I recently heard about a very cool project undertaken by Tony Beatrice, Director of Instrumental Music at Pentucket Regional High School / Middle School in W. Newbury, MA.  Tony’s project is called Art-Infused Composing. In his words:

The purpose of this project was multi-faceted.  Our first goal was to stimulate thought and opinion through reflective analysis and then to have students create based off of their reflections.  Students were split into groups and were asked to describe what they noticed in Frank Jonas’ Geoscape 6.  From there they created compositions using a new online flash-based notation program known as Noteflight.

Most of the students doing the assignment were not familiar with musical notation.  But, as you will hear if you check out their pieces via the above link, this didn’t mean that they weren’t musical!

One of the things we consistently hear from our users is how the simplicity of Noteflight opens up music notation as something that can be learned through experimentation and experience, rather than by tutoring and rote memorization.  Tony’s work is a great example of this approach.

A violin sound is now available for all the Instrument-related actions in Noteflight.

It feels like time for a quick preview of some features being actively worked on. Yes, things are happening!

Speed Adjustment will let anyone temporarily adjust the playback speed of a score, even if they can’t edit the score itself. It’s an additional control that is separate from the Tempo (which is part of the score itself):

We think this will be useful even for the composer of the score when working with fast passages or quickly reviewing the content of a piece.

View Transposition will let anyone transpose a score to a different key temporarily for viewing, listening, and printing. Like a speed adjustment, it does not affect the original score and can be performed on scores that you don’t have permission to change. We don’t have a picture of this one yet!

Along with this feature, we’ll also introduce a better score transposition feature for the contents of the score itself so that authors can more easily make permanent key changes to sections of their music.