Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

As I continue with posting about lesson plans that utilize elementary music software as an enhancement tool, I thought that I would share with you a few ideas and a couple of lesson plans that I wrote using Music Ace.

Music Ace, produced by Harmonic Vision, is an excellent piece of software for elementary students. I first used Music Ace 1 back in 1998 when I downloaded the demo version and tried it out. All of the sudden, 30 minutes had passed. I was enthralled. I then installed the demo in my school’s computer lab and had my 5th grade general music class try out lesson one, “Introduction to Staff,” which covered lines and spaces of the staff, high and low pitches, and treble and bass clefs. The students loved using the demo and I realized that this was a wonderful way to assess and reinforce musical concepts that were being taught in my music class.

Music Ace first appeared as Music Ace 1 and Music Ace 2. There are 24 lessons in each that cover musical concepts such as rhythms, pitch, note names, keyboard skills, music staff (treble, bass, and alto), and ear training. A few years ago, Harmonic Vision combined the two programs to form Music Ace Maestro. Music Ace Maestro has all 48 lessons in progressive order. Some of the highlights of the Music Ace Series are:

1. Self-paced lessons: If you purchase a network license for your computer lab and the computers in the students’ classrooms, each student can utilize the lessons at his/her pace at his/her computer.
2. Progress Chart: You can keep track of each student’s progress. This is extremely helpful for when you need to assess each student for progress reports. If a parent has questions about his/her child’s grade in music class, you can simply pull out the child’s progress chart from Music Ace and use it to validate the child’s progress report.
3. Music Ace Maestro Manager: This allows you to input student databases and archive student databases so that you can have them for the years that you teach your students.
4. The lessons reinforce, enhance, and/or assess musical concepts that you have been teaching in music class.
5. Games: The games in Music Ace excite and motivate your students to learn.
6. Doodle Pad: A fun way to compose music using a variety of instruments. In addition, the Juke Box portion of Doodle Pad plays many songs that the students can listen to and/or edit.
7. Price: Reasonably priced for MAC or PC. As quoted from Harmonic Vision’s website: “A single stand-alone version of Music Ace Maestro has a suggested retail price of $127.95. The pricing strategy for Music Ace Maestro is to multiply a comparable Music Ace product by 1.6. For example, a Music Ace Maestro Network 30 sells for $1,918 which is 1.6 X $1,199 (the cost of a Music Ace Network 30).”

Lesson 1: I have used Music Ace in various ways. I have used it with Kindergarten to reinforce basic musical concepts, with my laptop connected to a TV and each student coming up to the computer to take a turn. We used Music Ace 1 lesson 1 so that the students could place notes on lines and spaces on the treble clef staff. The students thoroughly enjoyed this activity and were very successful at it. I was able to assess if they understood which note was placed on the line and which note was placed in the space. You can see this lesson by clicking on the following link: kindergarten_music_ace.pdf It was originally published by SoundTree. If you go to SoundTree “teaching resources”, you can see many more lessons that integrate technology for the elementary, middle school, high school, or college-age level.

Lesson 2: This lesson is included in Technology Integration in the Elementary Music Classroom. It is titled “Playing with Pitch” and it utilizes Music Ace 1 lesson 3, or Maestro lesson 4, to assess the students’ abilities to identify if the pitch goes higher, lower, or stays the same. To see this lesson, please click on the following link: playing-with-pitch.pdf

Question: I’ve discussed Sibelius’s Groovy Series and Harmonic Vision’s Music Ace Series. I would love to hear from you. Have you used these two products in your classroom?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Software, Books, Lesson Plans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.