“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!
In our recent podcast (see video below), our director of education, Cece Roudabush, walks new teacher Sydney Pratt through the practical process of preparing her classroom to learn music composition with Hyperscore.
In developing her music curriculum, Sydney wondered how to incorporate the music creation standards from the national standards for arts education. “Most of the standards that I’ve applied only revolve around performance,” she notes. “Students never get to create anything, and I didn’t know how to incorporate it. Hyperscore seems like the answer.”
Roudabush begins with a great example of a composition created by a fifth grader using only four notes. “It’s a beautiful example of inverted pedagogy,” she says. Instead of teaching chords and intervals as abstract concepts, Hyperscore lets the student stumble across them while creating music. The student learns the concept more deeply because they discovered it by themself.
Next, Roudabush introduces a handy series of checklists and classroom materials that she has perfected through her years of teaching with Hyperscore and leading professional development trainings for educators who are new to Hyperscore. Watch:
This month, our team had an interesting challenge, to devise a short workshop for the F2F Music Foundation’s summer camp, which serves underprivileged kids in the Houston area. The camp supports youths in developing and honing instrumental performance skills. F2F’s founder, the multifaceted Hammond organist and composer Vel Lewis, was keen to give the campers hands-on experience with technology while introducing them to Hyperscore as a tool for composition. And he wanted the campers to produce an original piece that would be performed on instruments during the camp’s final concert.
The campers range in age from seven to 17, and several participated in last year’s summer camp, so they would be able to help the novices with Hyperscore basics. But what could we do in the few hours allotted to the workshop that would be rewarding and relevant?
The camp has a jazz orientation, so we decided to start with a jazzy melody. The campers’ job would be to add accompanying melodies, bass, and percussion. While the idea sounded good in theory, we had not actually tried it out ourselves. So that’s what we decided to do at this month’s Second Sunday Zoom workshop. We composed a bebop-inspired melody in advance. Here it is:
This is what it looks like transcribed into Hyperscore:
While easy on the ears, it’s rhythmically complex, with grace notes, syncopation—elements that make a melody “swing.” We decided to start by adding a bass line, something that could underpin the melody by marking the beat against which the melody would be syncopated. We wondered whether there was a chordal structure to work from, but as we were racing against the clock, we said “let’s just use our ears.” (Plus, we don’t know the rules of jazz harmonies…) We started with a basic descending scale with some jumps, a few eighth notes thrown in among the quarter notes, and a little “grace note” beat at the very end of the phase so that when we looped it, there’d be a nice little flourish to propel us sonically into the next cycle.
Once we got a bass line that sounded good to us, we wanted to add a second melody that could weave in and out. Maybe something that “echoed” parts of the main melody. To make the “echo”, Peter copied part of the melody and plopped it into a new melody window, positioning it right after the trombone melody plays. We chose a vibraphone (yellow melody window) for the instrument because it is a bright sound that contrasts and complements the trombone nicely.
Now onto percussion! Percussion often follows the rhythmic pattern of the melody. We heard in our heads a quarter beat alternating with triplet eights. Again, copying and pasting from the main melody into the percussion window saved some time. At first, the resulting beat sounded a bit too mechanical and lacking in swing, but upon listening, it wasn’t half bad. We adjusted the volume and changed to a cymbal with a more resonant vibration and liked that much better. We threw in some other percussion instruments at various points for emphasis:
We gave it a couple more listens and enjoyed what we heard! Here it is:
We realized afterward that the process we used was a great example of motific composing, in which we copied and pasted bits from the original melody to create the other parts. This was true even as we were guided only by what we heard, not by theory.
Some pro tips: The original melody was locked using keyboard command Ctrl – shift – L (L for “lock”). That way we couldn’t accidentally change it. Also, if you watch the full video of how we created this piece, you’ll see how we stacked various windows with the bars aligned so that it was easy to see the time relationship among the different parts.
Finally, while our team managed to collaboratively create our piece in one hour, we felt this would be a very challenging project for a workshop with kids. We decided to provide more supports, including showing the chords. Unfortunately, just as we were planning this camp workshop, Houston was hit hard by Hurricane Beryl, with electrical power for much of the city knocked out for days. The camp was postponed. We hope Vel and the kids are safe and look forward to composing with them in the near future.
Here’s the full video of our Second Sunday session:
Does your robot have a name? What is its personality?
What journey has your robot been on? Where is it going?
These were some of the questions we asked the elementary and middle schoolers participating in a Junior Botball robotics camp this summer. The campers were surprised by our questions. They had been so intent all week on getting gears to mesh properly and software commands debugged, that they hadn’t thought about naming their robots at all. But the metal, plastic and rubber contraptions were soon given monikers and endowed with personalities that “keep going” and “want to get the job done.”
Warming up to the idea of creating music to tell their robots’ stories, the campers were soon working on percussion riffs. They explored the different sounds made by the Rhythm Window. We talked about how the beat establishes a personality–steady as clockwork or cautious and exploratory. If fast, the tempo conveys urgency. If slow, the mood might feel deliberate or even dangerous.
When they were satisfied with their beats, the campers tackled the next layer, melody. One camper had designed a dancing robot that cycled between twirling and moving back and forth. While the movements were repetitive, the music was anything but. The beat was spiky and the tune careened chaotically, triggering much joyful head bopping by the composer.
Once melody-making was well under way, we introduced the Sketch Window and discussed how the campers could assemble their melodies and rhythmic motifs into a larger story–much the way they had taken a pile of loose parts and snapped them together to construct their robots. Each robot was programmed to go through specified movements. The more advanced robots navigated through a maze, picking up balls, blocks, and “moon rocks” along the way and delivering them to the moon lander. The campers needed to think about their robots’ stories. How does it start? What happens in the middle? Are there moments of tension, for example when a robot is trying to carry out a tricky task? How does it end? In triumph or disappointment?
For the final layer, we introduced the harmony settings and Harmony Line, and encouraged the campers to try listening to their pieces in the None, General, and Classical harmony modes. Did they like one more than another? Soon the campers were oohing and exclaiming, visibly excited to realize Hyperscore had more powers for them to explore.
By the end of our three-hour workshop, each camper had completed an original composition for their robot. The final assignment was to edit videos of their robots and layer in the audio soundtrack, which they downloaded from Hyperscore as MP3 files. We look forward to seeing the videos soon on YouTube!
Recipe for success
The camp ran smoothly because the campers’ Hyperscore accounts had been set up in advance. We had also trained a group of high-school student mentors in Hyperscore ahead of time. The camp director had set up the campers’ daily routines in a way that fit their ebbing and flowing levels of energy and focus. The campers themselves had some experience with computers and algorithmic thinking, so it was easy for them to learn the interface and grasp the basic ideas behind motific composing.
What Hyperscore added to the robotics camp was a way for the campers and mentors — a dozen high-energy elementary, middle and high school kids — an opportunity to reflect on and express the emotions and ideas that were until then an undiscussed, unexplored dimension to their experience. They were all eager to participate and quickly became focused and engrossed in the composing activity.
We hope that our workshop awakened the campers to new facets of their own creative potential. One camper in particular made an impression on us. When he was working on his rhythm motifs, he kept frowning and shaking his head. It was the start of something but he wasn’t satisfied. He continued to work with focus and intention and composed a piece that had a ear-worm of a theme and an impressive build that effectively captured the robot’s drama. A composer is born!
We are grateful to camp director Elaine Griggs and the Junior BotBall Summer Camp through CS4Youth in Pembroke, MA. Thank you for welcoming us and giving us this wonderful opportunity to work with you.
