Year of 2017

Prospective students applying to the University of Illinois School of Music are required to take a music theory diagnostic exam (MTDE) to determine if they are academically prepared to take Music 101, the first-semester core music theory course at the University of Illinois. The short (one-page) MTDE provides a quick assessment of a student’s knowledge in five areas of music fundamentals: pitch notation, scales and key signatures, rhythm and meters, and root-position triads. While the School of Music has been giving this test for many years, and has informally noticed generally declining scores over the last decade, only very recently did it start documenting the year-to-year results. Here are the average scores for entering freshman for the past three years:...

I'm a composer and one of the developers of Harmonia. For the past fifteen years I've taught classes in music theory and technology and have given private music lessons. One of the most tedious aspects of it is having to notate scores, often on the fly and requiring a lot of detail. Many of the decisions involved in score editing (especially for assignments) are repetitive, and popular score editing programs like Sibelius or Finale require a good deal of time and patience to coerce the score into an acceptable state. I realized this was a common issue for other composers so I wrote an open source application called FOMUS that simplifies the process of notating music by automating many of the mechanical decisions involved...

The idea for Harmonia came to me in 1997, just two years after I joined the composition/theory faculty at the University of Illinois. At UIUC all composers teach theory, and as the newest faculty member I was assigned to teach first-semester theory and aural skills. While I had taught similar courses in the past, during the preceding decade I had actually been working outside academia, as a computer researcher, first at the Price-Waterhouse Technology Centre in Menlo Park, CA and then for five years at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany. What struck me most about teaching theory again was that — though the content I was teaching had changed very little — the circumstances in which I was teaching was very different than anything I had previously experienced.

"What’s the value of Harmonia?" Or, quite literally: what commitments and investments did we have to secure along the way to move an initial idea about how to improve teach music theory using technology into a functioning company? The first thing I should say is that it was a very long path (almost 20 years!) and much of journey was not easy.