Earlier this month Evan Tobias posted about Noteflight, a new online flash-based notation application available at http://www.noteflight.com/. Over the past few weeks I have been exploring this software with college students in my Technology in Music Education course and with high school students enrolled in a beginning piano class at Lowell High School (LHS). Those of you who know me know how apprehensive I am when it comes to using notation software with students in general music or other technology classes in K-12 schools. Most of my concern centers around the common conflation of "notation software" with "composing software." All too often I see teachers using notation software as a technological endpoint rather than as a means to the musical end of live performance. However, Noteflight is not your ordinary notation software.
What interests me about Noteflight is not the notation component. Instead, it is in the social tools that surround the notation engine. When you sign up at Noteflight.com (currently free) you create personal profile, just like you would at a social networking site like Facebook, MySpace or custom sites created at Ning.com. Once signed in, you can create a new score, view existing scores, or scores created by other users.
Built in to the web application is the ability to share your scores with other users. These scores can be easily embedded just like a YouTube video in a class website. The embedded score can be played back by clicking on the play button and additional interactive functions are being planned which could be helpful in guided listening activities. Coming from a constructivist perspective, this functionality enables teachers to give students the opportunity to share their musical understanding in interactive ways within and beyond class time. For example, a band director could post a Noteflight score without added articulation. Students could then be assigned to add their own articulations to the score. During the next class, the students and director could choose a few scores to play through. This approach gives students the opportunity to make creative articulation decisions as composers, rather than traditionally learning it through listening and performing.
A variation on this assignment could be to post an audio file of a musical line performed with different articulations. Below the audio file, a director could post the notation for that performance, but again without articulation added. As an assessment, students could then open the score and add articulations that in their mind matched the recorded performance.
Right now, there are some limitations to accomplishing this, but I've been assured by Joe Berkovitz, CEO of Noteflight, that these functions are currently in development.
This screenshot shows the "version" function for Noteflight. As you work on a score in Noteflight, it periodically saves a snapshot of your piece and gives you access to it as a different "Version." If you open your score up to be added to by others, their versions show up in this box as well. At any point you can go back (revert) to a prior version. This is a cool function, not only because you can go back, but as a window into your students' compositional processes. Though not a full account of their process, these snapshots can provide an opportunity to have discussions with your students about the changes they made in their composition and are great starting points for assessment.
Here's a short piece composed by students of Tony Beatrice, UML graduate student in music education as part of an art-infused composing project:
Right now, the interactivity is limited to simple whole piece playback and playback within measures (click above the measure). Soon, functions will be added that will enable the composer to add additional interactivity through scripting. Very cool. :)
My students and Noteflight
My college students have been using Noteflight with beginning piano students at Lowell High School (LHS) for the past few weeks. Students in my class created incomplete duets to be co-composed and performed with their partner students at LHS. The music teacher at LHS has for the most part have been using Alfred's Adult Beginner Piano book to structure the curriculum. My college students wanted to add a composing/creativity aspect to the lessons. To do this, they created simple piano scores with either a chord progression in the bass clef or a melody in the treble clef (or some combination of the two) as a compositional frame to help scaffold the LHS students. Because the scores are online and viewable by the LHS students and my college students, both can practice alone and make edits to their duet scores. Tomorrow, they will meet again in person for a final run through and performance for the class. I'll post some of the pieces and performances here soon.
Because Noteflight is an online application, the potential for collaborative work and learning with other students is high. I'm in the middle of planning a distance composing project with another school later in the term through Noteflight. Facilitated by a custom Ning.com social network, students at LHS will notate compositions in Noteflight and share them with other students at a distance site. Ning will enable them to post their files and provide peer comment and critique. This use is inspired in part by the work at the Vermont MIDI Project, but instead centers on the students as providers of compositional critique and feedback, rather than professional composers.
I'm very excited to see how this technology develops. If you are interested in collaborative projects using Noteflight with your students, drop me an email.
Musicians often approach composing with music software in an additive way--starting by creating music one layer, voice, or note at a time. We might lay down a bass or drum track, then a melody or another instrument as we build our compositions. Most music software is designed to facilitate this approach. However, what might happen if we took advantage of the design of loop-based software programs like Super Duper Music Looper, Acid Music Studio, or GarageBand by allowing students to compose in a subtractive way, similar to that of sculptors who start with a piece of rock or wood, removing portions to reveal the finished work? What might a piece of music sound like if we borrowed the process that sculptors use and applied it to composing? To start the project, students viewed four Marshall Fredericks sculptures entitled Pony Express. These sculptures were created by sculpting a block of clay to reveal the images. A mold of the clay carvings was created which was then used to cast the final sculptures in bronze. The process that Marshall Fredericks used was a subtractive process--he removed portions of clay to reveal his final sculpture.
Drawing on the sculpting process, students used Acid Music Studio to create their own “sound mass” similar to a block of clay, wood, or stone. Students were asked to create an Acid file comprised of 10 to 15 layers of different sound loops that lasted for a total of two minutes. The result was a screen painted solid with a variety of different sound loops, creating a cacophonous “sound mass.”
After students had created their sound masses, they traded them with their classmates. The task for the classmates was to use a subtractive process of removing or altering portions of the sound mass (parallel to the sculpting process) to create a music composition. Students could not add anything to the sound masses, however, they could use the erase tool to make changes to the the texture and form of the compositions. Students also transform the musical layers through the use of filter, key change, and tempo tools to create their composition.
As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to better understand how my students think as composer-musicians. I often ask myself questions like:
What are their conceptions and misconceptions about music and musical process?
What are their challenges in the composing process?
What are their musical intentions?
I have found the following three techniques to provide many insights that have helped me be a better teacher and more importantly, my students to be better peer-teachers.
Composers' Commentaries When I watch a DVD, I have the option at the end of the movie (or even at the beginning) to watch the move with overdubbed commentaries by the director and often the actors who made the movie. These commentaries provide additional information and insight into the processes of creating the film. Because I wanted to learn more about what my students were thinking as they composed their pieces and what they thought was important to share with the listeners of their compositions, I ask my students to record an additional commentary track on each of their compositions.
When students are finished with their compositions, they save one version with the commentary, and another without it. Here is an example of a composition entitled Rock to the Beat by one of my 6th grade students, Jessica Walton:
What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition with recorded commentary?
Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing
When I first discovered the Wikipedia website, I was intrigued by its underlying concept - a website where anyone could easily contribute and collaborate to create an online encyclopedia. One of the first ideas I had a music teacher was to adapt this concept for use to support my students classroom composing experiences. Wouldn't it be cool to have my students create an online encyclopedia of composing that contained their suggestions for what made a good piece of music and their own successful strategies for composing and working with our composing tools?
After reading a great online article by writing researcher and educator Katie Wood Ray entitled Read Like a Teacher of Writing, I decided to have my students create composition logs of each etude and composition they created throughout our middle school general music classes. When students start a composition, they begin to fill out their composition log. They revisit this log again when they decide to either abandon or finish their compositions. Here's a link to the composition log we use:
One of the challenges for art educators is to know how a student visually experiences a work of art. What do they notice first? What are the students' visual pathways through the artwork? More broadly, how do they see the artwork?
Similar challenges exist for the music educator in knowing how students listen to music and what they perceive during that process.
In my classes I have used Frank Jonas' Geoscape 6 as a way to better understand how my students see a work of art. A common conception that my students often have is that a work of art is static in that it does not change over time, unlike music which is almost always in motion through time. One way to challenge this conception is to challenge students to compose a piece of music that expresses their visual pathway through a work of art.
I have had students compose to Geoscapes 6 with both acoustic and computer-based instruments. When I present the painting to the students, I often ask them?
What do you see?
What did you notice first? Second? Third?
How might you represent what you see through sound?
What does this artwork sound like to you?
Whether students work together in small groups with classroom instruments or work alone or in small groups with loop software, I have found my students' pathways through this artwork to be very different from each other. Some students see the background squares first, then additional layers of "chaos" on top. Some view it holistically noticing "chaos" first, then moving "downward" through the artwork to the order of the squares. Others focus on the shapes or colors and try to represent those aspects of the artwork through their music.
Perhaps the most interesting has been our class discussions when sharing our compositions. My students always came away with a better understanding that not everyone sees an artwork in the same way. Also, they come to better understand how an entire class of students can create totally different pieces of music from the same visual artwork and the different techniques composers can use to express through sound.
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