GHS Student Takes First Place in National MENC/NSBA Electronic Music Composition Competition

Congratulations to GHS junior, Emily Boyer, who is THE winner in the Music Educator National Conference (MENC: The National Association for Music Education) and the National School Boards Association (NSBA) Electronic Music Composition Competition (high school division)!  Emily is a member of the GHS Wind Ensemble and the Sound Beach Community Band.  She is also an artist & designer and excels academically taking AP and Honors classes.

Here’s an excerpt of Emily’s piece, Gothic Memory Land .  The full piece is now available on the new GHS Electronic Music CD  available at the GHS Student and on line through iTunes and other aggregators in 6 – 8 weeks.

Sponsored by MENC and the National School Boards Association (NSBA), the Electronic Music Composition Competition recognizes outstanding compositions and is held to help influence school administrators to include or improve music technology in their schools’ curriculum. Entries are judged based on their aesthetic quality, effective use of electronic media, and the power of the composition and its presentation in communicating to school board members, administrators, and others, the excitement and effectiveness of electronic music composition in the school curriculum.  The annual competition has several dozen submissions from all over the country.  GHS submitted 18 entries alone this year.

For more information on the competition:
http://www.menc.org/gp/nsba-student-electronic-music-composition-talent-search

For more information on the NSBA and their related technology conference:
http://www.nsba.org/tl/

Emily, her parents and I hope to attend the conference in Denver, CO in October where she will be honored.

TI:ME Essay: Notation Software

As I said in my previous post, Electronic Instruments & MIDI, these essays are part of TI:ME Level 1 Certification and answer specific questions posed for certification.

This essay goes a little further as it address the concept of music literacy.  Before purists vote to lynch me, let me say that I think teaching students to read traditional music notation is important.  However, I don’t think it’s of primary importance and that becomes clearer in this article.  Reading music notation is crucial for recreating music but is not urgent, given today’s tools, to create music.  I think we spend far to much time emphasizing music notation as THE tool for music literacy.

Notation Software

Notation software is sophisticated graphics manipulation program made specifically for the needs of musicians.  The top notation software is Finale and Sibelius.  Fans of each could tell you why they prefer one product to the other that might include ease of use and learning curves.  With products this sophisticated, choosing becomes a matter of personal taste and personal needs.

TI:ME Essay: Electronic Instruments and MIDI

The Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME) offers courses, workshops and conferences on technology and use to music educators and students of music and education.  TI:ME offers two levels of certification much like Suzuki, Orff or Kodaly offer certification to earned levels of knowledge and expertise.  For those working in the field already, TI:ME offers alternate certification for their Level 1 certification.  This and the following two articles are papers I wrote for that alternate certification.

First, a little clarification. Back in the day (as my students like to say), music software was divided into three separate and distinct categories. Software to manipulate MIDI, audio and notation were separate purchases. Today, the lines are blurred.  Sibelius & Finale, traditionally notation programs, offers some good MIDI and even audio.  Logic, traditionally a MIDI program, offers excellent audio and good notation.  Now that digidesign and Sibelius are owned by the same parent company, Avid, traditionally an audio program has some good notation and will only get better.  Although these programs can be considered “triple threats”, it’s still important to choose software based on your primary needs.  Although I can get some good notation out of Logic Studio, I wouldn’t publish music with it.  The same can be said for a notation program, it’s not my first choice for composing or teaching music through composition. I know that may be heresy to some but more on that in another article

Electronic Instruments and MIDI

Today’s electronic music instruments come in all shapes and sizes.  Keyboards, drums, guitars, winds, strings and even instruments you can play on your cell phone!  Around 1983, electronic instrument manufacturers got together and created a standard for transmitting musical information.  MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was born and a new world of music was created.  MIDI is simply a standard digital format for devices to communicate to each other.  Think of it as the language of electronic music.  When you hit a note on a MIDI keyboard, a series of parameters is captured, translated to a digital format (a collection of 1 and 0). MIDI parameters include pitch (the actual note you want to play), velocity (how hard did you hit that note will effect the sound or tone quality), volume (loud and soft and everything in between) pan (what you hear in the right or left ear) and other parameters that can be entered and manipulated by the user. Remember, MIDI information is just the digital information.  It has no sounds. You’ll need something to interpret the MIDI information and reproduce the sounds.  That’s the sound module or what might be called the tone bank, a computing device that reinterprets the digital information and reproduces it as sound.  All sound modules contain the basic industry standard for General MIDI that includes a collection of 128 preset sounds divided into 16 channels (translate that into groups of sounds like Keyboards, Guitars, Bass, Strings, Reeds, Sound Effects, Drums and others) and certain functional parameters including the ability to interpret velocity, support polyphony (simultaneous multiple voices). What separates one manufacturer’s keyboard from the next and what distinguish entry level of keyboards from more expensive keyboards are the proprietary sounds in the sound module and the user’s ability to manipulate these sounds on the instrument.