Image credit: The water cycle. Image by Saskia Nowicki, Nancy Gladstone, Jacob Katuva, Heloise Greeff, Achut Manandhar, Geofrey Wekesa and Geofrey Mwania. Creative Commons license 4.0
Fifth-grade teacher Elizabeth Peterson, founder of The Inspired Classroom, incorporates the arts into her teaching. But she had never had her students compose music, so she joined our Second Sunday workshop this November to try out an idea. Her class was studying earth systems, and she wanted to use the water cycle as a prompt for composing music.
We started by looking at a diagram of the water cycle, similar to the one above. We discussed the many ways water moves through the cycle and landed on precipitation – hail, specifically – as an appealing subject. We created a “hail melody” and chose an instrument, the harp, that made hail-like sounds. We enhanced the hail melody with a percussion pattern. We also made a “water melody” to signify the body of water where the melted ice would eventually end up.
We layered and built up the hail melody to suggest an intensifying hail storm. The storm subsides and the ice melts into rivulets (cue the “water melody”).
After a few listens, we decided the piece could use a bit of drama: a few claps of thunder! This was accomplished by a timpani drum, cranked up to maximum volume.
Take a listen. You can hear the entire discussion and composing process by going back to the beginning of the video.
Hyperscore lends itself beautifully to STEAM education and beyond because any teacher can integrate music into just about any subject – without needing specialized training in music education. Composing music gives students a powerful tool to express concepts, stories and feelings about what they are learning. Here are some examples from our Second Sunday workshops, all pieces composed collaboratively in one hour.
Visual art: Taking a line of music for a walk
Inspired by this Paul Klee painting and his notion that a drawing is “taking a line for a walk,” we composed a six-note motif, took it “for a walk” going down a hill followed by a second strand going up. We then came up with percussion beats to inject energy and a jazzy vibe to the tune.
Storytelling: Cappy’s Day
Invent characters for a story: what are their personalities? Where do they live? What’s the action? How does the story unfold? In this video, we introduce musical motifs for each character in this story: A jolly capybara, his happy music and footsteps, the sparkly river and a crocodile! These elements are combined to tell Cappy’s story. Listen to see if you can figure out what happens.
Harmonizing a Haiku
Set a haiku to music. We chose one by the great master, Basho:
In the autumn night Breaking into the silence Voices murmuring
Speak the lines out loud to explore the natural tonalities and rhythms of language. See what happens when the lines are repeated and overlapped. Choose instruments that express the mood and content of the poem.
A canticle for climate change: The Melt
We came across an article about recording the sound of an ancient glacier melting. You can hear dripping water and an occasional pop as primordial air bubbles are released – the sound of climate change. Can we capture this sound with music? Is it repetitive like a clock or more irregular? What instruments work best? What feelings does the sound arouse?
Social emotional skills: The Hero in You
Inspired by Harmony Hare, a picture book for young children by Tammy Vallieres. We meet little hare’s three personas: victim, villain and hero. The story encourages children to recognize these inner states. Each inspired a theme (in blue, red and yellow), and the composition brings them into relationships with one another.
History and social studies: My grandfather’s clock
An older man recalls a favorite song from his childhood in India. He hums a few bars, which we reproduced in Hyperscore. It is reminiscent of the grandfather’s clock song, which prompts the use of wooden percussion sounds. This was a delightful exercise in bringing the past to life through music.
Ecology and nature: Dance of the fireflies
An image of fireflies twinkling in the night inspired this composition. The “firefly melody” portrays the on-off flashing of lights. The jaunty melody captures the festive mood. It’s is rhythmic but irregular because this is life, not a machine. The same theme is copied and varied slightly. Other sounds portray the leaves rustling in the wind.
Technology & history: The countess of Lovelace
Ada Lovelace invented computer programming for the world’s first computer, the Analytical Machine of Charles Babbage. A video of a modern replica of the Analytical Engine inspired a young Hyperscore composer to create a piece that portrayed the clatter of the moving parts against a melodic theme reminiscent of English popular music of the time.
Math: Fraction attraction
A simple example using the length of musical notes to represent fractions. Each motif represents a specific note length: whole, half, quarter, eighths, etc. Students can see how many of each fractional note take the same amount of time as a longer note. Hyperscore can support thirds, fifths – any type of fraction!
We were recently invited to participate in a STEM festival at the UP Academy, a public charter school in Dorchester, Massachusetts. We were honored and excited to participate, but not without a frisson of trepidation. The school strongly emphasizes STEM subjects and has an excellent reputation for teacher quality and engagement by the community of predominantly African American and Hispanic families. The program directors were excited to have us introduce music composition with Hyperscore technology. Every student had a Chromebook, wifi, and email.
So why our trepidation? These were middle school students. Thirty of them, a mix of boys and girls. In some ways, they are our ideal audience. They are ready for the music concepts and technology we’d be introducing. But this is also the peak age for self-consciousness and peer judgement. Would they be willing to set aside any discomfort to explore their musical imaginations? Would they be able to carry on independently and in small groups for the 75 minutes of the workshop without things devolving into chaos?
To our relief, the students got right down to work. Fingers tapped away at the touchscreens, shaping melodies and percussion patterns. Faces erupted in smiles (or frowns) as the budding composers reacted to the sounds they were making. We soon discovered that many had missed the point of the Sketch Window so we coached them individually, explaining how it worked. Note to ourselves: When teaching Hyperscore, it would be better to introduce each type of window separately, have students practice with percussion, then with melody, before introducing how to combine these musical building blocks in a Sketch Window. It is conceptually so different from how the Melody and Rhythm Windows work and is too much to get across in a single “overview” talk.
Finally, we tried to coax the students to share their work. That was a bridge too far! Their self-consciousness took over. Some of the kids didn’t mind letting us listen over headphones, and that was enough. We wrapped up the day feeling we had given the students a tantalizing glimpse of what Hyperscore could enable them to do. It was a solid beginning, and we hope to build on this relationship.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2023-2024 Hyperscore Challenge! We loved hearing the pieces you created to accompany the video prompts.
We’ve compiled this gallery of the pieces you offered to share for everyone to enjoy! Click each thumbnail to listen to a video of the piece or click the piece title to open it in Hyperscore.
We at New Harmony Line are proud to announce that Cecilia Roudabush, our Director of Education, has been named by The Gazette as one of its 2024 HER Women of Achievement. We think she’s very special, and we’re glad to see others also recognize her extraordinary qualities. Following is an appreciation written by her daughter, Haley Roudabush.
Cecilia (Cece) Roudabush grew up in Creston, Iowa. She moved to Iowa City, earning her BA in Music Education & Therapy as well as her Masters in Music Therapy with a focus in Behavior Disorders. Cecilia delighted in working with students from grades K-12 for 32 years teaching general and adaptive music, rock band, success center and personal development.
After retiring from full-time teaching in 2021, Cecilia has continued providing music composition opportunities to children all over the world through her work as the Director of Education for New Harmony Line.
Since childhood, she has dedicated herself to many service projects in her community and church, including the free lunch program, working with Habitat for Humanity, and leading projects at St. Thomas More such as “Blanket Them With Love” for victims of the derecho and Afghani refugees in Cedar Rapids.
Cecilia believes her greatest accomplishment in life has been bringing her two children into the world. Now adults, they have both followed in her footsteps and begun careers of service within their communities. If she has free time, you can be certain Cecilia is using it to help those around her.
Cecilia thanks her friends, family and colleagues for their love, and this nomination for the HER Achievement Award.
By June Kinoshita, Executive Director, New Harmony Line
It seems like every education and arts conference this year is talking about Artificial Intelligence. Can generative AI be creative? Will it enhance or destroy creative industries, not to mention all kinds of jobs? One popular meme going around on social media says “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Amen to that.
In fact, Hyperscore is an example of a software that uses AI to do the more tedious chores, freeing people to explore the fun, creative, and essential parts of composing. Centering human expression and creativity in technology design is the core principle of Hyperscore’s inventors at the Opera of the Future Group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. We believe it is becoming ever more urgent to uphold these values as societal and economic pressures threaten to push AI in the opposite direction.
A deeper dive
One of Hyperscore’s advanced features is the “harmony line,” the dark gray line that is centered on the horizontal axis of the Sketch Window. This line can be manipulated to create regions of harmonic tension, release, and modulation. The Hyperscore composer can play with the harmony line and decide whether the results sound the way they want them to. A more advanced composer can do this more intentionally, and of course they can always specify the exact notes they want in the Melody Window. Hyperscore allows a user to be fully in control of every note, or to collaborate playfully with its algorithms to discover and shape the elements of their composition.
Hyperscore’s automated harmony algorithm was originally implemented using AI trained on classical music. You can read the technical details in this article (Farbood, M., Kaufman, H., Jennings., K. “Composing with Hyperscore: An Intuitive Interface for Visualizing Musical Structure” International Computer Music Conference, 2007.) To quote:
“In Hyperscore, users describe harmonic progressions by shaping the harmony line. It is parsed into sections which are then mapped to functional identifiers…which consist of four categories: Statement, Antecedent, Consequent, and Modulation. The harmony line, which runs through the center of each sketch window, can be modified by clicking and dragging. Colored bands appear to indicate the line’s parsing. Sections are classified as one of four visual types, each corresponding to a functional identifier:
• Statement – flat section, colored white. Musically defined as a statement or prolongation of the tonic.
• Antecedent – upward-sloping section, colored green. Musically defined as a combination of chords that need resolution (e.g. dominant chords or combinations of subdominant and dominant chords).
• Consequent – downward-sloping section, colored blue. Resolution of preceding Antecedent section. If not preceded by an Antecedent, then restates the tonic.
• Modulation – defined by a sharp pointed region or spike, colored yellow. Progression toward a new key.
After the line is parsed, chords are assigned to each section based on its functional identifier, how many beats it spans, and how textured or “bumpy” the section is. The instability of the chords assigned to a section is directly proportional to the amount of texture. The chords chosen are taken from a database that returns either single chords or small progressions based on the selection criteria. The database consists of chord progressions commonly found in Bach chorales.”
Explore Hyperscore
If you’re intrigued and want to play around with Hyperscore, you can sign up for a free version (with limited functionality) or a subscription version (starting at a very affordable $3.99 per month). You can also try out the full classroom version by signing up for the Hyperscore Challenge, which runs through June 21.
To help you get started, we have Quick Tips that walk you through all of the features of Hyperscore. We also invite you to attend our free Second Saturday Zoom workshop where you can participate in composing a new Hyperscore piece in real time.
Image credit: “Better Sharing With AI” by Creative Commons was generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt “A surrealist painting in the style of Salvador Dali of a robot giving a gift to a person playing a cello.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.
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.
The inspiration for our Second Saturday composition last month was this remarkable photograph of a nighttime forest illuminated by countless fireflies. We shared the image over Zoom and for two minutes we each wrote down words evoked by this vision.
To begin creating our composition, we began with a percussion window. Imagining all of those fireflies flashing their lamps in the dark, we created a rapid, scintillating beat, steady punctuated by small irregularities–the way we imagine Nature to be.
Next, we composed a jaunty “firefly theme song,” orchestrated for dulcimer. Peter suggested including an almost-identical melody as a second version of the theme. Again, the almost-but-not-quite-the-same quality of living beings.
We had our musical fireflies, but not the world they inhabit. To portray the beauty and mystery of the nocturnal forest, we composed a bass line of “forest music.”
A breeze blowing through the grove:
Add a sprinkling of pixie dust:
With the musical building blocks for our world in hand, we went to work, first establishing the mood of the forest at night, a place of mystery that erupts with rapturous swarming dance of fireflies. Things get a little wild!
Projectory members work together on an original composition.
By June Kinoshita, Executive Director
This past month, Tod Machover and I were invited to give a workshop to introduce Hyperscore and music composition at Projectory, in Seoul, Korea. Projectory is a center established by NC Cultural Foundation for the purpose of providing a space for children to give free play to their creativity without interference from adults. While South Korea’s public education system is regarded as among the best in the world, critics say it is too test-driven and brutally competitive. At Projectory, members are free to direct their own activities in any way they choose. They work with “crew members,” young adult mentors who are trained to support the children without prescribing what they should do.
In our workshop, Tod introduced the idea of composing as a form of personal expression and story-telling that could be about “anything you want.” Using a large projection screen, I then showed the basic features of Hyperscore.
The kids were then off to the races! They worked in groups of 2 or 3 brainstorming with paper and crayons to come up with topics ranging from baseball to fighting cats. They then shared laptops to compose their first-ever original tunes. We were all delighted by the results and later heard that the children are eager to keep composing. We’re excited to see if Hyperscore will take root and spread in Korea.
Have a joyful and musical New Year. We celebrate the universal spirit of music by sharing this exuberant rendition of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by a South African children’s marimba band. We love how these remarkable youths deliver this Western classic with virtuosity, musicality, and joy. They breathe new life into a piece that has been overplayed in formal concert halls and remind us of how much we all gain by sharing musical heritage across geographic, cultural, and generational lines. To more boundary breaking in 2023!
Marimba band of South African schoolchildren play exhilarating Vivaldi… 👏
