Artusi: What’s New in Artusi (Summer/Fall 2024)

What’s New in Artusi, Summer/Fall 2024

(June 1, 2024–...)

Artusi’s been hard at work over the summer and into the fall. Check out the list of improvements below. Top new features are:

Artusi’s new music theory (“for majors”) textbook, Artusi: Music Theory Now, vol. 1 has been released.
Create suspensions and create neighbor-tone/cambiata exercises.
Identify Chords from Pitch and Chord Factor Identification exercises.
Simpler and More Powerful Interval Selection for Instructors

These are in addition to the top features of Spring 2024 which include:

Major improvements to analysis of uploaded musical scores. All instructors can upload their own images.
Advanced chord identification (including augmented-sixth chords and almost any chord on the piano)
Dictation and Roman Numeral analysis can ask for key identifications
Up to 8 additional assignment types per courses for separating out aural skills, etc.
Even better accessibility: musical examples are available for blind/low-visibility students in braille or as musicxml to work with in MuseScore. More ability to give 1.5x etc. on assignments.

And here’s more of what’s new in the summer:

September 2024

(September 29) Newly available templates and drills for Terms and Symbols, Common Tones (set analysis), and Inversion and Transpositions of Sets.
(September 27) Chord Progressions can now have something other than the chord name displayed using ?hide to hide a label and ??label?? to make a different label instead. For instance: I–??Neighbor 64??IV64–I will expect the student to write but display "Neighbor 64" instead. At present this is a niche feature, but once chord alternates are implemented (November) there will be endless possibilities.
(September 20) Newly created exercises of many types will have better default weighing. Sight-reading/singing exercises and harmonic dictation default to 3 points each (allowing partial credit to be assigned). Chord-factor identification and chord creation get more comparable weights. Species counterpoint and chord progressions are more closely aligned. Over all students' scores will better reflect effort and quality of work.
(September 19) Play along rhythms and MIDI melodies now include warnings about performing over Zoom and Creston systems in addition to Bluetooth headphones. All these systems delay and distort rhythms to make it very difficult to answer these questions.
(September 18) Note lengths in the note-length exercise can now be expressed as mixed numerals like 1+1/2 or 21/3 (=2 1/3). Artusi will figure out what the student intended and not give wrong answers because someone doesn't use improper fractions like 3/2 or 7/3.
(September 16) LTI (Canvas) users have more control over how students start assignments, forbidding assignments opened outside of LTI/Canvas or allowing them to be opened within Artusi alone once Artusi has confirmed that grades will be properly reported.
(September 10) Standard (Generated) instructions have long had "off" or "on" as options. Now there is a third option: "subtle" where your own instructions will be emphasized and generated instructions are hidden unless expanded.
(September 9) Score examples in instructions can now circle notes using "C4_circle(blue)", etc.
(September 2) Instructors can now get a preview of the individual exercises of assignments without "Breaking linkage" to the Artusi curriculum or their previous courses. In the future, deleting individual exercises without breaking linkage will be possible.
(September 1) Beams are displayed by default in these exercises: Missing barlines, Missing rhythm, Play along (MIDI), Note lengths, Note names, Play along with Rhythm. Existing exercises are not changed, just newly created ones.
(September 1) Simpler and More Powerful Interval Selection for Instructors: Instructors who wanted to specify specific intervals to appear in a number of sections (especially interval creation, interval identification) previously had a bewildering set of choices, stemming from Artusi's early days and every modification after that making the process of selecting intervals more and more complex. Now individual intervals can easily be selected, but all the power of the previous system (such as making some intervals appear more often than others, allowing doubly-diminished and other strange intervals) is still possible. Even if you do not configure intervals with this detail in your own assignment, this change will enable new and interesting assignments throughout the Artusi curriculum. (Kudos to Joseph VanderStel who led this project).

August 2024

(August 28) Improved automatic instructions for exercises with only one question. Previous instructions were confusing for Missing Barlines, Missing Rhythm, Note Length, Play along with Rhythm, Hearing Errors in Scales, and Identifying Scales.
(August 26) Descriptions of scores for students with vision disabilities will now be shorter and omit irrelevant information (like duration of notes in scale identification exercises).
(August 23) Institution Name will now automatically be filled in for instructors returning for a new term.
(August 23) Fixed bug where "Copy your Own Course" and "Create Course from Scratch" was grouped with Artusi curriculum.
(August 21) Beaming in 6/4 and 5/8 and other less-common meters is improved.
(August 21) Various tempos in melodic dictation Level 5 have been equalized to make the exercises fairer. If you know any dictation exercise where you think the default tempo is too fast or slow, please let us know (support@artusimusic.com) with a link to the exercise containing the incorrect exercise.
(August 21) Dictation and other exercises that use instruments which do not necessarily decay after their attacks (like wind, voice, and bowed strings) now have a larger separation between repeated unison notes to make dictating rhythm easier.
(August 18) Students will now see the surnames of instructors when choosing a course. It shouldn't be necessary to put the instructor name in the title any more.
(August 17) Chordal Dissonance Resolution exercises (A4, d5, m7 -- like in a dominant-seventh chord) can now be configured to ask about one or two of these dissonances specifically (and not all three). Appearing in Theory I workbook.
(August 17) JSON editing of complex fields is now available in many more places, including Species Counterpoint. This feature is available to "advanced instructors" who program their own special tools for Artusi. If this applies to you, see the Instructor docs for information on how to have the Artusi staff enable this for you.
(August 15) Figured Bass writing exercises now display properly in "progressions" of a single chord. Useful for creating exercises where students have to write a chord given a key, bass note, and figured bass symbols. Used in Theory I workbook
(August 14) New Scale Writing variant: the type of scale and key signature are given, but no tonic. For instance, the staff may have two sharps and the question can be, “melodic minor, ascending, respecting the key signature” and students will write a B melodic minor scale. See Artusi: Music Theory Now Assignments 16 and 17 to see it in use for Renaissance (Church) modes.
(August 13) Sus4 chords are now displayed in chord creation as “sus4” (e.g. Bsus4) rather than “sus” alone.
(August 12) Embellishing tone creation and interval training now allow the duration of the notes to be changed. Changed default for harmonic intervals on two staves to use whole notes (just like one-staff). See Artusi: Music Theory Now Assignment 17 where melodic interval training with half notes mentally prepares students to write second-species counterpoint. Embellishing tone creation with smaller note values can reinforce that some embellishments, such as neighbor tones, are more often used with smaller notes.
(August 11) Two new randomness settings for assignments: assignment changes every year; and every student gets one random assignment but can only submit once (for open-book exam situations). Added clarification for when “changes every semester” changes (Jan. 1 and July 1) and “changes every trimester” (Jan. 1, Apr. 1, and Aug. 1).
(August 9) Note length assignments with compound meter can now decide to measure in “fast” or “slow” counts (2 or 6 beats in ). Previous assignments retain the “slow” default. New assignments default to “fast,” keeping with the general idea that “note length” measures in beats.
(August 7) Augmented 6th chords now intelligently enforce the resolution of when the context requires it.
(August 7) Annotate an image exercises can now have audio files directly embedded in the exercise (rather than just in the instructions).
(August 3) More space for working: info bars at the bottom of the screen now hide themselves when unnecessary.
(August 1) Artusi: Music Theory Now, volume 1 is released. All new Theory I courses will get the new content unless the instructor requests an opt-out. A:MTN is the most up-to-date, technologically enhanced, and diverse music theory textbook ever written.

July 2024

(July 26) Assignment end times are now adjusted according to students’ time accommodations (such as time-and-a-half). Previously, accommodations only affected assignments that were timed from the moment the student opens it.
(July 23) Grading of , , etc. is more intelligent in missing beams. Logical divisions of 2+3, or 2+3+2 etc., are now supported.
(July 20) “Create Pitches” can now explicitly forbid “white-key accidentals” like E and F for use in exercises where black-key sharps and flats have been introduced but not these.
(July 19) Make Student View more clearly defined on the assignment page with a banner and border around the screen. Student View now reflects even more what the student sees.
(July 18) Several improvements to the student experience in MIDI exercises including easier question submitting and navigation between questions.
(July 16) Fix bug where the student font was not appearing beneath scores in Scale Writing, Pitch Identification, Note Length, and Note Type exercises.
(July 14) Display instructor notes on assignment cards on the main menu.
(July 10) Add option to automatically increase the number of questions displayed to students when adding new questions to Multiple Choice and Open-Ended exercises.
(July 9) Out of beta: Identify Chords from Pitch and Chord Factor Identification exercises.
(July 9) The rhythm toolbar in rhythm exercises now supports toggling between note mode and rest mode.
(July 2) New course setting: greatly de-emphasize Artusi Drills on the main menu (so students are encouraged to focus on workbook assignments only).
(July 2) New course setting: opt out of Artusi’s complimentary trial period. Some instructors have asked to not have a trial period so that the course requirements can be emphasized on the first day (and not have to track down students weeks later. By default, all courses still have a free trial period.
(July 1) When cloning a course that is from an old version of an Artusi curriculum instructors have more options for how to import assignments.

June 2024

(June 27) Chord Creation: the editor for specifying how chords are displayed to students now links to documentation in the Instructor Manual.
(June 26) New exercise: Suspension Writing. Students write suspensions above or below a c.f. fragment.
(June 25) Chord Creation exercises now have a setting where students have to specify the quality of the chord.
(June 24) Instructors are now warned when editing instruction text could potentially overwrite edits from a different browser window.
(June 15) More rules are optional in Fifth-Species Counterpoint, making it possible to create easier exercises.
(June 12) Instructions can now embed custom-uploaded audio and multimedia.
(June 10) Instructors can now group assignments into folders.
(June 10) New exercise: Interval Complement Identification. Students see an interval and specify its complement.
(June 6) Third-species: Create double-neighbor and cambiata exercises now available. Minimum numbers of each embellishment can now be required. Instructors can also allow any beat 2/4 interval for practice. Fixed bug preventing single-measure exercises
(June 5) Notation examples in instructions can now specify a different final barline from other measures.
(June 4) 2nd–5th species allow students to edit the later beats in measures before finishing the first, encouraging “working backwards” approaches.
(June 3) Multi-staff musical examples in instructions can now specify a different clef for each staff.
(June 2) Fourth Species: instructors can optionally forbid A4–3 (Augmented fourth) suspensions and specify which suspensions are allowable; perfect for creating a “Create a 7–6 suspension” assignment. Look for these in the next version of the Theory I curriculum.