I - The new version 2.5, released today:
This version focuses on educational needs:
- View > Show Pitch with Color: maps sound pitch to the hue, repeated for every octave.
This lets one spot consonances, dissonances, and also find the tune in which you piece is played, as well as chord changes. This becomes a great tool to teach tonality changes in classical analysis and composition.
- 3 preferences to let you adjust the calibration of the rendering algorithms to avoid skips on slow machines and setup of the maximal gain.
- Allow scale labels to be placed at the left, right, both sides of the score or none: go to Tools - View Inspector - Background - Label Position (set it to 0,1,2 or 3).
- Random waveform: an experimental noise waveform whose randomness is tied to the frequency of the sound. Enables creating random LFO portamento effects easily.
- Select from Duration..., Select from Level... actions
- Paint tool allows moving backwards to reduce the duration of the drawn sound. Combined with the snap to time, snap to pitch and cpas lock key down, this makes it very easy to use HighC exactly like a piano roll editor to enter rhythms, melodies and chord sequences.
Known limitations:
- All platforms: can..'t assign waveforms when editing a composite waveform
- MacOSX/Intel/Tiger: clicks can be heard during playback at low sampling rates (medium quality rendering); tooltips are lost when leaving and reentering the piece window
- Windows: Java 6 update 10 : poor performance on some graphics cards due to change of the API like for many applications, don..'t upgrade to 6 update 10...
- Other issues reported but not reproduced: strange issue on 1st time reopen same piece: linked to save preferences; replace with pattern seems to miss some selected elements
The updates are free for registered users: simply download them from http://highc.org/download.html, install them...
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II - Educational uses:
I have already announced our partnership with
"Les Ateliers Volants" . We are jointly designing a complete curriculum using HighC and other software to teach music using computers, targeting schoolchildren, teenagers and adults as well.
Since then, I have received feedback from a few among you who use HighC in the classroom:
Pierre Couprie,
Brian O'Reilly. I would like to mention that I am offering special deals if you want to use HighC in your classroom, and can let you share the slides, exercises and pieces we have designed.
HighC's ability to make audio properties tangible and remanent turns out to be a very useful way to introduce children and non-musicians to the delicacies of acoustics, harmonics, composition and analysis. Students can address fairly elaborate concepts early, before having trained their ears to listen and fingers to play an instrument. We expect HighC can be both an efficient and fun way to learn music.