One of the most frequently asked questions that I have been asked by teachers and graduate students over the past twenty years is how to get existing printed sheet music and PDFs into notation software programs for editing, transposing, assessment, and distribution to students.  I have always responded as follows: you have four options:

• Manually type it in to your favorite notation software program;

• Have a student manually type it in to your favorite notation software program;

• Buy a digital version of the music on one of the many digital sheet music platforms;

• Scan the music into your favorite notation software program but be prepared to do some editing.

Yesterday, Technology in Music Education (TI:ME) announced their first ever festival that will focus on student compositions in a wide variety of formats. I am so happy to see this project come to fruition and I applaud the TI:ME leadership for making it happen. The festival is open to students of all ages and is broken up into 5 different age groups, and 5 different categories. It is FREE to enter and there are some really nice prizes for the top entries. If you are teacher that has your students compose as a part of your curriculum, I URGE you to let your students know about this. The deadline for entries is January 15, 2024. Entry forms can be accessed HERE. Good luck to all of the students who submit!!

To find out more about TI:ME and the amazing work that they do, visit their homepage and consider joining today!

Are you a strings teacher in the K-12 space? You’ll probably already know that there aren’t that many quality online free resources just for you. There is a LOT of stuff for band, some stuff for choir, but not a lot for strings. I really don’t know why. That said, there are a few fantastic resources, and Orchestra Classroom is definitely one of them. The site is the work of Angela Harman, a strings teacher in Mapleton, Utah. She is clearly passionate about providing resources for strings teachers, and has a terrific blog and online store with lots of resources. The blog is great for providing free resources and tips for teaching strings. This is a site you should definitely bookmark right now.

Google recently released an AI-powered music tool called MusicLM. It is a part of their AI Test Kitchen Project, which brings research projects in the field of artificial intelligence to life. The first public release is called MusicLM and what it does is convert text prompts to music.

If you have ever wondered what what the lyrics in your favorite song are about, Songtell is an AI-powered tool that tries to do just that. Super easy to use, all you need to do is enter the title of the song into the Search bar, and Songtell will list every song that has those words in the title. When you find the song you’re looking for, just click on it (you might have to include the name of the band if it’s a popular song title) and you’ll get an AI interpretation of the lyrics. Is it always accurate? Definitely not. Is it really fast at analyzing what the lyrics themselves mean - void of any nuanced back story references? Definitely. Here are a few examples so you can judge for yourself:

One of the most well-known and beloved sites for choral educators and composer is the Choral Public Domain Library - better known as CPDL.org. The original site was launched 25 years ago - in December of 1998 and it has become one of the world's largest free (and LGELA) sheet music sites. In 2005 the site was ported over to a new Choral Wiki which allowed users to edit, post, and more. The site hosts a HUGE collection of music scores and other supporting files (including MIDI, audio, and proprietary notation software files) which are free to be downloaded and used for any purpose. Of the 46,846 scores (as of Nov. 8 2023), most are modern editions based on the original works whose copyright has lapsed (or which are otherwise in the public domain). There are also MANY new scores composed and offered for no charge by the composers who have posted their works so that they might be performed. CPDL is an incredible resource for any musican.

This weekend I had the distinct pleasure of presenting a Keynote Address and a MusicFirst session at the Association for Music in International Schools (AMIS) 2023 Music Educator Conference in Zagreb, Croatia. This incredible organization, that is made up of music teachers from international schools around the world, comes together once a year to share ideas, learn new things, and get together with each other from all four corners of the globe. My coleague Richard Payne and I were waving the flag as a corporate member, and had many wonderful conversations with attendees.

Looking for a fun music game for you and your music students? Meet Chordle! I had the pleasure of meeting with its creator, Nate May, a few weeks ago and I love what he has created. Chordle is part of a larger project that Nate runs called Synthase which focuses on curriculum and training. Chordle is a great way to have fun learning about chords and their many shapes and colors. If you are a fan of Wordle and Byrdle, then Chordle is definitely a site to bookmark. Here is how it works:

The following lesson plan is from my publication for MusicFirst titled Podcasting Across the Curriculum. It serves as both an informative lesson on audio production as well as a practical lesson where students use common household objects to build their own pop filters that can be used when recording vocals. I used to do this lesson with my students back in the mid-2000’s and they always did a great job with it. If you’d like to preview the curriculum and the many resources included with the MusicFirst Classroom, just fill out this form. I hope you enjoy this lesson with your students!

My good friends at Soundtrap recently announced a very cool feature that harnesses the power of AI to remove background noise from any vocal track. The feature is called Vocal Cleanup and I am really impressed with the results. One of the disadvantages of students using only Chromebooks to make recordings is that the microphone isn’t the highest quality. It is very common to hear not only the usual background noise - be it a noisy classroom, talking, room noise, etc. - but also the 60 cycle hum of the CPU and sometimes a high pitched frequency known as a coil whine. Even if you and your students do have access to USB microphones and/or audio interfaces with good condenser microphones, you still will inevitably have background noise. Whether it’s a podcast or a vocal melody, no one wants to hear deal with background noise. The new Vocal Cleanup feature from Soundtrap is PERFECT for this situation.

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a lecture on AI in Music Education at my alma mater, Montclair State University. During the lecture, one of the graduate students asked me about US Copyright Law and how it applied to composing music. While I knew that the law does not apply to AI-generated art and music, but what about AI-assisted work? I simply didn’t know the answer. After about a week’s worth of research on the topic, and two decades of interest in US Copyright Law (I wrote a book titled The Teachers Guide to Music, Media & Copyright Law about 15 years ago), the following is what I’ve found out. In a nutshell, AI is moving so fast, the law is trying to catch up - but it has a way to go until there is real clarity.

You gotta love when a website delivers simple, concise content on a daily basis about the best subject in the world - music. This Day in Music is exactly that. Every day the site lists 3 main topics in popular music history based on the date:

What Was the Number One Song on the Day You Were Born?

On This Day in Popular Music History

What Famous Musician was Born on this Day

When the MusicFirst Classroom first launched back in August of 2014, we used to pull in content from this website as part of the Teacher and Student Dashboard. While we stopped doing that back in 2016 when we redesigned the dashboard, I’ve always wanted to figure out a way to get it back. I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, this is a GREAT website to bookmark and share with your students.

With Halloween fast approaching, I thought it would be a good idea to share some excellent resources that I have used in the past to get students composing scary music - no matter what kind of software you have available. In my teaching experience, I found that students LOVE music from horror movies. Don’t believe me? Just sit down at a piano and start playing the themes from Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Exorcist - even Jaws. Kids immediately want to know how to play those songs. But what makes those theme songs scary? What impact does music have in scary movies? The following is a collection of resources to help you teach students what makes music scary - and how to compose scary music.

Nearly two years ago, the UK division of MusicFirst hosted a very special free online event for young composers around the UK that encouraged them to submit original compositions using programs like Flat, Noteflight, Sibelius and Finale. There were hundreds of submissions from three different age categories - 11-14, 15-16, and 17-18. The submissions were evaluated by a team of qualified musicians and educators based on compositional technique, musicality and originality. From each age category there were two “finalists” and one “winner” selected. The finalists were then invited to participate in a live virtual masterclass with Judith Weir, where she provided commentary on each of the students' work and announced a winner of each category.

The SAMR Model (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition) provides a helpful framework for how technology can support learning activities. Created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, this model establishes a continuum from Substitution (where technology replaces technology in traditional instruction without substantive improvement), to Augmentation (where technology improves traditional instruction), to Modification (where technology allows for significant task redesign), to Redefinition (where technology allows learning tasks that were not possible before). The model addresses the range of ways that music technology functions both serve and support traditional music instruction as well as create entirely new possibilities for music instruction, often with some overlap.  

DALL·E 3 is the new beta version of an AI program trained to generate images from text descriptions and it is now available in ChatGPT4. DALL-E has actually been around for a few years, but it is now integrated directly into ChatGPT4, and I had a chance to experiment with it yesterday. It is mind blowing. To be able to write a description of an image that you’d like to see - especially something that doesn’t exist (yet) in our world and then have a program generate that image for you is pretty incredible. I have used other versions of DALL-E and I’ve tried out similar tools in Canva, but if this new version is any indication of what’s to come with this type of technology, we should definitely start buckling up.

One of my favorite music technology resources from Australia is a wonderful product called MusicEDU. Created by Kate Hargreaves, the MusicEDU Suite is a collection of curricula that covers a variety of topics, including Track Formers - a DJ-ing curriculum, Game Composer - focusing on composing for video games, Keyboard Evolution - a keyboard curriculum for beginners to advanced, AR Classroom - a general music curriculum, and Studio Sessions - which focuses on recording studios and sound production. This suite of curricula is perfect for both middle school and high school students and has been expertly authored with music educators and students in mind.

If you teach Beginning Band - whether at the elementary or middle school level - you should definitely check out the YouTube Channel for the United States Army Field Band. In addition to the numerous videos of their performances, they have curated a VERY useful playlist for Beginning Band, and if I were still teaching at that level, I would point all of my young musicians to the relevant videos for their instruments. I might also use some of their videos to recruit beginning musicians. The videos are all professionally produced and are really well structured from a pedagogical standpoint.

Virtual Drumming is another terrific tool for musicians, teachers, and students. It has some really great features and sounds, and does WAY more than just drumming. There is the main attraction - a gorgeous virtual drumset that has each drum mapped to a key on your QWERTY keyboard, a drum machine to create beats using the variety of drumsets that are available, drum lessons, a virtual piano, games, downloadable app, and more. The best part? You can do most things for FREE! All online - using any device. Definitely worth bookmarking this one!

WavTool is a FREE AI-assisted online DAW with some very impressive features. In preparation for some upcoming talks that I am presenting on AI in Music Education, I found this site and have been playing around with it for a few weeks now. WavTool bills itself as AI-assisted music production and feels like they have implemented ChatGPT to assist you in coming up with musical ideas. Users can type in descriptions of what they would like each instrument to sound like and WavTool generates musical clips based on those descriptions. For example, if you want to create a Hip Hop bass line - just type that in. Add more descriptive text like “Create a hard driving and complex hip hop bass line” and you get better results. I am very impressed by the way AI has been implemented in WavTool and I think it can serve as a musical idea generator and then exported into other DAWs. Definitely worth signing up for this one.