonder that passion for schoolwork may be hard to come across. In music classes, the disparity between students who get it right away and students who struggle may appear particularly stark. Barriers like lack of access to instruments and private instruction make understanding traditional music theory inaccessible for many. For students who don’t have an easy time grasping the material right away, they might end up discouraged, convinced that they’re just not musical.
Thankfully, as we have highlighted before, educators that use alternative techniques and tools like Hyperscore have found that these can motivate students who have been left behind by traditional music education, just as much as students with a pre-existing passion for music. In spaces around the world – from classrooms to workshops to summer camps, Hyperscore has inspired students at all levels to tap into their creativity and work collaboratively with their classmates.
Hyperscore in an Athens Classroom
One amazing musical result hails from a classroom in Athens, Greece, with the guidance of teacher Odysseas Sagredos. New Harmony Line Director of Education Cece Roudabush reached out to Odysseas after seeing his compositions featured on the Hyperscore Community page and his YouTube channel. He confirmed that these pieces were written entirely by his students working together as a classroom. Not only did his students compose collaboratively, but they did so within small groups and negotiated between these groups to create a single coherent piece. One composition that blew us away was the aptly titled “Salsa Song”:
Odysseas’ students wrote this Latin-inspired tune working together as a class.
How do they accomplish this impressive feat? Odysseas was generous enough to answer some of our questions and grant us some insight into his students’ composition process. His responses may give educators inspiration for how to use Hyperscore in their particular situations.
Q&A with Odysseas
To facilitate group composition, Odysseas uses an interactive touch board in his classrooms and a sequential composition style:
For example, two groups create melodic patterns, two others then work on rhythmic patterns, and a fifth group later composes the framework with harmonies. All of this takes place in succession, with each group making observations and improvements to the music creation. As a result, a collaborative musical creation emerges from the entire class, according to the musical preferences of the students in the class.
Odysseas Sagredos
All choices in the process were made by the students. They even chose their own groups, and resolved disagreements that arose. This speaks to the impressive maturity of Odysseas’ students, and also to the capacity of Hyperscore to facilitate the creative expression of all students. Odysseas shared that use of Hyperscore’s Harmony Modes, which move tones played in the Sketch window to fit a single diatonic scale or chord, ensure that “errors are avoided, and compositions that reward their efforts are produced.” The aesthetics and color palettes (and tone color palettes, so to speak) were also appealing to the students:
The students enjoy to intuitively visualize and edit musical structures. They love the themes, and the variety of the musical instruments.
Odysseas Sagredos on Hyperscore
Odysseas also teaches college students studying music education. He noted that, initially, the college students had a harder time with the non-traditional notation style of Hyperscore than his younger students who had less exposure to traditional Western music notation and theory. However, they came to love it over time – coming away from their time with Hyperscore with the “intention to use it in their future teaching as an innovative, effective, and functional educational music tool.”
The bottom line for Odysseas is that Hyperscore works wonders for engaging students and inspiring creative experimentation:
“As a music educator, I enthusiastically declare that Hyperscore has opened new horizons in music education, making music lessons more enjoyable, creative, and effective. The entire process of its integration into teaching gives learning a playful form, freeing students from the often burdensome weight of academic tasks.”
Odysseas Sagredos
We couldn’t have said it better. Check out the other amazing compositions that Odysseas’ students have created on his YouTube channel. And, whether you’re an educator or an individual interested in starting your personal composition journey, give Hyperscore a try for free today!
We entered into our November Second Saturdays workshop with the aim of tackling a prompt that we had attempted once before – setting the words of a poem to rhythmic and melodic form in Hyperscore. New Harmony Line’s June Kinoshita brought a haiku by famed Japanese 17th-century poet, Matsuo Bashō. We hoped to evoke not only the literal syllabic form of each of the lines in our composition but also the meaning of each phrase, the feel and mood that it stirred in us when we read it. The poem, translated to English, reads:
In the autumn night Breaking into the silence Voices murmuring
The difficulty of setting words to music, how much time and creativity it takes, was evident to all of us before we even began – for one, we chose a haiku after having a previous session where we attempted the same process with a longer poem and found ourselves in over our heads! This time, to start, we took a short time to brainstorm descriptive words for the way the haiku made us feel, as a jumping off point for our composing process. Then, we started composing music to set to the words, going line by line.
A variety of challenges can rear their heads when setting existing poetry to music: the preexisting sonic qualities and rhythms of the words themselves may clash with melodic and rhythmic experimentation, while reproducing their spoken rhythm faithfully may produce an inconsistent metric feel that can be hard to unify into a coherent song structure. We bumped up against these dissonances ourselves several times while composing, and we decided to go in a spare, ambient choral-style direction where strict rhythmic coherence is less important.
The exciting thing about the style of open-ended composition we followed in this workshop is that anyone in our situation may have gone in an entirely different direction to address this dissonance, producing something uniquely wonderful according to their own tastes and judgments. Perhaps they wouldn’t have even addressed it, not even experiencing these tensions we ran into as problematic at all – that, too, would be perfectly valid! After all, a crucial aspect of music composition, especially the experimentation-first model championed by Hyperscore, is allowing oneself to first quiet the critical inner voice enough to allow a spirit of curiosity, play, and possibility to come forward. Putting aside presuppositions about what we think we like, what we think makes a good, bad, exciting, or boring piece of music, can help to open up surprising paths of spontaneous intuition.
The next time you sit down with Hyperscore, try asking yourself these questions, and actually give yourself the space to answer them thoughtfully: Do I like what I’m hearing? What feels exciting to me about this piece so far? Is there anything that called my attention in what I just listened to? What reaction did I have when I was listening to this? Is there any part of that reaction that I want to emphasize more? Do I still have the same goals for this piece as I did before I listened to this part, or have they shifted? Where do I want to go next with this? These questions can turn music composition into a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts, with lots of unexpected twists and turns. Give it a shot!
The Inverted Pedagogy Cycle
Collaborative composition in Hyperscore
In this workshop, we really leaned into this compositional model, following the create, listen, react guidelines we talk about when we recommend ways for people to engage with composing in Hyperscore. Our experience setting Bashō’s haiku to music also highlighted the power of collaborative composition that many Hyperscore users might experience when working with their classmates or friends. We tried out many different iterations of the themes we developed through experimentation, and many placements of those themes in the Sketch window. Sometimes we disagreed or had ambivalent feelings about what we were hearing, and in that space of trial and error we ended up creating something that no one of us would have created individually.
In our piece, each line of the haiku stood on its own as a kind of choral intonation, repeated into the cavernous space of the sparse Sketch window. Then, as the layers of these melodies became more dense, they came into conversation with one another in an interplay of harmony and rhythmic tension. For the way we conceived of our composition, each line of the haiku was independent, and yet contributed to a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Such was our resulting composition – as are many compositions that have their basis in repeated motifs!
Our final composition: “In the autumn night”
Noticing what a composition evokes for you, and then working out what to do next with others, is a challenging, rewarding, and deeply human process. Hyperscore’s capacity to reduce the barriers to entry into this collaborative artistic process for students at any level of experience means that more people’s interpretations can contribute to the layers of a composition made in this way. Hyperscore provides an additional venue for people to encounter each other’s creative visions, and be mutually transformed in interactions that can be deeply meaningful for a person at any age. We want that experience to be accessible to everyone.
View the full workshop, as well as an isolated recording of the full composition, below, and register for our free Second Saturdays composition workshops to take part in the process!
The full recording of our workshop
The recording of our final completed piece, “In the Autumn Night”
High Contrast Workspace Theme for Students with Visual Challenges
Interested in teaching music or music composition with Hyperscore, but not sure where to start? Our wonderful Director of Education Cece Roudabush has compiled several resources on our website to help with exactly that. Based in her own many years of experience teaching with Hyperscore as well as pedagogical input from such figures as Dr. Kevin Jennings, these curriculums present different methodological options for music education with Hyperscore. Whether you prefer teaching with more traditional, top-down methods, or want to experiment with the “inverted pedagogy” proposed by Jennings, Cece gives detailed examples and outlines for how to utilize Hyperscore to meet your educational goals.
Can algorithms and creativity mix? In our current technological landscape saturated with discourse about generative “AI”, it has become perhaps less intuitive that algorithms have long been a friend to human creativity. As opposed to the current trend of using AI software to metabolize and supplant the creations of human artists, algorithmic tools have a legacy of facilitating free creative expression. In fact, we can count Hyperscore among the products of this legacy. With Hyperscore, algorithms can translate moment-to-moment experimentation and play into sound with ease, while still allowing users to remain in the driver’s seat. In October’s Second Saturdays workshop, we took a look at principles of algorithm as they apply both to motive-based music composition and the nuts and bolts of Hyperscore itself.
The practice of using recurring motifs in music can be quite similar to the practice of calling a function in algorithmic calculation – both processes involve the recapitulation and development of a discrete idea (whether a musical theme or string of code) across a larger document (a musical composition, or a program). In our workshop, we zoomed in on the parallels of a program written in Scratch and a piece of music written in Hyperscore. Peter demonstrated this by writing “hot cross buns” in both programs, showing the way that Hyperscore uses the same building block approach as Scratch while streamlining the process, making it immediately accessible to anyone regardless of familiarity with either music or programming.
Hot Cross Buns written in Hyperscore (left) and in Scratch (right)
It was striking to see how similar building a program using algorithms is to building a song from component pieces in Hyperscore. A musician delving into programming, or a software engineer trying out music, may find more familiar territory than they would expect. Moreover, from whatever entry point, field, philosophy, or mindset around composition someone may encounter Hyperscore, they are sure to find spaces of resonance and support in their particular approach. Hyperscore is just that versatile.
Behind the curtain of Hyperscore
We progressed into a conversation that highlighted some of the musical and harmonic philosophies and choices that underpin Hyperscore’s programming. Much care, passion and effort has gone into making Hyperscore easy to use while still allowing for ample expression of subjective user taste and harmonic preference.
Peter showed us some of the code that goes into managing the melody and sketch windows, and we discussed the complexity of the code that handles the harmony modes and the Harmony Line. Creating this code required choices about what kinds of harmony might be considered “classical”, for deciding how “Classical Mode” or the Harmony Line modulates the notes a user puts into a motive. These settings do not invoke unequivocal rules from Western harmony, however – although they informed by Western musical traditions, they prioritize user choice above all.
Indeed, there is no prescriptive view within Hyperscore of what music “should” sound like or be. In classrooms and in workshops, we never frame the classical harmony mode, or any harmony mode, as better than any other way of composition. The harmony mode options are available as a tool if students prefer not to hear dissonance in their piece, so that anyone can create a consonant piece if they want to. However, this is not necessarily the “right” choice. The only “right” way to compose is the “right way for you”, and only you can determine that for yourself by using your ear and hearing what makes you excited, what resonates, what makes you go “ooh, I like that!”. As an example of this dynamic, our conversation turned toward the common practice for musicians to play “wrong notes” in compositions they are performing, because it sounds better to their ear. In many ways, their “mistakes” are just another interpretation, rather than an error to be corrected!
Similarly, there are no dogmatic compositional rules in Hyperscore despite the traditions that informed it. The subjective, original choices made uniquely by each user breathe life into the scaffolding that Hyperscore’s programming has built. Algorithms enable Hyperscore to exist as the barrier-breaking accessible program that it is, but it is the creativity of the human composers that use it that creates something magical.
What does a member of the 19th century English nobility have to do with the development of computation technology? And why would we spend an hour on a Saturday morning discussing either of these topics in a workshop about music composition? There are surprisingly many parallels, in ways that ultimately dovetail to illustrate foundational principles that underpin the philosophies of Hyperscore. In the Second Saturdays composition workshop on September 9th, we explored the themes of engineering, structure, repetition, and functionality as they apply both to mechanical computation and to musical composition. To guide our conversation, we looked to a composition written in Hyperscore in 2007 by New Harmony Line CTO Peter Torpey, titled “Countess of Lovelace”.
The Countess’ Legacy
When we look to the history of computation, we can see that musical composition and computation share more lineage than one might expect. The title of Peter’s composition refers to Lady Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. Daughter of the famed English poet Lord Byron, she was widely known for her instrumental work with Charles Babbage on the analysis and programming of various computing engines – these engines are popularly seen as precursors to modern computers. She presciently envisioned the many scientific and creative applications that computing machines could have, well beyond simple mathematical analysis. In 1842, she wrote that “the engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine…. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
Put more briefly, she saw that there was a potential for these machines to use their computational power to express not just numerical statements, but all kinds of things that could be represented by these numbers – including, for example, certain systems of musical harmony. This inventive foresight, in essence, has paved the way for applications like Hyperscore itself. When we sit down with Hyperscore, we create melodies, listen back to what we did, and respond according to our preferences and desires. In this process, we collaborate with our devices as they use their numerical language to translate our tactile and visual expressions (the notes we drop in Hyperscore) into series of sounds, which we then respond to to build something that we find pleasing. It is a creative dance, actively working with a machine to make music interposing multiple systems of understanding and structure. When spelled out, it can feel truly wondrous – and it was the vision of people like Ada Lovelace that laid the foundation for the form it takes today.
A tribute to a machine, and a person
Peter became inspired in 2007 to write a song in Hyperscore dedicated to Lovelace after seeing a video of Tim Robinson’s Meccano implementation of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine – modeled on the Difference Engine that Lovelace and Babbage collaborated to design. Peter took compositional cues from the mechanical interlocking structure of the machine and the whirring and clicking sounds made as it completes its algorithmic tasks. What results is a piece that has its own thematic motives that weave closely in and out, mirroring the mechanical movement of the Engine’s cylinders, alongside intermittent methodical clicks and a consistent, stable harmonic backbone that reflect the physical structure and actual sound produced by the machine.
Peter’s composition, alongside the recording of the engine that inspired it
In the Second Saturdays workshop where Peter showcases his composition, we discuss how the process of composition, particularly the motive-based composition that Hyperscore facilitates, can echo the use of modular units in fields of engineering and computer science. Using the Difference Engine as inspiration and metaphor, we talk about the many different ways that structure, repetition, and thematic interplay can be present in a musical composition – and admire the beauty that can result.
Watch the full workshop below, and sign up to attend future workshops here.
What does making music actually mean? Why does music matter to us? What goes on in our minds when we write, perform, and listen to music, and how is that different from what happens when a generative AI program creates a song? What does that gap mean for our relationship to AI-generated material? And just how did we get to this point with generative AI? In an August interview with Chamber Music America on the pitfalls and potential of AI as a tool for creating music, innovative composer & New Harmony Line Board Chair Tod Machover gives his perspectives on these nuanced and tricky questions.
Machover delves into the history of AI, including as it relates to his own groundbreaking work into the nexus of technology and classical music since the 1970s. He discusses early hopes for AI as a means of understanding and modeling how human minds work, and the divergence into what AI has predominantly become – generating replicas of the end result of the human creative process rather than engaging transparently or meaningfully with the process itself.
Is this isolation from the process such a problem? According to Machover, it can carry with it the risk of losing what makes original music meaningful in the first place: the expression of a person’s lived experiences, feelings, and hopes. If machines are uncaring, then they cannot imbue creative work with meaning themselves. Meaning-making, and thus music-making, must take place in close collaboration with people who do have intention, and who care. In its current predominant form, AI digests and replicates work in ways that are virtually unknowable for people interfacing with it on the user end; the process by which the work is generated needs to be shaped by human users who know what they want. What we have now is very potent, but it is not a substitute for the music that human users who bring their own meaning and care to the process create.
There is certainly great potential in the realm of artificial intelligence as it relates to making music. Machover shares ideas for ways this may look, using as an example the process of composing a piece and collaborating with an AI to generate iterations of mood and instrumentation for that piece. AI is very powerful indeed, and the prospects of human cooperation with AI are vast. These possibilities are diminished, however, if we do not pivot to designing and implementing these technologies with intentions and goals that center the creative process itself.
