by June Kinoshita, Executive Director, New Harmony Line
I’ve been reading the wonderful New York Times opinion series by guitarist and social activist Tom Morello, and his post “How I Taught My Son How to Shred Like Crazy” really landed for me. Morello, an esteemed rock guitarists known to legions of fans for his stints with Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, and as a member of Bruce Springsteen’s touring E Street Band, recounts how a guitar teacher almost derailed his musical dreams when he was 13 years old. Eager to master guitar licks from Led Zeppelin and Kiss, he marched into his first guitar lesson only to be told he had to first learn to play scales. It was years before he returned to the guitar when he founded his first band.
I wonder how many millions of children have been steered away from music by similar “thou must master the basics first” mindsets. Of course, drilling scales, arpeggios, and chords into your muscle memory is essential for mastering an instrument. But if a child is on fire to learn a piece of music they love, or to explore making sounds that mean something to them, a great teacher will find a way to feed that flame.
Having learned this seminal lesson in his youth, Morello recounts how he cautiously approached his 9-year-old son, Roman, early during the pandemic lockdown about learning “Stairway to Heaven,” and soon discovered he had a shredding prodigy on his hands. Roman ended up collaborating with Nandi Bushnell, the British-Zulu drumming phenom. (I first learned about Nandi through my fangirling of David Grohl; watch their epic drum battle). Here’s their song, a call to arms for the world to take action against climate change. This resonates so much with us because the driving motivation behind Hyperscore and everything we do is to empower kids to find their voice. They have a lot to say. Watch:
Board member Sep Kamvar is a computer scientist, artist, and entrepreneur. He has been a professor at MIT and Stanford, and a co-founder of Wildflower Schools (a network of Montessori microschools), Mosaic Building Group (an AI-based residential construction company), and Celo (a mobile-based global payments platform for cryptocurrencies). Sep’s main contributions to computer science have been at the intersection of computer science and mathematics, particularly in the fields of numerical linear algebra, peer-to-peer networks, and information retrieval.
Sep is the author of three books and over 40 technical publications and patents, and his artwork has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens among others. Sep received his PhD in scientific computing and computational mathematics from Stanford University and an AB in chemistry from Princeton University.
We’re thrilled to welcome Alysia Lee to the board of directors of New Harmony Line. Kennedy Center Citizen Artist, Alysia is the Founder and Artistic Director of Sister Cities Girlchoir (SCG), the El Sistema-inspired, girl empowerment choral academy in Philadelphia, Camden, and Baltimore. Lee is the education program supervisor for Fine Arts Education for the Maryland State Department of Education across five arts disciplines: music, dance, visual art, theatre, and media arts. She is the President-Elect of the national service organization, State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE).
Alysia is the series editor of Hal Leonard’s Exigence for Young Voices, the new choral series uplifting Black and Latino composers for young choir ensembles. Her piece ‘Say Her Name’ is published by Hal Leonard. Recent composition commissions include Baltimore Choral Arts, Portland Lesbian Choir, and GALA Choruses. Lee is a faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, she is a Board member of Chorus America and the Advisory Board for ArtsEdSEL.
Cecilia taught General and Adaptive Music K-12 in the Iowa City Community School District for 32 years. She has a master’s degree in music education specializing in music therapy and behavior disorders from the University of Iowa. She was honored by the ICCSD District Parent’s Organization in 2012, received the Achievement in Education Award for Outstanding Contributions to Education in 2014 and was the Iowa City Education Association’s Teacher of the Year in 2017. Cecilia piloted Hyperscore in 2003 and passionately taught the program until 2020.
When the nation went into lockdown in March of 2020, Cecilia reached out to New Harmony Line in desperation. Her music students could no longer share computers in their lab and she wanted to know if Hyperscore was available on the Web. The new version of Hyperscore wasn’t ready at the time, but she began to talk regularly with June and Peter. When Cecilia retired from teaching in the spring of 2021, she took on a new role, as Director of Education for New Harmony Line. She connected with educators to beta-test Hyperscore for the Web and is collecting feedback, evaluating students’ reactions, and using their input to add new features to the software and develop teaching materials. With her long experience teaching with Hyperscore in public schools, she is a great guide and collaborator for educators who wish to introduce Hyperscore to their classrooms.
MIT Professor Tod Machover and (then) doctoral student Peter Torpey work with a student who is composing with Hyperscore in Armenia in 2012.
From our archives. This story about the 2012 “A to A: A World in Harmony” concert in Yerevan, Armenia, is a testament to the power of Hyperscore to foster powerful collaborations.
The opulent Armenian Opera Theater in the heart of Armenia’s capital Yerevan will reverberate with some truly fresh sounds on the evening of February 25, 2012, as two of Armenia’s elite musical ensembles dig into new pieces composed entirely by children from Armenia and the United States. The concert features the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra and DOGMA, one of the country’s most popular rock bands. The event is co-sponsored by the LUYS Education Foundation and the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan to celebrate the embassy’s 20th anniversary.
Despite the composers’ youth – they range in age from 8 to 14 – their work is rich and rewarding to hear, thanks to the boost their musical imaginations received from Hyperscore, a music-creation software developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab by a team led by renowned composer Tod Machover. Hyperscore puts unprecedented composing power into the hands of people who long to express themselves musically, regardless of their formal training. More than that, Hyperscore turns out to be an exceptional tool for collaborative creativity. One of the pieces receiving its world premiere at the Yerevan event was jointly composed by children in Boston and Armenia.
Musical composition is usually imagined to spring from the minds of geniuses toiling in splendid isolation. But for the youngsters visiting the Media Lab earlier this month, the composing process was more like a cyber paintball game. Color-coded splashes of melodies and beats popped up on a large flat-screen monitor as a half-dozen students from the Armenian Sisters’ Academy in Lexington, MA, traded ideas over a Skype connection with their counterparts in a classroom 8,700 kilometers away in Yerevan.
Under Machover’s deft direction, the students launched into creating their new piece by humming melodies and tapping out rhythms, which were notated using Hyperscore. The screen quickly filled up with melodic ideas, or ‘motifs’, and a percussion sequence. The kids then started assembling their composition. “Do you want the piece to start with a big explosion, or something quieter?” Machover asked. Something quiet, the kids agreed. A motif was selected and “drawn” onto the digital canvas. A second pensive motif was introduced, and then it was time to bring in some livelier motifs to wake things up.
“How do you tell a story through music? How could we keep this moving, keep it building?” Machover urged. The kids started piling on layers, made a motif swing high and swoop low, tried out various harmonic configurations… and they were out of time. In one hour, they had put together the first minute of their piece. After a few more sessions, they completed a short but complex and fascinating work which they titled “Frenzy of Friendship”, ready to be orchestrated and sent to the Armenian Phil for its world premiere.
“We usually think of music as belonging to a special elite who have unique powers to create it and share it,” Machover says. “Hearing these exciting new pieces by young people renews my conviction that anyone can create original, valuable music given the right tools, environment and encouragement, and that through music we can build friendships, share individual visions, and enhance life’s meaning.”
To Jacqueline Karaaslanian, Executive Director of the LUYS Education Foundation, this is a perfect example of harnessing technology to spur creativity and collaboration. The foundation was established by Armenia’s President Serjh Sargsyan and Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan to transform the nation by raising the quality of education and infusing the country’s youth with a “can do” attitude.
“Hyperscore wakes up the genius within children and instills in them a desire to better understand a whole universe of worlds they had not previously imagined or considered,” Karaaslanian explains. “When children know that their elders and professionals will play their music, they are empowered. This process is beyond encouraging words; it validates children as thinkers and creators.” And that, she says, is vital for any nation that expects to thrive in our rapidly changing and interconnected world.
Peter is an artist and engineer who explores the nexus of music, interface, interaction design, cognition, storytelling, and theater. He received his PhD in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab and now works as an independent contractor providing services that span the possibilities of integrating technologies into live performance and artistic experience. These services include theatrical design, video production, media and graphic design, as well as web and software development.
The challenge of replicating the original Hyperscore software as a Web application fell to Peter. He not only completed this monumental project but has also added some cool color options, freshened up the design, and continues to add and refine features. What can we say? He is a magician of the highest order!
Betsy Corcoran, New Harmony Line board member, brings education’s best ideas to life. She heads Lede Ventures, which advises organizations at the intersection of technology and learning on the strategies and tactics for catalyzing innovation. She consults with C-level executives on how to foster vibrant teams that stress authenticity and transparency drawing on decades of experience in leading teams and in analyzing industry’s top leaders. In 2011, Betsy cofounded and served as CEO of EdSurge, an award-winning news and information hub for teachers, entrepreneurs and school leaders with a commitment to edtech. She was named a “Rock Star of Education.” In 2019, she negotiated its successful acquisition by ISTE, the International Society for Technology Education.
She writes regularly on the future of learning for sites including EdSurge and Protocol. Betsy is a well-known speaker and conference moderator as well as LinkedIn “Influencer.” She advises the Unboxing School Movement and the REMOTE Summit. She is a Fellow with the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellows Program. Betsy served as Silicon Valley Bureau Chief for Forbes Media, helping establish its Midas List. She has received national recognition for her work as a journalist at organizations that include The Washington Post and Scientific American magazine. She has been a Fellow in the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has a B.A. in economics and math from Georgetown University.
June is an experienced entrepreneur and executive with a track record of creating and transforming game-changing organizations. Her extensive non-profit leadership experience includes serving since 2012 at the FSHD Society, a rare disease advocacy and funding organization. Previously, she co-founded the Alzheimer Research Forum and N-of-One, a pioneering precision medicine company.
“Having seen Hyperscore in action, I am driven to see this amazing technology realize its potential to transform how children experience music,” she says. “My passion is to make the world a better place by building sustainable models to promote health, wellness and culture.”
June is a graduate of Harvard College, where she concentrated in physics, and has been a writer and editor for Scientific American, Science, The New York Times Magazine, and many other national publications.
Two years ago, Tod Machover and June Kinoshita founded New Harmony Line to resurrect Hyperscore, the software which hundreds of school children have used to compose original music that has been woven into Tod’s Toy Symphony and City Symphony pieces and performed around the world. Hyperscore enables anyone to express themselves through original compositions without demanding years of musical training. It’s super fun to use, and more importantly, it helps young people “find their voice” and deepen their appreciation of musical culture—a lifelong gift.
We’re incredibly lucky to have Peter Torpey, Tod’s former PhD student at the Media Lab, join as CTO of New Harmony Line. Peter has redeveloped Hyperscore as a web application. This was a tour de force, and we now have a beta version that is being tested this fall in 24 classrooms across the U.S. and Europe. Our next step is to develop the back-end software so that we can release Hyperscore in the spring of 2022 to the educational market.
To help us fund this critical step, we have launched a Kickstarter campaign. We would love it so much if you would consider supporting it. Your financial backing would be amazing, but just as important is your help in sharing the campaign with your network. Our success depends critically on word of mouth, especially at the start of the campaign. We’d deeply appreciate your help in letting your friends and connections know about it. Encourage them to view the page and share it in turn to anyone they think might be excited by Hyperscore.
Hyperscore was invented by the Opera of the Future group of Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. A Pulitzer Prize-finalist and Emmy-winning composer, Tod is creator of City Symphonies. In 2016, he was named Composer of the Year by Musical America. Called a “musical visionary” by The New York Times and “America’s most wired composer” by The Los Angeles Times, Tod is an influential composer and inventor, praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone, from celebrated virtuosi to musicians of all abilities.
Hyperscore software, developed by his Media Lab team, has enabled children around the world to compose music which has been performed by chamber music ensembles like the Ying Quartet, rock bands, and major orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Tod studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. He is widely recognized for designing new technologies for music performance and creation, such as Hyperinstruments, “smart” performance systems that extend expression for virtuosi, from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, as well as for the general public. The video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band were invented by graduates of Machover’s group at the Media Lab.
