The world has moved forward and music has been left behind. A population who before the invention of public radio would read countless books and newspaper articles to inform, entertain, and educate themselves has now after quite some time replaced those activities with video and radio. The information received then would surely have been similar to today’s, but the mode of listening is the key difference. Radio and video content hypnotize the listener into a passive and receptive state. All the better for the advertisers, but much to the worse for meaningful engagement with said information. This mode of listening has poisoned our music for the general public. The music pushed in today’s society has been engineered to maximize its hypnotic and emotional effects in an attempt to influence a large portion of the populace. People hear more music than ever before, while meaningful engagement with music, it seems to us, is at an all-time low for any modern society. For music to regain its ground, a new more interactive, more dynamic, and more meaningful mode of communication will be required. Music education needs an update.
The fullness of music comes from how it changes and how it moves. Standard forms of educational material don’t reflect this reality. An exercise in a textbook can’t correct itself, or adequately explain why something is the case. It just is the case. The ideas in the mind of a textbook’s author will never be accurately reflected in the mind of its reader. Music exists somewhere between a listener’s mind and their vibrating eardrums. What more could be said about it? A question like “what is music?” will never be that interesting outside of a philosophy course, but for a musician, are there any questions worth asking? Musicians greatly admire performers who are deeply engaged with their material, scholars who plunge the depths of music to find valuable insights, and composers who create music that could only possibly have been written by them. What is the essential quality that these three individuals share? They all possess an intellectual and deeply intuitive understanding of how music works. This is the only musical knowledge worth communicating.
Students are born into and shaped by the world as it is. One may wish it were different, but that doesn’t change the reality we, as music teachers, have been thrown into. Digital attention grabbers and dopamine depleting social media machines have made our jobs much more difficult; social media companies engineer their apps to maximize the number of seconds your student spends on it per day. This directly competes with our stated goal as teachers, to guide our student’s musical development. How can we guide their development if all the time they should’ve spent practicing was wasted on social media instead? Obviously it’s all hopeless! So, let’s just give up, right? Or, maybe we can try to better understand the situation in hopes of finding a solution? What is it that makes social media so engaging, anyway? Obviously, interacting with other humans is preferable to not doing so, but interacting with people you know seems to have an even more powerful effect. Ironically, this seems like the opposite of the serious musician trope. You know, the one who locks themselves away and avoids any and all interactions with others while practicing incessantly. Most people aren’t misanthropic and actually prefer interacting with the people they know, who knew?
What better place for our students to find musical friends than in our own studio? And what better way to motivate our students than to make their ability to participate in that community contingent upon the effort they put in? Social rewards and punishments can be extremely motivating for anyone, let alone younger students. By the way, there’s a reason why slot machines in casinos are so loud and obnoxious when somebody wins, it motivates the people who hear it to gamble more money! With the problem of motivation mostly solved, we can focus on the part that we actually care about, helping our students deeply understand music. Sadly, telepathy isn’t real. But if it did exist, it would be a great way to help students understand what all those textbooks are talking about. This problem of communicating how music works is still a problem even if the student were as motivated as possible to figure it out. How do we relay a complex concept like how to harmonize a chorale tune to our student? Well, you would say, the first thing you do is read these four textbooks, then we can get started. And it goes without saying that every student thinks this process is ZERO fun! Most musicians suffer valiantly through this process and forget all about it when they’re through. But as teachers we should ask ourselves, how do we solve it? What if we replaced this arduous process with something fun? What if the chorale exercise could help the student along as they go, like training wheels? Wouldn’t that become more dynamic, more interactive, more like a game?
Features of The Platform
- Studio Management Tools
- Create musical courses
- Enroll your students in courses
- Setup your student’s daily routine
- Setup lesson schedules and send invoices
- Integrated music notation editor
- Innovative notation editor design for fast note input
- Integrates into musical worksheets
- Both teacher and student can use the editor
- Easy to create musical examples for the worksheet
- Automatic chorale analysis and evaluation
- Automatic and instantaneous analysis of chorale
- Analysis shows colored highlight boxes
- Mouse hover shows extra information
- Automatic grading of chorale exercises (no more tedious manual grading)
- Whiteboard collaboration
- Share a synchronized editor over the internet
- Load music into the editor
- Partner can see your mouse cursor
- Above chorale analysis features work as normal
Teacher Walkthrough
Course Creation Walkthrough
Current Limitations and Future Direction
The platform is currently skewed in favor of students who are ready to read expository prose and music notation fluently. This problem will be solved in subsequent updates to the platform where flattening out the degree of difficulty on the path to chorale harmonization will be the primary focus.
The music editor is complex and our fanciest features are tied to it. For example, our automatic analysis engines for chorales and species counterpoint are necessarily tied to the editor. We will explore features in the future that are less complicated and focus on the fun while still delivering the music education outcome we desire.