One of our assignments this week was to recreate a printed score, “Bicycle Built for Two,” using the online music notation tool, NoteFlight. NoteFlight is a free to use notation tool, which shares many of the features of other notational tools, such as the open source MuseScore or commercially available tools such as Sibelius or Finale. For students of music, the NoteFlight tool offers a wealth of benefit for free. As an online tool, computer platform is not of concern, and with the new HTML5 interface, iPad users have essentially the same functionality as computer users.

The interface is intuitive, but the power of the program is in using the PDF file which provides users a wealth of keyboard shortcuts to work within the program. Recreating the assigned file took approximately 15 minutes, using several shortcuts to save time. Clicking the letter R with any selection repeats the highlighted material. Using up and down arrows with selected notes moves those notes diatonically. If you can visualize patterns in the music, then those patterns are easily recreated using the QWERTY keyboard.

Another strength of this program is the ability to create a template for students. The shared template function allows the teacher to create a digital worksheet, which can serve as a baseline for students to respond to music theory questions by actually creating a response with notation. Using LTI, NoteFlight can also be embedded directly into learning management systems such as Canvas or Moodle, and is a selectable component for schools using MusicFirst LMS.

Below is a shared file created in NoteFlight for this assignment.