Tag: MIT Media Lab

“Some [students] would share that they did not think their creations had a “place”…this gave me the opportunity to talk with them about what I could hear that they could not hear and perhaps why I was hearing it.” – Rebecca Ogilvie, Iowa City Elementary Music Teacher

For the next 2 weeks, I will be sharing the work of 5th and 6th grade students in Becky Ogilvie’s class. I share “Ghost Fog” first for two reasons: 1) it showcases the “settings” that CTO Peter Torpey created so that students had choice over their workspace visual ; and 2) this is the piece that gave Becky the opportunity to have a discussion with her student who felt their music “had no place”.

Becky saves the day

In one of those wonderful ‘teachable moments’, Becky shared with her unsatisfied student that listening to their piece made her think of black and white scary movies with ‘something’ lurking around the corner. Thankfully, this inspired the student to use a different visual setting called “High Contrast” which changed the workspace to black, the sketch windows to white and the notes to neon colors. The name “Ghost Fog” came from the student thinking of scary movies and the visual that the setting created.

The darker settings remind me of my days in the classroom when students wanted to turn Google Doc paper black and write with white letters! To each his own–with 18 choices in Hyperscore! Finally, let’s enjoy “Ghost Fog” as you picture yourself in the theatre seat with your popcorn almost spilling from the fear of what’s to come…

Here are picture examples of the other settings and the 6 NEW ones just uploaded:

“High Contrast” setting

“Classic” setting

“System Preference” setting

“Dark” setting

“Sunlight”

“Black Light”

“Minimalist”

“Chalkboard”

“Springtime”

“Nighttime”

“LCD Screen”

New settings and how to access:

The are 7 are BRAND NEW settings including the visual “Cinema” seen at the top of the article. To update your version to include these new settings and some bug fixes, use the buttons in the upper right corner (“i”–choose “update now” then refresh window) and then settings (gear) to change the visual workspace to ANY of the 19 choices.

“Carnival”

“Serene”

“Cotton Candy”

“Magazine”

“Comic”

“Toy Symphony”

Enjoy this musical gift from Becky’s classroom and the technology updates from Peter Torpey!

Becky Ogilvie set a great example for her students by composing right alongside them as they explored Hyperscore. We will be sharing the student’s work with Parent/Guardian permission. First, let’s enjoy Becky’s offering. She called it “Teacher Model”. We’ll call it “Joy”!

Becky Ogilvie, an Iowa City Schools elementary music teacher, gave us the best Christmas and New Year’s gift–a joy-filled video of her talking about her experience of sharing Hyperscore with her in-person and online 5th and 6th grade students! Four of her students chose to share their pieces with Parent/Guardian permission and we will be debuting these pieces over the next couple of weeks. A big THANK YOU to Becky for being a Beta pilot tester, to all of her students for completing the pilot and for those students who were willing to share their work!

Take a peek “behind the curtain” at the history of Hyperscore by visiting the Resources page on our website under “Hyperscore: In-depth“. With New Harmony Line’s upcoming launch of Hyperscore as a web-based, user-friendly composition tool, we think it is important to acknowledge the students who wrote the program, Morwaread “Mary” Farbood and Egon Pasztor, who were in the Opera of the Future Group at M.I.T. Media Lab, and Kevin Jennings, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin. Please enjoy a look back at 2004 when the original Hyperscore creators were profiled in this IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications article.

Here they write: “The fundamental idea of Hyperscore is that anyone can perform two key creative activities without musical training: compose short melodies and describe the large-scale shape of a piece. Providing graphical means to engage in these two activities forms the basis for Hyperscore’s functionality.” This powerful insight by the original creators explains why Hyperscore has enduring appeal and remains unique to this day among music technologies for education.

Currently, Egon is Founding Engineer of Relyance AI. Mary is an Associate Professor and Associate Director of Music Technology at NYU. Kevin is Global Director Talent Development at Study Group, an international education provider.

IEEE is the not-for-profit Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers with the mission of “advancing technology for humanity”.

New Harmony Line announces that Group 3 has started the Beta test model of Hyperscore. Our group includes teachers in Iowa, Canada and Portugal. Our first high school Adaptive Music class is learning to use Hyperscore. I am thrilled to visit them this afternoon as I was their teacher last year before I retired!

Hyperscore Beta testing will continue into the winter and spring. Please let me know if you have any interest in a free subscription with materials and support! Contact me as Director of Education at: cecilia.roudabush@newharmonyline.org.

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. 

What an incredible adventure Kickstarter gave the New Harmony Line team and board these past few weeks! First, we were chosen as a #ProjectWeLoveKickstarter for the program’s “brilliant creativity”. We received daily emails on our goal progress, a big motivator. Finally, to read the email announcing that we had met AND exceeded our goal was the ultimate thrill! Thank you to our backers, those who shared the project with friends and family and those who took the time to watch the videos or check out our sites. We hope we’ll be making music with YOU!!

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.