I was thinking the other day about Noteflight, and the most frequently asked question of all — so frequent, it should probably go in our FAQ: “How can you make money”?

I’ll answer that question somewhat indirectly, with an observation followed by another question.

There is a constant trend in the evolution of software. Our expectations of software value received per dollar spent are constantly being raised, whether we are aware of it or not, and online use has a lot to do with it. Part of that process is a shift in perspective that I’ll summarize this way: “Yesterday’s application is tomorrow’s component.”

Let’s look at a familiar example: word processing. Way back when, there was a program called Microsoft Word. Hey, there still is — and it still ain’t cheap! But I’m talking about Word 2000 right now, not MS Office 2008. Its main toolbar looked like this at the time:

And here’s a toolbar from one of those ubiquitous online “rich text editors” that you see in your browser all the time now, everywhere from blogs to email programs to content management systems:

So, back to the original proposition: do you pay anything for an editor like this, that you use in an application whose main purpose is to do something else, that’s larger-scale and more important to you?

Of course you don’t pay for that. You unthinkingly click the “B” button to make your text bold, never giving a thought to the fact that Microsoft used to charge a steep price for functionality like that, back in the day. As you do this, you are not thinking, “wow, I’m doing word processing!” You are using the editor to write your friend an e-mail, or to create some course content for your students, or to make up a document that you are storing online in Adobe Buzzword, Google Docs, etc.

This neatly sums up what Noteflight is all about. What you should pay for isn’t the raw ability to compose and edit music notation on a computer: it’s the software around the editor that matters. Music notation software is going to be free now.

We’ve forsaken Cambridge’s frozen streets for the warmer climate of San Antonio, Texas this week, where Noteflight is exhibiting at the Texas Music Educators Association/Technology Institute for Music Educators pair of tandem conventions. It’s 80 degrees here, but we’re not here for the weather: we’re here to announce and demonstrate our new product, Noteflight Learning Edition (NLE).

I won’t repeat all of the material on NLE that you can read and watch at the above page, or in our press release. To briefly summarize the picture here: NLE extends the capabilities of the free noteflight.com website, in a way that is aimed at music teachers, music departments and music schools. NLE provides 1) a secure space for each learning community to share and publish its content separate from Noteflight.com, 2) a seamless integration with online course management systems such as Moodle, Blackboard and Haiku, and 3) a really smooth way of handling musical assignments in which students automatically receive private copies of a template created by an instructor and do their work within these copies. The instructor can later access these copies and respond to them individually.

Noteflight Learning Edition’s integration with course management systems (CMSs) is a big deal in a couple of ways. These systems are designed to build and manage web-based content for teaching and learning, and Noteflight is the web-based music notation tool — so putting these ingredients together permits the construction of an online music curriculum that works like a coherent whole, not like a bunch of desktop tools roughly stitched together. Also, these systems manage courses, course rosters, and user authentication in ways that make sense for a variety of settings: higher education, K-12, and non-institutional. NLE works hand-in-hand with each CMS’s way of loggin in users; and it accepts a CMS user automatically as a Noteflight user via a single-sign-on mechanism.

While the noteflight.com site will remain free, NLE requires a modest subscription fee. There are two ways to buy NLE. First, post-secondary institutions can license it yearly, based on their music department or course enrollment figures. Secondly, we will offer a special K-12 package in conjunction with Haiku LMS by Haiku Learning Systems, which combines NLE with Haiku’s elegant course and roster management.

We’re putting the finishing touches on NLE right now, and of course we’re demoing it at this show this week. We expect to have it ready in March; look for another announcement soon!

I’ve been on a couple of field trips that were very memorable indeed — one recent, one not so recent.  I’ve been remiss in writing these up and it’s about time I did so!

Last week I visited Kevin Coyne’s classroom at McDevitt Middle School in Waltham, MA.  Waltham is one of the original New England mill towns on the banks of the Charles River, and has taken some hard knocks over the long years of industrial decline; yet it has a lot of great culture going on and its downtown has really perked back up in the last decade.  The McDevitt school reflects this mix in its own architecture: it’s a fairly new, modern structure grafted directly onto one of those “old-school” schools: an intimidating, stolid brickwork bastion.  Somehow the combination is pleasing and chimerical, neither old-school nor new-school.

Kevin’s class was great, and incredibly inspiring for me to visit.  He had created a composition activity based on Noteflight in which his students write pieces with some simple constraints — in this case, an 8-bar A section, 8-bar B section,  and a repeat of the A, all in the range of a G clef staff.  Students worked individually some of the time at their computers, and came together at other times for sharing/critique of their works-in-progress on a digital projector, directed by Kevin.  The mood was very upbeat: I could see the kids were having a lot of fun.  For them, music notation had left the realm of the abstract: they were creating something of their own.  As Kevin said to me, “In art class kids make drawings — why can’t they write music in music class?”

One thing that jumped out at me was that the kids weren’t only working individually: because all their pieces were online together, they were constantly sharing their work with each other, on an informal level that fed into the general mood of creative excitement.  They were constantly chatting, and went back to their class home page on Noteflight to check out each other’s work from time to time (since Kevin had set things up so everyone could see everyone else’s pieces).  Their pieces had funny and fanciful names, with some teenage middle-school braggadocio mixed in sometimes.  This was music composition returned to a place it truly inhabits: music in the realm of play, rather than as a collection of theoretical rudiments.

Another thing I noticed was the ease that the online medium brought to the class-wide activities around sharing and critiques.  It was very easy for Kevin to survey the set of pieces being built in his class and to bring them up on the projector at will.  I was really impressed by his skill in managing the class discussion dialogue, keeping everyone’s tone positive while still asking his students to comment critically.  At one point he had a student’s piece up on the screen and asked the student if he liked the change that someone had suggested.  The answer was a good-natured “no”, and the student had an alternative that he had already been working on at the same time, on his own computer.

Going back in October, now… I visited Lowell, Massachusetts to visit a Lowell HS classroom in which Prof. Alex Ruthmann’s music ed. students were working.  Like Waltham, Lowell is another former industrial mill town with a struggling economy and the urban problems that go with that. And, like Waltham, it’s also a place where innovation is going on.  Alex teaches music education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell Music Dept. where his students are experiencing some of the latest ideas in music learning and technology.

In the class I saw, high school piano students were paired off, while they worked on creating collaborative co-authored pieces in Noteflight which they presented to the class at the project’s conclusion.  They received little or no instruction in the use of the software, and didn’t seem to need it: they just jumped in and started writing, learning as they wrote.  Noteflight was well suited to this idea because the pairs of students did not always work on their piece at the same time, or on the same part of it.  Having these pieces online meant either member of the pair could contribute no matter what computer they were working on, or whether they were in class or at home.  The students covered an enormous range in terms of their comfort level with music — or even with the idea of composing it — but Alex and his students were really adept at creating a space where the kids could themselves create.  Some pairs wrote original songs, others used a familiar tune as a starting point, but everyone made something.

We’re looking forward to getting some links to some of these classroom creations to post here!