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.

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