Home | Learning Tools | Art & Music Corner: Learning Music Online: NotationStation

NotationStation is the flagship website of GVOX, and from what they say, the world's largest music education portal, with more than 11,000 registered teachers (as of 3/07/01). GVOX is developing content through partnerships with leading content providers such as McGraw-Hill.

NotationStation was designed to provide music teachers and their students with access to a free online notation program — MusicTime Online is the core of NotationStation. Registered teachers can upload files and lessons to their own class site on NotationStation. Students use MusicTime Online to write, arrange, play, print, and share music scores. The online design is great for fostering a collaborative environment between teachers and students. The classroom is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from any computer that is connected to the Internet and meets the minimum system requirements. The NotationStation Basic version is free, and on June 1st, their new NotationStation Plus will become available for a set fee per school.

Score Writing
MusicTime Online makes it pretty easy to write music scores with as many as four staves by utilizing a handful of friendly menus and buttons. The notation allows up to 32nd notes and triplets and almost any time signature and tempo. Note entry is quite flexible. You can enter the notes using the mouse, MIDI keyboard, computer keyboard, or even by simply playing the notes on any instrument into the microphone. You can also import music files as long as they are written in one of three formats: MusicTime (.mus), Encore (.enc), and Standard MIDI file (.mid). You can listen to the scores at any time during the writing process, and when you play the score, you have the option to select different tempi and choose an instrument. Even better, you can assign different instruments to play each part (up to four simultaneous parts per score). Currently there are eight available instruments, and I'm sure more are on the way. The writing functions that I couldn't find, but which would be very helpful, were a "copy" and a "paste" command for repeating groups of notes and measures. And it would be great if you could write for more than four parts. But that's getting a bit greedy.

Virtual Instruments
MusicTime Online uses musical instruments called GVOX Virtual Instruments to play the score. As of this writing there are eight popular band instruments available: recorder, flute, clarinet, alto and tenor sax, trumpet, trombone, and keyboard. Not only can you select them to play the score, but they also can teach you how to play that particular instrument. To teach you, the Virtual Instruments employ three interesting features:

1. Animated Instrument: As the instrument plays the score, fully animated renderings display a musician's hands playing each note on the instrument.
2. Fingerings: As the instrument plays the score, the fingering needed to play each note is displayed in real time.
3. Step Play: You can practice playing the score with your own instrument using the computer's microphone and a feature called Step Play. In Step Play the Virtual Instrument sounds the correct note and displays the correct fingering. When the student plays into the computer's microphone the Virtual instrument will keep highlighting the correct note until the student plays it. When the student plays the correct note, the score advances to the next note.

These features are quite basic, but on the other hand, provide a beginning level of support to students learning a new instrument that might be crucial. Students can take this lesson any time they are ready for it, as many times as they want, and at their own pace.

The Virtual Instruments don't sound very good, but they work and sound as well as most MIDI instruments. They have to be initially downloaded, but that only takes 1 or 2 minutes per instrument on a 56k modem. One problem I noticed is that the instruments don't play legato. They play in a non-legato touch that sounds computereze. It would sound more musical if the type of articulation could be selected in the music score, e.g. legato, staccato, accented, portato.

Classroom
In each online music classroom teachers can publish lessons, receive, view and hear student submissions (completed homework), assess students' work, print or save it in their own personal folders, communicate with students online via the Message Boards, and share students' work with parents, relatives and friends using the Student Showcase.

Teachers can create templates for each type of assignment. In addition to composition and music theory assignments, teachers can create an online practice room. Choral students can upload an accompaniment part to songs and sing along with it, or instrumental students can practice playing along with the music as they mute their part, change the tempo, or transpose the key. Instrumental students can even "record" themselves playing along with the music and then play it back with their own performance included! What the student will hear is not their actual sound, but the duration and pitch (timing and notes) of their performance played through one of the Virtual Instruments.

Lesson Library
Using the Lesson Library, teachers can import pre-existing lessons and make them available to their students. They can share lesson ideas with other teachers by making their own lessons public in the Lesson Library. The lessons that I saw seemed to be thorough and indicated grade level, description, objectives, procedures, assessment/outcomes, follow-up lesson ideas, and national standards.

MENC: The National Association of Music Education has adopted NotationStation as the industry standard online platform for dissemination and development of National Standards-based music curriculum including MENC Strategies for Teaching.

Music educators can only benefit from this integration of teaching expertise and technology because it works and the potential for content development is tremendous.

Home | Learning Tools | Art & Music Corner: Learning Music Online: NotationStation

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