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Reimagining Music With a Little Help From New Friends!

Red banner with the Reimagining Music logo on the right side with text to the left of it. Text reads "Turning Music On its Head: Join our team as we have conversations with educators and creatives about how Hyperscore invigorates the music education and composition landscape. 7:30 pm ET first Tuesday of each month"

The New Harmony Line team was discussing our Office Hours events this past week.  We came to the conclusion that what we are sharing with the world through Office Hours is actually a PODCAST that highlights the fabulous people we are meeting as we grow and engage with the world.  As a result, please see our wonderful new podcast logo and description above. We are thankful that we’ve met and worked with so many insightful people who reimagine music as we do!

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Lisa and Peter

Lisa Pierce-Goldstein attended our first teacher training in the fall of 2021.  As a speech pathologist and musician, she created yearly operas with her students with autism.  She saw great potential in the graphic interface of Hyperscore for composing with students with special needs. Additionally, Lisa was a great contributor to our early Second Saturday composition workshops. Also in 2021, University of Iowa Music Therapy undergrad Peter Esarey designed and completed the data analysis of our first informal study with 3rd graders using Hyperscore. This was also our first opportunity to use Hyperscore with students with varied learning styles. We had such positive results on student’s rating of their happiness level before and after using the program. It will be exciting to see where Patrick’s graduate work leads him going forward. Maybe another study in his future?!

Jonathan and Vel

The 2022 Texas Music Educators Association Conference brought us two excellent connections. The first was father of 5, and the world’s happiest music teacher and church deacon, Jonathan Ochoa.  We also met singer, producer, composer, arranger and world-renowned Hammond Organ specialist, Vel Lewis. Their work with underserved children is inspirational! Vel invited us to do Zoom workshops with Vel’s summer music camp in 2022 and 2023. We’re planning F2F Summer Music Camp 2024! Vel will be our podcast guest in May 2024. Both Jonathan and Vel believe, and live the idea, that every child should experience the joy of music in their lives!

Odysseas and Frederico

We found our first international connections, Odysseas Sagredos and Frederico Ferronha in 2022.  Odysseas ran across Hyperscore on the internet and used it to teach his elementary students to lay a bass line, add chords, percussion and melody to create remixes and original pieces.  He continues to be so excited that he has met with the Ministry of Education about making Hyperscore part of the Greek curriculum!  Frederico also found us on the internet and decided to hold a composition contest, with his students choosing the winners.  We were able to send gift cards for the awards ceremony and Zoom in to meet the winners, their friends, Frederico and his colleagues. Truly an example of the universal language of music!  

David and Sam

In winter of 2022 we met David Casali and Sam Reti at the National Association for Music Education conference.  As part of his PhD in music education at Amherst, he had been working on having students write music for Scratch video games.  David’s insights inspired us to come up with our Hyperscore Challenge. He has shared his interest in Hyperscore at presentations on his work. He wrote an article for EdSurge about helping students to find their creativity through composition tools like Hyperscore. Sam has a website he created to provide music lessons for students during COVID.  His site has continued to be a successful way for students to access music learning from anywhere. We hope to have Hyperscore be the composition component of their learning!

Casey

This past year, we met Casey Byrd who was starting his 24th year as a music teacher for students who have physical disabilities and communication challenges. He had been teaching with Hyperscore for 23 YEARS!  He shared so many ideas on how to break down all barriers that keep students from creating music. In collaboration with the art teacher, classroom teacher and specialists, Casey’s team has created a highly innovative way to write music with Hyperscore. This music is the culmination to a colorful mural they created in art class. Every teacher who works with students who face challenges fully expressing themselves in the music room would benefit from the ideas in his Office Hours recording!

Ben

We met Ben Mirin in 2023 when someone asked us if we had an instrument set featuring bird calls.  We were referred to Ben after we found the Bird Song Hero game from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  Ben is known as the “Wildlife DJ”. He travels the world recording animal sounds and sampling their voices to create music that inspires conservation. We talked with Ben about how he incorporates recordings of animal voices into music to connect young people to their natural world, endangered species, and habitat conservation. He recently had the opportunity to speak about his work at the United Nations. We hope to someday incorporate birdsong and other animal sounds into Hyperscore compositions!

Maude and Kevin

Teachers Maude Hickey and Kevin Coyne were wonderful to talk to because of their experience in the music classroom.  Kevin was a Hyperscore pioneer who used the software in the mid-2000’s with his middle school students in Waltham, Massachusetts. Learn how he turned their work into pieces that were performed at the school’s year-end concert. Maude Hickey PhD, is the author of “Music Outside the Lines: Ideas for Composing in K-12 Music Classrooms.” She recently retired from Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL, where she worked in the area of music education. Her research (and passion) focuses on creative thinking for children.  She has developed curricula and worked with teachers and students of all grade levels to advocate for more composition and improvisation in schools. Listen to her enthusiastic video, such a great motivation to try out her wonderful ideas!

Polina, Terrence, James, Vel, Bobby…YOU?

We have a wonderful schedule of musical guests to come whom we’ve met in our adventures this past year. Stay tuned for blog posts and office hour recordings, or should I say PODCAST recordings, to come!

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Classroom composition: Hyperscore in large group settings

A screenshot of the Hyperscore workspace with six melody windows, two percussion windows, and one sketch window.
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!

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How to engineer a song

A painted portrait of Lady Augusta Ada Byron King, known as the Countess of Lovelace.

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.

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A Hyperscore jam with Orff instruments

by June Kinoshita, Executive Director, New Harmony Line

We’re constantly discovering new and wonderful ways to play with Hyperscore. Recently, Peter Torpey and I were invited to give a series of talks to music education masters students at the Longy School in Cambridge, MA. Their instructor, Garo Saraydarian, mentioned the students were in the middle of unit about Orff instruments. We had not thought about integrating Hyperscore compositions with Orff or any other type of acoustic instruments so we arrived in class without a plan.

We showed the basics of Hyperscore composition to the class of around a dozen students from diverse parts of the world and then turned them loose to compose. They worked in clusters of two to four students for about a half hour. Because all of them were already experienced in instrumental performance and theory, they could dive right in, although none of them had composed collaboratively before.

When the time was up, Garo asked each group to share their composition. And here’s when he made a simple but brilliant suggestion. After sharing the composition, they were asked to use Orff instruments to improvise an accompaniment to the Hyperscore piece.

The effect was utterly charming! The digital sound of Hyperscore set a foundation to which the students added a variety of expressive rattles, buzzes, and melodious metallophone sonorities. It was all so playful and everyone was pleased with the outcome. It was such a simple idea – any music teacher could replicate it–and yet captured the essence of music-making, with delightful results. Watch:

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Meet the “wildlife DJ”

Chatting with Ben Mirin was one of those unforgettable meeting-of-minds moments. Ben has recorded a Noah’s ark of animal sounds in the wild and then remixes this non-human chorus with his own beat boxing. It’s entertaining, but it’s more than that. Ben is on a mission to use music to make people care deeply about our natural world–protecting endangered species and restoring habitats.

This resonated with us. One of the core ideas we emphasize in our work is “active listening” — opening up your ears to hear the world around you fully. We want you to become attuned to the wealth of information that sounds carry to our brains but also to become aware of the feelings these sounds stir in us.

In our 45-minute conversation, we cover some of the diversity of Ben’s output. He shares video from Indonesia of the amazing vocal prowess of male birds of paradise. We get to enjoy a video of Ben’s beatboxing video from the National Arts Center of Canada’s Great Orchestra Field trip, featuring sounds from the rainforests of Kalimantan. He walks us through “BeastBox,” a game he created with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where you too can be a wildlife DJ. (Visit Ben’s website and click on the BeastBox link.)

We talk about his journey using music technology to create his work. I ask about an idea to create a Hyperscore instrument set using bird songs with varied pitches and timbres and Ben launches into a discussion of the “acoustic niche hypothesis.”

Now working on his PhD at Cornell, Ben shares stories about his field research in Java, where there is a booming trade in songbirds. The local people prize their feathered divas, training and entering them in American Idol-style contests complete with judges, cheering spectators, and prize money that could support a family for ten years. It’s a big business that brings jobs and money into the local economy, and people are passionate about their birds, but it’s also having a devastating impact on wild bird populations. “We all love birds,” he says. He wants to build on the shared love of these wonderous creatures to “plant the seeds of conservation.”

Click on the image below to watch.

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Hyperscore music curriculum now on MusicFirst

A banner showing Hyperscore's logo alongside MusicFirst's logo, with a backdrop of a person's hand using Hyperscore on a tablet.

We are pleased to announce that in collaboration with our friends at MusicFirst, our Director of Education Cece Roudabush has designed and published a curriculum for teaching music concepts and composition in Hyperscore. There are three curricula available for varying levels of experience, appropriate for 4th graders and up.

This curriculum is available in the MusicFirst Classroom resources for teachers. If you are a teacher and already have a MusicFirst Classroom account, you can log in at the designated link for your organization. If you do not yet have a MusicFirst Classroom account, your organization or school must first register with MusicFirst. Then, your administrator will be able to send you an invitation code to register for an account.

Once you are signed in to MusicFirst Classroom, you will be able to access the “Composing Music with Hyperscore” curriculum module via your dashboard:

  • From your dashboard, select the “Content” drop-down menu from the top menu bar, then click on “MusicFirst Library”:
  • Next, select the “General Music” category:
  • You will see a wide variety of courses and curricula that you can browse through. To find the Hyperscore curricula, you can filter by the “hyperscore” keyword in the search bar. You’ll see three curricula that are separated by students’ experience with music into “intro”, “intermediate”, and “advanced”. The intro level may typically be more appropriate for 4th graders, while the intermediate level and advanced level may be more appropriate for 5th and 6th graders, respectively. The higher levels delve into more sophisticated musical form and software features, while the intro level uses simpler language. For all three levels, though, no prior training in musical theory is required. Select whichever level is appropriate for the students you are instructing!

Once you select the curriculum, you will see the lessons and tasks included. You can click into each lesson page to see a detailed lesson plan that utilizes elements of the Hyperscore interface to demonstrate and teach music theory and composition principles. There are also educator resources included where you can read about the pedagogical philosophies at the foundation of Hyperscore, and decide what approach best suits your classroom.

As part of using this curriculum you will sign up your classroom for Hyperscore through MusicFirst Classroom itself, and organize your lessons and grades there. If you are using a MusicFirst Classroom trial, you will automatically have access to a trial version of Hyperscore through MusicFirst. If you do not yet have a MusicFirst Classroom account and would like to sign up for Hyperscore through MusicFirst Classroom, you can fill out the request form here.

Hyperscore has the power to inspire and enable all students to make music and explore their own creativity. We hope the resources and lesson plans we have made available on MusicFirst serve you well as you support your students in their musical journeys. Happy composing!

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Hyperscore strikes a chord with Houston summer campers

In Houston, Texas, on the morning of July 18th, 13 young music students began their second day at the Faith-2-Form (F2F) Music Foundation Music Summer Camp intently focused on making music in a wide range variety of rhythms, melodies, and timbres. In this collaborative composition workshop, they were not playing physical instruments – their musical medium was Hyperscore.

The F2F Foundation, founded by esteemed musician, composer, and recording artist Vel Lewis, is a nonprofit based out of Houston that aims to give all children, particularly youth who have been disadvantaged and marginalized, the tools to enrich their lives with music and to allow them to share their gifts with the world.

An exciting way that this mission is carried out is through the F2F Music Summer Camp, where participants – music students in Fort Bend County – are immersed in two weeks of STEAM workshops and classes led by experts in music performance, technology, software, production, business, psychology, and more.

Given our mission to enable children everywhere to discover and express their creativity through fun and accessible music composition, we are thrilled to collaborate with an organization engaged in such essential work of bringing youth and music together. After New Harmony Line Director of Education Cece Roudabush led an online composition workshop with Hyperscore at last year’s inaugural camp, we were honored to be invited back to lead a more in-depth workshop this year.

Vel, Cece, and our Chief Technology Officer, Peter, joined the 13 students on the morning of the 18th to facilitate the workshop. We began with a group composition exercise to introduce the participants to the basics of Hyperscore. One by one, Cece called on each student in the room to make a small musical decision about a shared Hyperscore piece – should a subsequent note in a given motive be higher, or lower? Longer, or shorter? Should the line move up, or down? Was the piece complete, or should we keep working on it? It was an exercise in showing how many micro-decisions come together to form a whole in the process of making music. Above all, it was an invitation to listen closely – and listen they did, with many students asking unprompted to hear a motive again before making their decision. The students acted together to compose a single piece, and it was wonderful to witness of the power of collaborative composition.

Once the students voted that the collaborative piece was finished, having established the principles of composing in Hyperscore, we moved toward individual composition, each student working on a separate device. The quiet focus in the room was palpable, and they took to using the software very quickly. A lovely dynamic emerged organically during this period of the workshop: the two students who had also participated in the Hyperscore workshop at last summer’s F2F music camp began to assist their peers who were newer to the program. Everyone was engaged and invested using the time available to create their own piece, and supported each other, too – after all, no composition is ever truly a solitary endeavor.

We always come out of workshops having learned from the participants about the various ways people learn music composition together, and more about how Hyperscore can facilitate this process. The speed and enthusiasm with which the campers took to the software was striking, and being able to cover both an egalitarian group composition process and individual composition sessions was a testament to the versatility and accessibility of Hyperscore to support different styles of composition and learning. No matter what level of expertise with the program the campers had coming in, they all came out having focused their creativity and imagination through Hyperscore.

Though the workshop had to come to a close, all students left with a demo version of Hyperscore so they could continue their experimentation and composition at home. We are immensely grateful to Vel and the Faith 2 Form Music Foundation for welcoming us back for the second year of the F2F Music Summer Camp, as well as to all the young composers who made music with Hyperscore!

Special thanks as well to the Harris County Public library for lending us tablet devices for each camper.

For more information on the F2F Music Foundation, visit their website here and get involved with supporting their important work. If you are new to Hyperscore and want to join in on sparking your own musical imagination, set up an account today.

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The Melt: Composing a song from an audio prompt

This photo captures the shades of blue and white present in a glacier that is now in water.
Melting Glacier

This month’s Second Saturdays Hyperscore composition workshop started with a sound:

Striking and familiar yet uncanny, this sound, which we encountered in this 2020 article from The Guardian, is that of Antarctic icebergs melting. The sound of rushing water is punctuated by an eerie and percussive whooshing and popping sound, which, as the article explains, is the sound of primordial air breaking out of millennia-old bubbles, held no longer by the ancient, now melting, ice.

We listened to this in the context of taking inspiration from clips of sound from the world for musical composition. How might we translate the feelings that came up, and the rhythms of the sound of the melt itself, into music? We set out to find one answer to this question during the workshop.

We began by naming the feelings and atmospheres that were evoked for each of us when we listened to the sound of the iceberg. Themes arose as we spoke of familiarity, awe, uneasiness, uncanniness, and surprise. What sounded like rushing water in the clip was a familiar, even comforting sound, but the interruption of the strange popping sound gave an edge to this feeling. The additional context that knowledge of climate change gave to the sound – the melt reaching farther into the ice, and getting louder, every year – added a somber, even grim, undercurrent. We wanted to approach composition both mirroring what we were literally hearing (a constant, smoother sound punctuated by sudden and unexpected pops) and the emotional reactions that this sound and its context created in us.

Moving into Hyperscore, we decided to start with some melody windows that could serve as an ambient, slow backdrop to the piece, using notes with long durations and in a low register, using a timpani and strings for our instrumentation.

We then created some strokes to correspond to these motifs in the Sketch window. The result was melodically tense and rather menacing.

We had our “consistent” sound which we then wanted to break up with unexpected interruptions and percussive splashes. To add a rhythmic yet unpredictable element we composed two faster-moving melodic motifs on pizzicato strings – one with a measure broken up into 3 notes of equal value (in other words, a half-note triplet), and one with a measure broken up into 4 notes of equal value (in other words, quarter notes).

When played together and layered into the Sketch window, they created a kind of rhythmic dissonance and a sense of driving momentum that broke above the surface of the steady and slow sounds we started with. We decided to emphasize this sudden and inconsistent effect to introduce these new sounds in the Sketch window (represented by the light and dark green strokes) as fragments that would pop in and out before returning in earnest and persisting for what would become the climactic moment of the composition:

To add even more emphasis to this climactic section and create a mood of mounting urgency, we created another 3-against-4 rhythmic figure on woodblock in two Percussion windows and added this in the Sketch window as well:

The intensity of the climactic section increased with the addition of the orange and purple percussion motives.

We liked it but found that we were deviating some from the unpredictable sense that we got from the popping in the initial iceberg sound clip. To reintroduce that surprise, we created a version of the green motifs that was a bit more sparse, while still maintaining the 3-against-4 feel, and applied this to the green strokes only in the latter half of our piece.

We decided to tweak the percussion windows as well, making the note attacks much more rapid and inconsistent and adding in some triangle hits:

We continued on with this process of listening to our composition, reacting to what we were hearing, then making changes and additions according to our reactions. Through this process in the course of the rest of the hour-long workshop, we added a mournful, soft ambient drone of low flute and organ, and a jerking, syncopated melody played on pizzicato strings.

We arranged all of the building blocks we had created into a form that ebbed and flowed between themes of rattling urgency and dirge-like somberness. Without planning to, we ended up creating a rather atonal and dissonant piece that nonetheless carried in its undercurrent a driving movement that enthralled us when we listened to the final product. We ended by titling it, appropriately, “The Melt”.

Listen to the final, 80-second-long composition below, along with a recording of the full workshop including our brainstorming, composing and editing process.

Iceberg image courtesy of Angie Corbett-Kuiper via Unsplash

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From silence to song: writing music from curiosity alone

For the May edition of our Second Saturdays composition workshop, we chose not to write from a prompt. It can often feel risky or intimidating to face the prospect of creating “something from nothing” – where to begin? It was precisely for this reason that we wanted to experiment with this process. Hyperscore shines when composers lead with an open mind, and can help to lower the barriers of “the blank page”. Composers of all experience can learn to trust their musical intuition with the tools of Hyperscore.

Using Hyperscore, we simply began by choosing an instrument set -folk band – and putting down some notes into a percussion window. We added one percussion instrument at a time, reacting to what we were hearing when we played it back. What does this instrument sound like? Do we want fast or slow notes, on the beat or off the beat? Most importantly, how does it feel to listen to it, and do we want it to feel different? We ended up with a steady, dense rhythm that was heavy on syncopation and evoked a slow, erratic march:

Next, we moved on to add some melodies. We agreed to start by creating a bass line riff that could repeat throughout the piece, forming a solid, catchy underpinning. Going through several iterations and asking each other what we heard and what we imagined was essential for the composition process. The bass developed into a two-instrument section, with one bouncy, quick motif complementing a swaying legato figure. After listening to them all together in a Sketch window, we made some edits to the melody windows so they would stand out and complement each other better and landed on our final versions:

Adding all three motives into the Sketch window, we decided to use the Classical harmonic mode and to experiment with creating regions of tension and release with the Harmony Line. Fine tuning these sections meant plenty of listening back, making slight changes, and then listening again.

We had rhythm, a bass line and a basic harmonic structure – now a piece was really starting to develop! It was time to bring in more melody. We created two variants on one melodic theme – a lightweight twinkling dance on a music box, and a half-speed repetition of the same theme, lower and more dramatic, on guitar:

We also decided to add an additional, more stripped down version of our main rhythm theme to add some variety and interest throughout the composition.

Weaving together all the elements in the Sketch window, making edits and additions following our intuitions and desires, we landed with a piece that had an uneven yet regimented feel. For us it was evocative of animated clocks ticking in and out of time. It reminded one of our participants of the classic tune “My Grandfather’s Clock”, after which we named the composition.

Listen to the final composition below, and watch the recording of the the full workshop, including our process of brainstorming and editing:

Photo of clocks courtesy of Andrew Seaman via Unsplash

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Removing barriers to creativity with Hyperscore

Getting students invested and excited about music can be one of the most challenging aspects of teaching the subject, as many educators know all too well. Students may come to conclusions early that music just isn’t for them, that they’ll never understand, or decide that they don’t want to learn all the complicated lingo and notation just to be able to express themselves. Hyperscore was built with this in mind, designed to open up surprising new avenues for learners and slip between the gaps in the barriers that block students from being able to access their musical curiosity and wonder. In a recent EdSurge feature article, music educator extraordinaire and Hyperscore enthusiast David Casali shares his personal experience of how Hyperscore inspired his classroom to express their creative talents for music in previously unimagined ways.

Musical voices blossom

Casali came across Hyperscore at the height of the pandemic, at a time when remote classes made it even more difficult to connect with students. Facing disengagement from students and wanting to find ways to bring the most reticent voices in the classroom into the fold, Casali decided to experiment. Inspired by his students’ love of playing games, he had the idea to integrate Hyperscore into Scratch, the popular program used by millions of children to program computer games, and ask his students to compose music to add to Scratch games. The experiment was a resounding success, and Casali saw the barriers falling between students and their previously out-of-reach musical inspiration. One student who was had been convinced that she had no musical talent submitted an assignment using Hyperscore and Scratch that spoke to quite the contrary! Throughout the classroom, students showed off their creative voices for music – some for the first time in their lives.

Making music education work for students

This experiment in Hyperscore and Scratch was a crucial step for Casali in rethinking how a music classroom could be relevant and accessible to students, and how to remove artificial barriers to creativity. With these groundbreaking tools, students do not have to be restricted by pre-existing ability to play an instrument or decipher the nuances of traditional musical notation. When these barriers are lifted, students can express musically what is already in their hearts and minds. They can take a leading role in their musical education rather than only following rigid and inflexible curricula. When teachers are willing to listen to the needs of their students and hear what excites them, tools like Hyperscore are there to support them in uplifting and amplifying their students’ voices.