When we first launched the MusicFirst Classroom in August of 2013, we knew that as time went on and more and more teachers and students started using our platform on a daily basis, we would need to continue developing and upgrading the underlying technology and feature set to not only provide a better user experience for our customers, but also to keep up with all of the advances to web-based platforms and technology to ensure that we were always on the cutting edge. Over the past 18 months, our development team at Avatar New York, working very closely with Brad Smith, our Director of Technology, as well as our entire support team including Jaye Mateyko, Tori Stroud and James Rock, AND our Director of Content, Marjorie LoPresti, has been working on the biggest upgrade we’ve ever done to the MusicFirst Classroom. Over the past week, our site has been intermittently down so that we could bring this upgrade to the thousands of implementations that we have in schools around the world. It was a VERY big project - rewriting every line of code - so the migration of data and the actual upgrade took some time - but I think you will LOVE the new version. I am SO excited to bring it to our customers. Starting today, Monday, July 29th, 2024 you will see this new version of the MusicFirst Classroom as soon as you login. What follows is a complete list of all of the new features that was compiled by Tori Stroud - one of our amazing support managers.

I’ve been in San Antonio, Texas this week representing MusicFirst at the 2024 TBA/SMSE Convention, along with my colleagues Dr. Keith Dye and Mike Olander. I have been coming to San Antonio twice a year for MANY years. It’s one of my favorite cities and between the TMEA/TI:ME Conference in February (one of the largest music education shows there is) and this event, we get plenty of quality interactions with current and prospective customers, as well as time to meet with many of our software partners. I was asked to present 3 sessions for the Texas Bandmasters Convention on AI and it’s potential impact on music education for both teachers AND students - a first for me. The session that I presented to teachers on Thursday was one that I have done many times in the past - often as a Keynote Address. It is titled Music Education at the Crossroads: The Impact of AI & Technology. For the students, I was asked by my good friend Frank Troyka to speak with the many students who attended the Student Day portion of the convention on Friday. That talk was titled Can AI Help Make You A Better Musician? Let’s Find Out!. It has been a LONG time since I’ve taught younger students, and I think they really enjoyed learning about the many tools that use AI - including the MusicFirst Classroom, PracticeFirst, Sight Reading Factory and more.

I realized this morning that I haven’t written anything about one of my all-time favorite AI-powered music tools - Moises. I cannot speak highly enough about this incredible suite of AI-tools for music production. They are the PERFECT example of how AI can be used to help musicians with all aspects of music production, and some of their tools also have incredible value for teaching music. Moises is an audio processing tool that utilizes advanced AI algorithms to analyze and manipulate audio files. The software's standout feature is its ability to separate tracks within a song into individual stems, isolating vocals, drums, bass, and other instruments. This powerful functionality allows students and teachers to focus on specific elements of a composition, making it easier to study arrangement, instrumentation, and performance techniques. Here’s a quick promo video to give you an idea of the look and feel:

Focus On Sound is an incredible resource for music educators and their students, and it is included with every seat of the MusicFirst Classroom. It is essentially an interactive encyclopedia covering MANY aspects of music, including musical instruments, world music, types of ensembles, styles of music, music theory, as well as a large dictionary of musical terminology. Teachers LOVE Focus On Sound because it includes hundreds of lesson plans that all culminate with an assessment for students - PERFECT for sub plans :). This summer, we have had the pleasure of having a fantastic intern on our staff, Elaria Ipecki from Montclair State University. She is a music technology expert and has been helping to create LOTS of new content - specifically in the Music Technology and Music Tech Hardware sections of the software. It is the PERFECT resource for any music teacher who covers music technology as a part of their curriculum. Here’s a closer look:

Another Generative AI music platform? Yes. Meet JEN. Like the many other platforms out there, JEN can create music based on text prompts however they put copyright compliance, transparency and compensation of artists front and center. According to their website, “every training input and generative output is vetted for audio recognition and copyright identification utilizing a database of 150M tracks. Jen creates a cryptographic hash for each track, ensuring the integrity and timestamp of the track’s creations.” It is great to see this push for a more ethical approach to generating music with AI. JEN has posted a training doctrine on their website that looks like this:

One of my favorite parts of attending any conference is meeting new people and learning new things. When you can do both at the same time, it’s pretty special. At the Modern Band Summit this week, I met a fabulous music educator named Jasmine Todd Faulkner who attended one of my sessions. She came up to me after I was finished presenting to share an incredible resource with me that she has created on YouTube. Her channel is called K-12 Modern Band with Jasmine, and it is fantastic. Jasmine is the music teacher at Polaris Expeditionary Learning School in Fort Collins, Colorado where she teaches K-12 modern band, songwriting and recording studio. She creates really cool play-along videos of TONS of pop songs. Her goal is to make a complete K-12 modern band starter curriculum for public schools, and her videos are terrific. Here are a few to give you an idea of what she does:

I just finished up three incredible days at the 2024 Modern Band Summit on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. It was my first time attending this conference and all I can say is WOW. I have never attended a music education conference like this one. SO much positive energy, learning, affirmation, support and downright FUN. The Music Will organization really knows how to put together an event that combines high quality pedagogy and “jump right in” performance opportunities. From the moment I walked into the Lory Student Center - the hub of all the activities - all I could hear was music being played - everything from Ceelo Greene to the B52s. Impromptu bands formed by the participants getting ready to perform the next night on stage with professional lighting, sound system, and hundreds of screaming fans. Such a great event! Hats off to David Wish, Bryan Powell, Maddy Posner, and ALL of the Music Will staff.

Recently, the amazing content team at MusicFirst, in conjunction with the inimitable Marcel Pusey from OGenPlus, published an amazing new course in the MusicFirst Classroom Content Library called OGenPlus Plug & Play. This course is designed to help teachers and their students explore OGenPlus - the newly revamped version of O-Generator - one of my favorite composition tools. The course includes 20 lesson plans that help students learn both HOW to use the software while learning how to compose in various styles of music. There are also over 50 projects for students to explore, including an overarching lesson plan for each category of project as well as direct links from the lesson plan to OGenPlus - making it the PERFECT solution for teachers who are looking for an affordable, accessible and EASY way to get your students composing. OGenPlus is included with every MusicFirst Classroom seat purchase as a part of our Creativity Bundle. Below is an example of a lesson plan as well as a project. But first, a quick refresher on what OGenPlus can do from the one and only, Marcel Pusey!

This week I am thrilled to be heading out to Fort Collins, CO for my first Modern Band Summit, presented by Music Will, on behalf of MusicFirst. I will be presenting a session titled Modern Band & MusicFirst: Perfect Together on Wednesday, showing off our amazing new Modern Band Bundle in the MusicFirst Classroom, and I’ll be participating in the Tech Playground for two more sessions on Thursday. I am so excited to finally attend one of these events. MusicFirst is a proud sponsor and I look forward to meeting with other like-minded music educators and industry folks. I will be posting my session materials and a recap on Friday. Until then, I am also looking forward to some great early morning hikes, checking out some amazing craft breweries, and making some music! There is actually still time to register for the summit if you’re looking to make some last minute PD plans. I hope to see you there!

For many teachers, summer is a time to relax and decompress from the stresses and challenges of the previous school year. For many, it is also a time to do some professional development and reading. While I’m not suggesting that you spend your entire summer reading music education books rather than the latest novels, or binging on podcasts and Netflix series, I do think that there are some amazing music education books that have come out in the past year or so that are definitely worth the time to read between podcasts, Netflix episodes and novels. Here are 4 that I have read recently and HIGHLY recommend to any music educator.

We launched MusicFirst Elementary less than a year ago with our partners from the UK, Charanga, and every day, more and more school districts are adopting the curriculum to engage with students and provide a high quality, standards-based spiral curriculum at an affordable price. As elementary music educators, we're constantly seeking innovative and effective tools to enrich our students' musical journey and we believe that MusicFirst Elementary is a standout option for K-5 music curriculum. Our elementary music consultant, Amy M Burns, has been creating amazing videos that show the product in action and explain both how it works, as well as how you can implement it in your school. As the 2024-25 school year approaches, and decisions on which resources to use are happening, here are the 5 main reasons why you should consider implementing MusicFirst Elementary in your classroom, complete with some of Amy’s best explainer videos.

The MusicFirst content team has been hard at work over the last few months, bringing a brand new publication from GIA Publications into the MusicFirst Classroom - creating an exclusive COURSE for music teachers to use with their students alongside PracticeFirst - our revolutionary performance assessment program. This course includes all of the incredible instructional materials from the new Habits of a Successful Young String Musician book, and breaks it down by individual lesson plans and assignable tasks for every single exercise in the book. Combined with the unique functionality of the MusicFirst Classroom, where teachers can simply drag and drop these lessons and tasks into a class calendar, this exclusive offering from MusicFirst is a MUST HAVE for any string teacher at the elementary or middle school level. Here’s how it works.

As part of all of the research that I’ve been doing for my AI in the Music Classroom online course - currently being run through the MusicFirst Summer Teacher Academy - I ran across a wonderful initiative called AI For Music, spearheaded by Roland and Universal Music Group. This initiative has created a set of seven core principles that help “establish a guideline for the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence in music. By adopting these principles, companies and organizations commit to protecting the vital contributions of human creativity and to the responsible development and application of artificial intelligence for music creation.” As a company that lives exclusively in the education space, I felt that it was extremely important to support this very important cause. I am thrilled to say that MusicFirst is one of a handful of companies that are official supporters of these principles. I hope that my competitors do the same.

With all of the negative attention that AI in music has been getting lately, here’s something that should brighten your day. Country music legend Randy Travis, known for his distinctive baritone voice and numerous hit songs, has been largely absent from the music scene since suffering a stroke back in 2013. The stroke left him with limited vocal abilities, making it all but impossible for him to record new music. That all changed recently when his long-time producer Kyle Lehning and Cris Lacy from Warner Music Nashville approached Randy and his wife Mary to try to use AI technology to recreate his voice on a new song.

Yesterday the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in conjunction with labels including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group Recordings and Warner Records, filed a MASSIVE lawsuit against two of the most well known (and best) AI-assisted music tools - Udio and Suno - something that I believe we’ll be seeing more and more as the music industry tries to figure out what to do with all of the tools that have been trained on copyright-protected music. The lawsuit claims Suno and Udio’s software listens to, analyzes and copies music to create similar works and asked for compensation of $150,000 PER WORK. As I have been writing about for months now, the music industry is at a crossroads with AI, and this recent legal action by the RIAA alleges copyright infringement on a massive scale. This case has significant implications for music technology and the future of creative tools in the industry. Suno’s CEO said the technology was “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content” and doesn’t allow users to reference specific artists. Suno says that they have tried to explain this to labels “but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook”. My gut tells me that the end result of this lawsuit is a revenue sharing scheme that will pay royalties to artists for every song generated. How they’ll figure out how to do that, I have no idea - I’ll leave that to the lawyers.

This past weekend I learned about another AI tool from a colleague at work. This one is called Claude and it is similar in many ways to the other AI tools out there like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Claude is an advanced AI tool that is created by Anthropic, and it has three versions: Claude 1, Claude 2, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is what I decided to experiment with over the weekend. What sets Claude 3.5 apart from other language models is its comprehensive knowledge base (that isn’t connected to the Internet - yet)., spanning a wide range of topics - including music - and it’s focus on ethics, safety and transparency which is pretty refreshing. Before I entered my first prompt, it gave me the following warning:

Make Music Day is a worldwide celebration, occurring annually on June 21st. It underscores the universal language of music, encouraging everyone to engage and participate in musical activities. The origins of the “Fête De La Musique” trace back to France, 42 years ago. Jack Lang and his team at the Ministry of Culture envisioned a new type of musical celebration. They pictured a day filled with free music in every conceivable public space—street corners, parks, rooftops, gardens, and storefronts. Seventeen years ago, the spirit of Fête de la Musique traveled across the Atlantic to inspire the first Make Music event in New York. The event has since grown and spread well beyond New York, with cities across the United States embracing the celebration each year on June 21 with thousands of musicians—ranging from amateurs to seasoned professionals and spanning all genres—delivering almost 5,000 free outdoor concerts across the United States. To better coordinate and enhance these widespread efforts, in 2014, Make Music organizers from across North America came together to establish the Make Music Alliance. This organization aims to nurture and expand the reach of Make Music Day across the continent. Here’s a guide to some invaluable tools and platforms for music educators planning to celebrate Make Music Day.

When it comes to the endless images, text and music that is being created by the many generative AI tools that are out there, what does it all mean for copyright? There are SO many facets to this question, including what about copyright protection for the works that the AI algorithms were trained on, is AI-generated content copyrightable? If not, how much human input should be required to make it eligible for copyright protection? If you create a new piece of music with the assistance of AI, who gets the copyright - you? The software company that created the AI tool? The artist(s) that the AI tool used to train itself? Recently, the US Copyright Office has issued some guidance on this topic - as they are feverishly trying to draw up new copyright legislation that will address these questions as well as many more that will come up as generative AI improves and evolves.

For the past 3 weeks I have been teaching an online course for MusicFirst titled AI in the Music Classroom. Running a music tech company is a full-time gig but I am thoroughly enjoying teaching this course, not only for the meaningful interactions that I’ve been having with the students enrolled in the class, but also the deep prep work that I’ve been doing each week. I truly believe that the only way to be a good teacher is to throw yourself in the deep end and do LOTS of preparation before each class. As part of that work, one of the aspects of AI that we looked at last night was the ethical considerations and issues that go hand in hand with AI - specifically Generative AI. While the focus of the class last night was the impact that AI is having on the music industry, the portion of the class dedicated to the ethics of AI seemed to resonate the most with my students. Here is an overview of that discussion.

As June 14th is Flag Day here in the United States, I thought it would be fun to share a lesson plan that I wrote that focuses on the American national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. The lesson focuses on the artistic interpretation of the anthem and asks students to watch two performances of the Star Spangled Banner and then compare and contrast those performances. It’s a simple activity that can be done at almost any grade level. I hope that you can use it today in your classrooms!