Notation Software
In this series of posts, I reflect on some of the highlights from one of my university courses, Technology in Music Education (TME). To see my reflections from other classes, click here.
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I just finished TME Week 2A and thought I'd write a little about it. For those who aren't predisposed to reading, my summary of this lecture is: Greatest lecture of my life! Let's get into it.
Notation Choices
As someone who has used music notation since high school, if you asked me about the available options, I could tell you that Sibelius was a reasonably effective way to notate music. If you pushed me I'd murmur something about the existence of Finale and MuseScore, but that's about as far as I'd go. But even while these three programs have continued to exist as viable options for music notation, through the course of the lecture I discovered that there are a lot of other options. Interestingly, while Sibelius and Finale have slowed down their upgrades, the market for scores has sped up.
During the lecture I didn't have time to test out all these types of software, so I'm just going to name drop a few and leave you to experiment for yourself.
NoteFlight: I'm going to give this one a special mention, because of its ability to be embedded into blog posts. I need to work that out how to do that though. Stay tuned.
Sibelius Party!
This part of the lecture probably had maximum expertise directed towards it, given that our lecturer James Humberstone worked for Sibelius for nine years and wrote the handbook for Sibelius 7 (which includes 33 online tutorial videos). The tutorial videos cover a lot of interesting ground, but there were a few things that really changed my world, particularly as a budding educator.
Amongst the cacophony of delighted yelling that occurred on each occasion where Dr. Humberstone showed us another feature we had never seen before, no decibel registry could compete with the moment where he demonstrated Alt + G. The entire class had been screenshotting our score excerpts for word documents, but of course, Sibelius already thought of this! Alt + G creates a crosshair that allows the user to copy and paste high resolution score excerpts. Goodbye grainy scores!
And now let's finish with some fun facts.
Fun Fact
There is now a common language that all music notation software is written in: Music XML. This means that whenever you write any music notation in software, you can save it as music xml, and then you should be able to move from one kind of software to another.
This post is a highlights package of the TME lecture focused on notation software. Click here for my full lecture notes.