Making music with colors, lines and blobs
February 2nd, 2006 by etobias
The screenshot of the new software on a recent post at Create Digital Music looks somewhat similar to the Hyperscore software developed at MIT. Both seem like interesting types of software to use with younger students and both use some non-traditional ways of creating music. They both also remind me somewhat of software I used to use with fifth graders called Making Music and Making More Music that composer Morton Subotnick helped create.
Lately I have been using the piano roll function on various types of sequencing software, most recently FLstudio, with some great results with my fifth, sixth and seventh graders. It’s been very easy to discuss melody, contour, harmony and rhythm with the way the piano roll displays the music they are creating. It is fascinating to walk around and observe the way they create and manipulate their music. It might be interesting to compare the music they create using the piano roll on the software to the music they create using an actual keyboard.
[…] I have written before about the use of iconic notation in composing with computer software. In having students listen to and analyze music it can be very helpful for them to use iconic notation to help them focus on various details in the music. This online video of Bach’s’ Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is completely in iconic notation. This is just one of many videos created by the music animation machine. By importing a MIDI file into a software program that has a piano roll editor you could have something similar to show your students. These videos,however, are on a black background which makes them a little less cluttered to look at. One advantage of a piano roll editor,however, is that you could mute and take away various lines to draw students’ focus to a particular part of the music. […]