Teaching with LiveScores

For many years now, digital sheet music has been an integral part of the musical landscape, particularly in education, where it is a valuable asset. You can enrich them as you see fit with video or audio accompaniment, annotate them digitally and, above all, share them with your students.

Here's the thing: while the value of digital sheet music is well established, you still need to be able to get it! And while sites like IMSLP or Mutopia make it easy to find PDF scores, finding "digital scores" online in a format compatible with your various software (the universal MusicXML format, for example) has proved more complicated... until now.

Thanks to Maestria, the powerful artificial intelligence technology developed by Newzik, it's now possible to bring any of your paper or PDF scores to life by transforming them into interactive LiveScore. How about a score that comes to life?

An animated score?

What is a LiveScore?

A LiveScore is a new medium that combines the advantages of a PDF, MusicXML and MIDI file. It enables users to enjoy a more advanced and even more interactive musical experience.

Thanks to the MIDI integrated into LiveScore, you can play and listen to your score. You'll learn the language of music faster and improve your sight-reading skills.

You take control of your score. With just one click, transpose the tempo of your accompaniment, change the tempo of your piece and practice live. You'll see, it's kind of fun to take on the role of conductor for a while.

Above all, your song can be rearranged and modified at any time, as it is now compatible with all notation software.

This new musical experience lets you, the musician, enjoy an enhanced version of your scores.

Now that we've understood what a LiveScore is, let's look at three ways you can use them in your teaching.

Playing with an orchestra from your bedroom

Newzik makes it possible to add audio and video directly to your pdf scores! This is very practical when you want to add value to a score. As a teacher, it enables you to pass on to your students a wide variety of sources and enrich their musical experience. It's a time-consuming process. First, you have to record yourself with the audio from the digital device, play the score, save the audio in your score storage software and finally add it to the score for use during the lesson.

It can sometimes be a bit long, you might say...

It's possible to make this more interactive and much faster once your score becomes a LiveScore. With LiveScores, your students will feel like they're playing with a full orchestra! You launch your score and play along. This way, your students can play their piece and feel as if they're playing with a symphony orchestra.

Create new arrangements

Now you can work with any score and transpose it for the different instruments as you quickly rehearse.

This new digital score format lets you convert any paper score into a format readable by all notation software. Thanks to the MIDI format, you can export your score to various music-editing software programs and edit them. This eliminates all the initial work of manually entering the original paper score or PDF.

Newzik's software will analyze the score's pdf and convert it into XML format, compatible with the various notation software packages available today. MusicXML is a universal exchange format compatible with all notation software, whether free or fee-based. This means you can quickly recreate an arrangement from a score you have in paper or PDF format, and adapt it to your teaching needs.

From score to full sound rendering in your DAW

From the Newzik platform you can play different audios or integrate videos to enrich your scores. Unfortunately, the sound is not always optimal.

Thanks to LiveScores, you can retrieve your midi file and play it in a DAW such as Logic or Soundtrap. You'll be able to work on it with your students and get a much better sound quality.

Here's a list of list of the most efficient DAWs for working with digital scores.

As you can see, LiveScores offer a completely new music-reading experience. You can now bring your scores to life directly from your Newzik Web account. If you don't yet have a Newzik account, don't forget that you can take advantage of a 30-day free trial of Newzik Education, so make the most of it!