What's up this month?
We're shifting our newsletter format to place more emphasis on you, our users, as well highlighting information about our products and our company. In this month's issue:
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Featured Noteflight User: Anthony Beatrice Occupation: Band Director and Musical Technology Specialist. Earliest musical memory: Being in the 1st grade and seeing my brother play the drums in the school band. I thought he was the coolest and therefore signed up for the drums when I got into the 4th grade! Instrument of choice: Marimba I am inspired by: Students who choose to surpass mediocrity in order to achieve success in music. Also, those who perform in coffee houses! |
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Favorite Composer: Robert W. Smith, Percy Grainger, and my colleague David Schumacher who co-composes for the Schumacher/Sanford Sound Assembly
Favorite Musician: This is a toss-up between Dispatch and the Yale University Shades vocal group How I use Noteflight: I use Noteflight for my Virtual High School class and my Music Technology Class at Pentucket Regional High in West Newbury, Mass. For my Virtual High School Students, Noteflight offers a notation program that they can access at both home and at school. Over the course of the semester, the students learn about music theory and compose both alone and in groups. The magic of group composing is that Noteflight saves each version of your piece and now you can even leave comments, which is helpful for group members to track progress over time and work together more efficiently. At Pentucket, my goal is to break down the fear barrier people have with composing. My projects are aimed at students that have little or no music background. I let them explore the software as its own instrument without any constraints. It is from this that they gain independence and confidence, thus making it easier for them to feel comfortable and excited about learning the nits and grits of music theory and composing later on. The fact that it is so user friendly, but has a sophisticated interface makes the students feel technical and less like they are just playing a video game. Listen to my Noteflight score: Rather than bore you with a score from me, check out one of my student's variations: "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" by Kevin Dacey. Read more about Tony Beatrice... |
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New Social Features. We've felt for some time that Noteflight needed more ways for people to discover each other's music and, through this exploration, to discover each other. So in our latest release we've introduced a set of new features that we think make it easy and fun to find interesting music and interesting people. Users can now flag any published score as a "favorite". Scores that are tagged as favorites are listed on a new Top Scores page that sorts them according to the number of favorites they've received. Browsing this area makes it easy to find out what music other people are enjoying on Noteflight, and to see who's creating it. Best of all, you can look at other people's favorites to find out what music they like, following a web of connected users and scores to discover even more users and scores. |
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As another important way to communicate, users can now comment on scores that allow it, and you can put comments on your own scores. Comments are a great way to exchange ideas and opinions, as well as a means to attach text to a score so that it doesn't get displayed directly within the music. Finally, we're encouraging users to provide their Twitter and Facebook usernames as ways to link up outside Noteflight, and use the power of existing social networks. What's coming next? Here's what we're working on right now:
Noteflight Internship Opportunity. Noteflight is looking for a talented intern who wants to join us in reinventing notated music for the Web. If you live in Boston and are deeply engaged with music and with building software, we could be the perfect opportunity for you! See our jobs page for more information. Talk to us. Please tell us about how you're using Noteflight to collaborate and share music with others, so we can let everyone know about your ideas and experiences in future newsletters. Send us an email at: info@noteflight.com. Nowadays, you can communicate with us via Facebook and Twitter too! |
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