Over the summer, a couple dozen Toronto music teachers convened workshops to develop an exciting new music curriculum incorporating Hyperscore, a music composition software that uses a graphical annotation interface enabling anyone to express themselves creatively through music. Here’s Tod Machover explaining how the curriculum is now being taught to several hundred Toronto school kids.

From Tod Machover:

Now that I’ve collected a range of sounds from you all, we’re ready to begin using Hyperscore to create music!

Hyperscore uses lines and color as opposed to typical musical notation to express musical ideas so that people of all ranges of skills and musical training can compose.  Over the past months, we have had the opportunity to work with teachers from the Toronto School District to create curriculum that will encourage students to compose with Hyperscore.  This spans across middle and high school levels, and we’re hoping to connect younger and older students to collaborate on the same pieces.  Younger students can create melodies that older students can combine into compositions and send back to the middle school for reflection and thoughts on improvement.  Eventually, these projects will become part of the Toronto Symphony project.

Don’t worry—if you aren’t a current student, I still want you to be involved.  This is the link to Hyperscore: http://hyperscore.com.  I will be sending out ideas for sections of the final piece or small Hyperscore fragments for you to work on alone and with the other participants of the project so we can reflect together on the best melodies and short compositions for the final piece.  Let’s get started!

Yours, Tod

If you’d like to try your hand at composing with Hyperscore, the company is making the software available to “A Toronto Symphony” participants at a discount. Please email june@harmonylinemusic.com to receive the discount code.