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For the little mozart in each of us, harmonic vision lets you compose--or as the software says, "doodle"--on almost any mac or pc with a cd-drive and 256-colour monitor. It also teaches "lessons", if you can stomach the animated, white-haired mad professor complete with horrible fake cherman accent,and charts your progress through "games" of beat and tempo, rhythm, melody, harmony, sharps and flats and the like. Unfortunately the interface is poor--you can't see a whole list of the lessons, for example, but have to scroll through them chronologically--and the lessons and games are nothing short of excruciating. Possibly if they had put in some decent pop music these might hold your attention longer, but you will find you soon tire of clicking on your mouse in time to the beat of a bach overture, for example. one thing that is exciting is the doodle pad, though even here it's very difficult to control the distance (i.E. Time) between the animated, smiley-faced notes as you drag and drop them on a musical staff. You'll need either a mac running os 7.5 Or better with 24mb hard disk space and 12mb ram, or one running os 8 or better with 24mb hard disk space and 32mb ram, both with virtual memory off. It will run on windows 3.1 (And up) on a pc if it has an mpc-compatible sound card or general midi, with 24mb hard disk space and 8mb ram (16 for win95/98). You can also configure it to give lessons and play games using a proper midi keyboard. --liz bailey |
