Winter/Spring courses are about to start, and Artusi’s been very active since the last time courses began!

Here are our new major features as you start your 2025 Winter/Spring courses (October 2024–January 2025).

• Unit 4 of Artusi: Music Theory Now has been released, covering the first 6 lessons of Theory II (Dominant Harmony)
• Students can choose their own Roman numerals in selected Chord Progression exercises.
• Interactive form diagrams are coming soon to instructors!
• Fill in the Blank and Open-Ended Questions now support grading rubrics.
• And so much more listed below!

For features since January 31, 2025, check out What’s New in Artusi (Spring 2025).

For our biggest features before October 2024, check out the Recap of Summer and early Fall 2024 which includes:

• 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

Here’s everything significant we’ve been up to:

• (Throughout January) Newly Revamped Theory II curriculum has been released, currently combining legacy assignments with brand new assignments and lessons from Music Theory Now: Volume 2.  Lessons 26–31 (Unit 4: Extending Dominant Functions) were the first to be released.
• (Throughout January) Improvements to form diagrams: overlapping sections, height of individual rows, sections with no form (especially helpful for spoken word sections)
• (January 30) Add warnings when editing a progression will also delete an attached score. (Advanced chord-progression usage)
• (January 22) Updated our Getting Started page, “How It Works” page, and our Assignment Editor, and Creating a Course videos with new features.
• (January 21) “Melody Compare” exercises (fix wrong notes, etc.) now have an option to not play the note the student has entered, for a harder and more traditional “desk dictation” style of assignment.
• (January 18) Instructors can now click on “Draft/Active” badges to switch status.
• (January 17) User interface uses red and yellow more often to show dangerous choices.
• (January 15) Inter-assignment links are now available for pointing to another Lesson or Workbook where the link will move if the assignment moves.
• (January 11) Pentatonic scale writing can use “given scale degree” from an underlying diatonic context (for jazz, etc.)
• (January 9) Instructor Review hides reviewed answers by default (improved Feb. 12)
• (January 8) Allow common-practice style cambiata and double neighbor tones (where the direction of the “fifth” note is irrelevant) in third and fifth species counterpoint.  Allows training in later Classical/Romantic styles or to make a less-strict third species assignment.
• (January 7) Exercises and Assignments can now have very long HTML titles, which are useful for inputting RomanNumerals etc. in them.

• (Throughout December) Several improvements and new features added to form diagrams. To see form diagrams in action, check out Artusi’s latest textbook, Music Theory Now: Volume 2, coming spring 2025!
• (December 18) Fill-in-the-Blank and Open-Ended Questions now support grading rubrics: add a note that might be helpful to other instructors when grading student responses to a question. Colleagues will see these notes when they grade responses from the Review Questions page of the gradebook. In addition, Fill-in-the-Blank exercises now let you specify custom feedback that students see when submitting particular responses. 
• (December 13) Practice/example questions now can be used in these sections:
  • Bass Consonances
  • Chord Creation
  • Harmonic Dictation
  • Interval Writing (and aural variant)
  • Key Signature Writing
  • Neo-Riemannian Operations
  • Twelve-Tone Row Manipulations
  • Transpose Melody (and variants)
• (December 11) When students receive partial credit on a question they now see the number of points earned in the question header.
• (December 10) Chord Progressions: you can let students provide any Roman numeral using the * (“wildcard”) symbol. For example: I-*-V will let students input any Roman numeral for the middle chord. Artusi checks the student’s Roman numeral against the notes they wrote.
• (December 5) Chord Progression exercises can now let students write their own chords and Roman numerals. Look for more student choice coming to Artusi Theory II. (Technical matters: add a % symbol to a progression to create an input box that students fill in. Use the ? symbol to indicate acceptable inputs. For example: I-?IV%-V creates a progression where students are required to write “IV” for the middle chord. (This would be inferred from your instructions.) You can also choose a different label to display for the middle chord: I-??Predominant??IV\ii\ii6%-V will display “Predominant” to students and expect them to write one of IV, ii, or ). 
• (December 2) Changed “denied” enrollment status to “unenrolled.” Someone who has an “unenrolled” status no longer has access to your course and there is no record of their past work in your gradebook. You can re-enroll a student at any time by changing their status back to “student.”

• (November 30) Annotate an Image: Artusi prevents uploading a new image or resizing an existing image when it will cause existing annotations to exceed the visible area.
• (November 30) Fixed confusing link colors in assignment listers in the gradebook.
• (November 29) Species exercises have a new setting “allow antiparallel motion” that creates an exception for parallel unison, fifth, and octave violations when they are anti-parallel (contrary motion) parallels. 
• (November 29) Bug fix: when Chord Progressions are written with instructor-provided notes (e.g. the soprano or first chord is given), Artusi now only transposes the progression within the tessitura specified in the “Allowable Ranges” setting.
• (November 29) Custom assignment names (e.g. renaming “Quiz” to “Exam”) now appear across the entire site, including the gradebook.
• (November 29) A dropdown now lets you create a new assignment of any type directly from the main menu. 
• (November 27) Bug fix: Artusi now has more guardrails for transposing chords in Chord Identification exercises: chords that are spaced too wide for any clef will trigger an error, and chords are never transposed beyond a reasonable ledger-line range.
• (November 20) You can now create interactive form diagrams in exercises and instruction text. This is an advanced feature: the Artusi team will release a tutorial on how to create your own form diagrams in 2025. To see form diagrams in action, check out Artusi’s latest textbook, Music Theory Now: Volume 2, coming spring 2025!
• (November 1) Fixed a bug where editing notes with ties caused the tie to permanently disappear. This was previously a problem in exercises where rhythm is given and students only need to provide pitch, such as Transpose Melody, Fix Wrong Notes In A Melody, and some Melodic Dictation exercises.

• (October 25) For Canvas users: manually adjusting a student’s score now automatically updates the student grade on Canvas.
• (October 9) Scale Pitch Patterns now displays pitch patterns using the movable system from your course settings page. (We made the same improvement to Identify Scale Degrees earlier in 2024.)