It all started early in 2001 when Datasonics was contacted by a number of school teachers who were facing the challenge of implementing music technology at their schools.
The Mastering Music - Site License™ includes an unlimited license of Mastering Music for every computer within a school or school district. This is a fixed software cost plus a license fee per student using
the software.
The issues facing those music teachers were:
Limited time to prepare lessons and be creative in extending students
A need to meet individual student needs and assess their performances
A requirement for tools that could be easily mastered by themselves and their students
A product that would assist them to meet the requirements of the curriculum.
Datasonics saw this as an exciting challenge and one that they gladly responded to. However, to ensure that they were developing a product that not only met those teachers’ needs, but those of the broader market, they undertook extensive market research, drawing on schools from a range of educational systems. They were extremely gratified to see that when Mastering Music™ was developed, it generated a high level of excitement amongst teachers when it was launched to the music teaching community worldwide. Early market research in Australia, UK, USA and Canada has confirmed that no comparable product exists in those countries.
Mastering Music™ is an e-learning education software product covering all aspects of the music curriculum – performing, composing and appraising (listening). The product comprises a series of over 400 self-paced, multi-task lessons working in an integrated environment delivering musical outcomes in performance, composition, notation, digital audio, aural training, music theory and film scoring.
One of the advantages of Mastering Music™ is the flexibility it provides teachers to satisfy the total music requirements of the school curriculum for ages 10-18, irrespective of whether teachers:
follow a set curriculum guide; OR
prefer to adopt a personal "start to finish" approach; OR
follow Year Level guidelines.
Each of these is contained in the Music Teacher's Guide that comes with the program.
If you are a school or university that wants to teach music in the computer lab without the need for MIDI keyboards, then you need Mastering Music Site Licence™. Each workstation can be upgraded to use MIDI keyboards if it is required to run in a stand-alone mode for additional composition and publishing activities outside of the lesson environment. This option is called Real Time Extender™.
If you are a laptop school or university, and want to teach music in the classroom using laptops and MIDI keyboards, then you need Mastering Music Laptop Licence™. Each student pays a small annual subscription for the use of Mastering Music™ that is loaded onto their laptop during that academic year.
The Mastering Music product range has several options that can be purchased to customise the installation.
WebConnect™ This licence allows the Mastering Music™ lessons to be loaded onto the institution’s web site and for students to access these from home in order to complete their work. This option requires all students to have Music Master Professional™ loaded onto their laptop or home computer so is appropriate for those institutions with a laptop or student purchase agreement for Music Master Professional™.
Komposa™ As a teacher, you can create your own lessons to augment the excellent library of lessons provided with Mastering Music™. Now you can build from that base to develop lessons that suit your individual requirements and curriculum. Komposa™ gives you the freedom to customise and improvise.
The music lessons have been structured into four learning areas -
Performing (playing songs on your chosen instrument)
Composing (experimenting with creating and editing music)
Publishing (learning about writing and printing notation)
Musicianship (exercises that help to understand the language of music)
Each of these three lesson areas contains a number of lesson topics. Each lesson topic contains:
Multiple lesson levels with increasing degree of difficulty. Each level contains a split screen consisting of:
Lesson Outline - details of the task to be completed
Lesson Task - activity screen to complete the task
Lesson Help - help pages to assist in completing lesson tasks (text hyperlinks on lesson outline)
Lesson Curriculum - aims & objectives, activities, outcomes & assessment for that lesson topic
Mastering Music™ comes with two guides to assist in installation and usage.
Mastering Music™ Teacher's Guide
Mastering Music™ IT Manager's Guide
