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This post provides information about Harmonia's new symmetrical scale generators.

This post provides information about the Fall 20201 release of Harmonia 3.2.11.

This post outlines Harmonia's default settings for Species Counterpoint.

This post describes how to generate scores for advanced harmony instruction.

This post introduces the new web app versions of Harmonia 3 that are available on our download page.

This post describes how to convert and customize a Harmonia counterpoint score into a counterpoint assessment for students to compete.

This post outlines and describes who to import counterpoint score in Harmonia.

This post outlines and describes Harmonia’s counterpoint score generators.

This post outlines and describes Harmonia’s counterpoint control panels and assessment tools—new features that enable instructors to alter analysis and assessment settings to accommodate modal or tonal counterpoint and strict vs freer style.

We are delighted to introduce the latest features available in Harmonia: new analysis and assessment tools for creating counterpoint lessons and exercises. The fall 2021 version of our app will support all manner of first- and second-species counterpoint activities, and...

On July 1st Harmonia version 3.1.0 for Fall semester will be available as a free download from the Mac, iPad, Windows and Android app stores rather than our website.

Harmonia is a useful tool for teaching and learning many ear training fundamentals. Harmonia works very well for creating interval, scale, and chord-quality identification drills and exercises...

Read this post for answers to your frequently asked questions.

Read this post for answers to your frequently asked questions.

Harmonia is a music theory app linked to a web-based learning management system (LMS) ...

Dear Harmonia Friends,COVID-19 is having a large impact on music instruction across the nation and many schools are now moving to entirely online course delivery with very little notice. To help, Illiac Software is offering free student/teacher access to the Harmonia app and platform for all new courses set up from now through the end of the academic school year. If you know of any teachers who could benefit, please pass this message along...

An exciting new feature of Harmonia3 is our audio-streaming service, which enables teachers to embed and control high-quality audio in their Harmonia documents. In Harmonia3 all audio is streamed from our server, using settings added by teachers in their personal media library. The media library is a new, free feature of your Harmonia teacher’s account on our website...

Harmonia3 is up and running! The beta release (3.0.18 or higher) is now publicly available from our website’s download page.  With the beta release of Harmonia3 there are now several options to consider for your Fall Harmonia courses. Here is a summary of each option...

During the last week of May 2019, I attended the music theory Pedagogy into Practice conference in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. While there, I introduced Harmonia 3—in particular, our new audio streaming interface—and illustrated how it could support a variety of ear-training applications. I presented my work in poster form, so find the poster and an expanded abstract below...

We've added a great many improvements to Harmonia 3 to make it even easier for teachers and students to work on their course materials and assignments. One of the most exciting changes to the software is that we've redesigned the user interface from the ground up. Teachers can now design lessons more efficiently and students will find the process of completing their assignments much more intuitive...

The new Harmonia 3 app with a completely redesigned user interface focuses on optimizing user experience and performance. Harmonia 3 allows students to access their homework more easily, and teachers have the ability to maintain collections of media files and embed them into Harmonia documents whenever and wherever they want. As an added benefit, Harmonia 3 will be tablet-ready, meaning students can do homework on their iPads or Android tablets...

As you have probably already heard, over the past year we've been working very hard developing Harmonia 3. This new app has been redesigned and implemented from the ground up to provide a truly state of the art experience in music theory instruction. The most important new features in Harmonia 3 are: A completely redesigned user interface ...

Switching to Harmonia-delivered rather than paper-based assignments has many advantages for both teachers and students. One of the most important benefits for students is that homework can be delivered as a series of short targeted assessments, one assessment per document, each of which concentrates on just one concept or skill and contains very few elements to complete. This allows students to concentrate on one concept per document and, more importantly...

We are excited to announce a brand-new audio-streaming service, which we plan to roll out in Fall 2018 as part of our upcoming Harmonia 3.0 release (much more on that later!) Our new streaming audio service will allow teachers to embed high-quality audio in their Harmonia lessons and homework assignments without needing to attach audio files to their documents and control exactly how the media is used by students...

Before joining Illiac Software, I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. From being a teaching assistant to running my own music theory courses, I taught undergraduate music theory courses there for eight years. I enjoyed teaching, and I always sought for ways to help my students learn. Questions that I asked myself frequently include:...

Did you know that Harmonia offers students and teachers an online discussion and comment board? Our discussion board facilitates the learning process between teacher and student by offering students an easy way to post comments and ask questions right from our website...

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.