Composing in the Classroom with Hyperscore

A few of years ago, a technology teacher in my district introduced me to a new composition program called Hyperscore.  A parent at the school she taught at worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and had been instrumental in developing this program and had demonstrated it for her.  It was rather simple, but offered a new way to compose music, where students would draw where they wanted the music to happen.  So I tried it with a few elementary classes, who enjoyed the playful nature of it, but I felt limited with the few sounds you could use. Fast forward a few years, and I was finally introduced to the parent and was given an updated version of Hyperscore.  Its design is aimed at a younger audience, but I felt it would fit in well into an elementary or middle school curriculum.  After playing with it for countless hours, I knew I needed to install this in my school's computer lab, and I quickly found my students shared the same excitement that I had.

Hyperscore is designed to help people compose original music, especially those with little or no musical background.  It's easy enough for a beginner to use, but has a lot of variety to captivate those with much more experience.  A quick glance when the program opens reveals very little that's music related.  Hyperscore more closely resembles a painting program and thrives on its visual nature. Students create small motifs by placing droplets on small color palettes.  Droplets placed higher on the palette sound higher, and longer droplets sound longer.  These motifs can then be combined on a separate screen, where Hyperscore acts like a looping program, repeating the ideas over and over.  Students draw in where they want their ideas to happen, and like the original palettes, the motifs will sound higher/lower in pitch depending on where they are drawn.  The program has very low system requirements and uses general midi sounds, so there are a wide variety of sounds to choose from.

The program was an instant hit with all of my middle school students.  I teach 7th and 8th grade general music to about 300 students in Waltham, MA, a large suburb west of Boston.  My school has a high percentage of minority students, low-income families, and special education and ELL students, which can sometimes make things interesting in the classroom.  Most of the students have very little music background.  Like many students not involved in a performing group, they tend to wrestle with and are often intimidated by standard music notation.  When combined with the fact that many have never played an instrument before, my students have struggled to creatively compose music, especially something that they are proud of.  I had always put a high priority on composing in my classes, but I felt like I was never successful.  My students never seemed to get as excited about their work.  Removing these obstacles is what Hyperscore is made to do, allowing almost anyone the ability to compose.

From the first day with the program, my students had an immediate attraction.  I was amazed at the interest my students showed.  Even my more discipline-prone students were drawn into the program’s simple interface.  The visual aspect of the program is the key.  Students can easily see their notes and how they fit together.  It's easy for them to point out notes that might sound wrong, making it easier for them to edit their compositions.  Notes that sound long and look long.  They are note disguised by dots and flags.  There are no signs of a sharp or a flat, or puzzling key and time signatures.  Of course these aspects exist within the program, but there are just not as visible to the untrained 'unmusical' eye.  Soft horizontal lines represent pitches in a chromatic scale, while vertical lines represent beats and measures.  This allowed me to open up discussions with students about melody and rhythm as it pertained to their compositions without being hampered with their limited music vocabulary and knowledge of theory.   Often, students would end up discovering these ideas themselves as they tweaked their motifs into perfect ideas.  Another great feature in the program is the different harmony modes, where the computer will help 'fix' some of those dissonant note combinations.  This helped make even the strangest looking compositions actually sound like real music.   There was at least one student in each class that wanted to use the program as a drawing program, and would soon discover that letters and shapes can actually sound pretty good with the help of the harmony modes.

Hyperscore doesn't aim to eliminate standard music notation.  And when used in the classroom, it can open the door to very in depth musical conversations between the teacher and student. It's visual nature allows for greater use of class discussion and dialogue.  A few times in every class, student volunteers would have their songs displayed through our LCD projector, allowing everyone to see and hear the work.  Students would then offer warm and cool feedback about the piece. Student A would comment on things he liked about student B's song, and talk about ways they might have tried things differently.  This helped create a really great class dialogue where students turned into the teachers, offering everyone tips and ideas to apply to their own compositions.  By the end of our third or fourth class, I had nearly 100% of my students involved in these discussions.

Since I try so much classroom composing, it should be no surprise that I'm in love with the Vermont MIDI Project, www.vtmidi.org.  Student Hyperscore compositions can be exported as MIDI files, so I created a wiki for my music classes.  I then posted students compositions were people could leave comments and suggestions.  I invited people from outside the classroom to join the discussion, including my school's band director, an 8th grade English teacher, and a few of my friends who are professional musicians in the Boston area.  Students were soon begging me to have their songs posted on the site, and loved being able to read all of the suggestions left for them since their work was uploaded.  The MIDI files can also be brought into a notation program, where individual parts can be printed.  I again followed along the lines of the Vermont MIDI project and put together a band and presented a concert featuring the compositions of my students, which was a huge success.  Our new project, which we hope to tackle soon will be taking these songs and making a CD of them to sell at our school store, or possibly selling them online with the help of websites like TuneCore.  Below are two of the songs created by some 8th grade students, whom we'll call Jack and Jill.  Jack is a student with Asperger's Syndrome, and he feverishly worked at his song and was very proud of the outcome.  Jill was a very quiet student, who also was happy with her song, more so when she found the rest of the class really liked it.

The program has also recently been used in music therapy contexts, where patients at a Tewksbury, MA hospital created original compositions with the aid of Hyperscore.  A great article was written about this for NPR and can be found at NPR.org, or tinyurl.com/hyperscore.    For more information on the program, you can visit www.hyperscore.com or the MIT Media Lab's website where the program was first developed at opera.media.mit.edu.  If you have any questions about my work you can email me at coynek@k12.waltham.ma.us.  If you are at all intrigued by anything I wrote, please give the program a shot.  I'm sure you won't be let down.  Best of luck and happy composing!