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Welcome in the Music Theory H5P Sandbox.

On this WordPress site I share content that has been made with H5P. H5p is a tool to make all kinds of interactive content that can be used to enhance education. You can try assignments/exercises that have been made with the H5P plugin for Moodle or WordPress. They are presented here just for illustration. They can be used for informal learning but can also be deployed in a LMS (like Moodle or BrightSpace).

You can find assignments via categories and/or tags.

N.B. This site is continually “under construction”, with all items you can practice and check your answers.

A few words on the exercises/assignments

Bass line listening
A very important skill for any musician is being able to hear bass lines. Without this skill students will remain a low-literate or even illiterate musician. Bass lines are THE key to recognize harmonic patterns (chord changes) in all tonal music. I have taken lines or clips from Goudimel psalms, Bach chorales, Jazz standards, pop songs, church hymns and the like.

Harmonic melodic memory game
When a tile is clicked, the fragment is played and a (small) picture of the score fragment shown. The picture gives a general impression of movement of voices, rhythmic density and so on and is aiming at informal training of aural memory (sound clip) and visual memory (notation patterns). Complexity is varied: 4 lines generate 8 tiles, 8 lines generate 16 tiles and are thus more demanding.

Harmonic analysis:
Being able to handle chord symbols and functional (roman numeral) analysis is an indispensible skill. By putting chord symbols above the grand staff and roman numeral symbols below the grand staff, the link between the vertical and horizontal dimension (relation to a key and tone center) is made.

History
For the time being: simple examples of recognizing portraits/images of composers.
There are plans for a Trivial Pursuit Game based on A History of Western Music by Grout, Burkholder and Palisca.

Interactive videos
In interactive videos several question types can be embedded. The questions are presented when the video stops at a chosen point. In this way musical scores with audio can be presented for questions about musical events.

Keyboard Harmony and Partimento Patterns
I have made several instruction videos based on the magnificent book by Job IJzerman – Harmony, Counterpount, Partimento: A New Method Inspired by Old Masters (OUP 2018). The idea is to use presented prototypes as the starting point for simple keyboard harmony patterns with figuration, to be played in several keys. These exercises can function as stepping stones toward “real” improvisation. Instruction videos of chapter 1 of the IJzerman book are available. Spoken Dutch with subtitles in English.

Outer voices of Bach chorales
In the harmony of music of the so called (extended) common practice the outer voices (bass & soprano) have a key role with regard to the total harmonic texture. All outer voices of (for example) Bach chorales can be seen as examples of two part counterpoint that can be extended to a complete four part setting (SATB). Learning to hear, sing, recognize and write outer voices contributes to awareness and understanding of tonal patterns. Also playing just outer voices of Bach chorales (which should be not to difficult even for non keyboard players…!) is very beneficial for the development of harmonic awareness. Just one chorale each day can take you through almost all of the Bach chorales in one year! Check https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/809566/ayyv