Jonathan Savage

Just wondering, what pieces of music software are being used in the middle and high schools across the USA? If you are reading this post in America, perhaps you could let me know. Over here in the UK, the use of music software in secondary schools (11 – 18) is dominated by Cubase and Sibelius with other sequencing/notation packages have a smaller share of use. Is it the same in the USA? Does Finale have a greater use over there? What about other sequencing software? Do let me know. A comparative study would be interesting at some point. Would anyone would like to collaborate with me on this?

There’s been quite a bit of discussion around the university about building iPhone apps with educational content. As with any technological development, there are those who try to mystify it and make it appear too complex for the masses. I have some sympathy with this point of view. Programming is an art-form in itself and the skillset needed is considerable to do it well.

But the basic elements of writing an iPhone app seem to be in reach of a larger audience. I’ve explored this a little over the last few weeks. I’ve done some study of my own, downloaded the Apple Xcode developer kit and worked through this really helpful book. I’ve got no experience of writing Objective-C (the programming language) but a bit of creative cutting and pasting can go a long way (and can also get you into trouble!).

Today, I was alerted to this interesting collection of products/services that help you make an iPhone app with no previous experience at all (at a cost, of course). Now there are even apps to help you make apps! It will be interesting to see how quickly some of these services take root.

In the meantime, what other experiences have you had exploring iPhone apps or the creation of mobile content using other infrastructures (Android, etc) for educational purposes?

Thanks to Scott for this interesting post about the talking piano. Many of our students will be writing on the topic of music/language and education soon and will find this amusing. The link to the AmazingMidi software was helpful too. I haven’t tried it yet (too bad it is for PC only) but making the link between .wav files and MIDI data is something that many people have wished for. There are obviously benefits for those wanting to transcribe music but there will be wider educational benefits too if the software improves (as no doubt it will).

I guess the new term is bringing its normal dose of blogosphere ideas about teachers and teaching to the fore. Here is a helpful post about generic web applications that teachers may find useful. Most, if not all, are free and there are some very helpful ideas here too about how to use them. Thanks for the link James.

It was good to welcome another cohort of students to MMU yesterday. They seemed all keen and smiley! One of the discussions we had was about music software. The opening question was about Sibelius (a piece of software which many of them are familiar with) and how they can extend their knowledge into new areas. I stressed that buying large pieces of software is probably not the answer for many of them at the moment. I suggested that they explore open-source solutions or other free-ware. To this end, it was great to see that Joseph Pisano has done a fantastic post on free music software for music teachers. You can read it here. Thanks for doing this Joseph.

As an advocate of open source software, it was very encouraging to read this report about how the open source community are ‘growing up’ (no sarcasm implied there I’m sure). It was interesting to note in the report that ‘open source’ doesn’t imply ‘free’ in terms of providing solutions. There are plenty of ways that open source developers can make money out of their products. It just requires a rethink about how their services are provided to a particular community. Interesting stuff.

If you schedule events regularly, can I recommend Doodle to you. Doodle is a great little online tool for coordinating meetings, making choices about dates, times, which film to watch or whatever else you want! Really useful.

Thanks to my MMU colleague -  Clive McGoun, I’ve been exploring the Commentariat theme for WordPress. This is a theme designed to allow collaborative reading and commenting on a document. I’ve put up a sub-portal of this site where you can see it in action with a short paper I wrote for NAME last year about teaching talented music students. I’d welcome your feedback or comments about the theme and its potential as a learning tool. I’m thinking of using it with students on the courses I teach next year. I think it has a lot of potential.

I know that many of my students use Audacity with their classes. If you want a basic introductory guide, why not have a look at Tim Brook’s workbook that you can download from here. If you want something more interactive, UCan.tv sells Audacity Interactive which is an interactive guide to Audacity containing 20 movies that illustrate the various simple and more advanced things that you can do with this piece of software. You can order it here.

We always used to plug Finale Notepad as a free and well-equipped music notation software package. Unfortunately, Make Music have decided to charge for this product (only $9.95 though). So, what are the freeware alternatives that could be used on either Macs or PCs. One good looking alternative is MuseScore. This was mentioned recently on MusTech.net and there is a good review there. There is also a good comparison between Notepad and MuseScore here by David Bolton. So, thankfully, there are still open source solutions for a world dominated by Sibelius and Finale.

Unfortunately, there is no Mac install package, so you’ll have to revert to the Linux version at the moment.