Quick Guide for Creating Harmonia Instructional Content

Harmonia is a tool for teaching and learning music theory that uses analytical algorithms to automatically evaluate the harmonies and voice leading of tonal music. Follow this guide to create (and instantly grade) personalized interactive instructional content that combines musical score notation with text, images, audio playback, video, and more.

The Harmonia App opens to a blank white page flanked by a series of iconic buttons across the top of the window. The buttons on the left connect users to the Harmonia Cloud and social media sites, the center buttons are used to add content, and the buttons to the right link to document and application settings.

Log In To Harmonia Cloud

Click on the white cloud icon to connect to the Harmonia Cloud. Follow the directions in the pop-up window to sign in. Once connected, the cloud icon will turn blue. NOTE: Instructors must sign in using a teacher account to enable editing and saving features. If "Save" and "Save as" are disabled in the File menu, contact the Harmonia support to update your account.

Generate Teaching Scores

If you log in with a teacher's account the Teacher icon button and menu will be visible in the app. Click this button to gain access to our in-app score generators that let you quickly create many common kinds of scores for making music theory exercises and lessons. The Teacher menu contains global commands to help you work in the app.

Add Musical Scores

There are three ways to add musical scores to a page. Teachers may:

1. Select a score from the in-app database of 371 harmonized Bach chorales. To add a Bach chorale, click on the music score icon and select from the Bach chorale menu. Search by number, title, key, or meter. Double-click on a chorale to add it to the page.
2. Import a musical score in Music XML format. Once imported, click the music score icon, then select Imported in the drop-down menu near the top of the dialog.
3. Use the in-app Score Generators to add a wide variety of instructional score content .

Add Text

Click on the text icon to add text. A text box editor opens on the right side of the window with basic word processing features and a selection of musical notational symbols. Use text to write instructional content, assignment directions, lessons, etc.

Add Multiple-Choice Questions

Click on the multiple-choice icon to add gradable questions to the page, providing another way of assessing student comprehension of course content. In the editor on the right side of the window, enter a question in the dialog box and type in the answer choices on the blanks below. Add or subtract answer choices by selecting the +/- symbols. Click on the up/down arrows to move answer choice selections to the desired location and select a number from 1-to-8 to create columns for answer choices. Toggle the "Multiple Selections Allowed" to enable multiple choices to be counted correct.

Add Images

Click on the image icon to add pictures, charts, graphs, etc. to a page. Harmonia supports a variety of formats including GIF, JPG, and PNG. Use the menu on the right to justify and resize the image.

Add Video

To add video content, follow these steps:

1. find or upload a video to YouTube or Vimeo.
2. Open Harmonia and select the video strip icon.
3. In the window, drag-and-drop the selected link.
4. To attach the video, open a Harmonia text box and select the video stream in the A/V Resources pull-down menu (located under Media Attachments menu on the right side of the application window). A blue video strip icon will appear in the margin beside the text box.
5. Click on the icon to view the video. Note: Internet connection is required to view video content.

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Add External Audio

Harmonia features high-quality in-app MIDI playback and supports external audio content. Click on the headphone icon and drag-and-drop an audio file in the popup window. To add the audio example to the page, open a text box or music score and select the audio file from the Media Attachments A/V Resources pull-down menu on the right side of the window. A blue headphone icon will appear in the margin. Click on it to listen to the example. Note: Harmonia supports FLAC audio formats. Click here for more information

Questions?

Visit https://harmonia.illiacsoftware.com to download the free Harmonia app and sign up for a teacher account. To access the Try Harmonia! Demo, download the app and log in as a visitor. Try out a variety of instructional content in the Cloud menu.