Getting children to compose music has always been seen as difficult, a skill reserved for those who have mastered theory and acquired sufficient instrumental skill. With Hyperscore, children can express their innate musicianship literally in minutes, regardless of their levels of prior music experience.
Hyperscore “inverts the pedagogy”
- Hyperscore puts imagination first, enabling teachers to act as guides and mentors for children as they engage in the process of discovery. Read our blog post about this approach.
- Even teachers who are not experts in composing will quickly find they can play a valuable role in helping students discover compositional processes and techniques.
- Hyperscore facilitates advanced conversations between the teacher and student about complex compositional concepts, months or years before they would normally be able to conceptualize these issues.
- Children studying various musical styles and techniques can easily put into practice ideas and concepts from other parts of the curriculum in a composing context.
- Music composed in Hyperscore can form the basis for small or large group performances.
Hyperscore Education Modules
Our Director of Education, Cecilia Roudabush, has created several Google Slides modules specifically geared towards educators teaching with Hyperscore. On this page, you will find all of these modules, which span various compositional topics.
The first module presents on all things rhythm. Teach how to make a percussion window, choose a workspace theme, understand the note grid, drop notes into the window, add more measures and experiment with note values:
The next module teaches how to navigate Hyperscore’s melody windows, experimenting and playing with pitch and note length.
If you’d like to teach the tools of the sketch window, here is a module that presents how to make a sketch window, change your strokes using the scissor tool, alignment, or color, add dots to play specific notes in the instrumentation of the corresponding window, change the harmony mode to different degrees, and flavor your harmony with tempo and dynamics:
Our final Slides module presents how to change tone colors, how to highlight and move your harmony in time and register, how to copy and paste your harmony, how to add Introductions, Bridges and Codas to your piece, and how to use the harmony line:
Educator Accounts: Hyperscore in Classrooms
In collaboration with MusicFirst, New Harmony Line has launched an Education version of Hyperscore. This enables you to coordinate a large number of composers, like groups of students in classrooms. Even better, for an entire organization – such as a school – one Hyperscore Education license is all that is needed. Here are some of the features of this version of Hyperscore, and how to get started:
Hyperscore users with Educator accounts are able to manage groups of composers and scores. These could represent classrooms, special events, and more. When users are added to a group, they gain access to all available compositional Hyperscore features. What’s more, individual users will still be able to access their own compositions even after a group is deleted. They can add these back into their own account to continue building on and inspiring future projects.
Each Education Hyperscore license has one account that serves as the Organization Administrator. This user has unique administrative abilities. For example, they can invite individuals to join the organization’s Hyperscore license as an Educator. The Administrator can also oversee the total amount of composers, educators, and scores included in the organization:
Even more resources for educators!
For further resources to support educators using Hyperscore, see the following pages:
- Check out the Hyperscore Quick Tips page for refreshers on how to use Hyperscore’s compositional settings
- Take a look at Hyperscore lesson plans informed by the National Core Arts Standards
- Explore New Harmony Line’s YouTube channel for easy access to Hyperscore history, tips, and dozens of sample compositions from all levels!
- Watch New Harmony Line’s Director of Education, Cece Roudabush, present composition guides for educators’ use at the 2022 New Jersey Music Educators Association conference.
- Need to raise funding for a Hyperscore license? Check out our DonorsChoose toolkit.