Teach Music to Kids!

English and music - an apt analogy

Subject: English

Lesson 1 - letters of the alphabet, sounds each letter makes

Lesson 2 - commas, periods, colons, semi-colons, other punctuation

Lesson 3 - Paragraph forms OR perhaps parts of speech—noun, verb, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs, etc

Lesson 4 - Longer paragraph forms OR grammar, concision, clarity, eloquence,

Lesson 5 - Feet, half-lines, caesurae, etc.

Lesson 6 - Definitions of the above

Question: What does a child gain from learning the above lessons before he or she can learn to speak? Nothing! Zero! Zip! Nada!

Subject: Music

So, take a look at this picture of a well-known learning site and think about how you’d learn this if you hadn't already learned to perform scores of songs and learned to improvise (just like we do in language by 2 or 3 years old)?

What would you learn?

Nothing! Zero! Zip! Nada! Scratch! Donut hole! A vast black hole of nothing musical at all. Just information. So, can I ask that music educators please stop teaching music this way until children’s EARS are “literate”, and their MOUTHS are musically rhythmic and tuneful. All the rest (that is, the stuff in this picture) is completely wasted information until that point.

Can you hear me? I hope you’re not reading letters here, but rather seeing patterns of letters called words. And, those words create meaning as they’re placed together in a way that hopefully has thinking occur at some level. Am I mad? Yes. Probably both kinds.

Send feedback. I want to know what you think. And, please check out some of my other posts here and elsewhere.

Thanks! 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TeachMusicToKids

IndieGoGo - http://igg.me/at/teachmusictokids

@rizzrazz

"This music learning app is such a great 'idea!' Can’t wait to use it!"

These comments are common and very encouraging. But, it’s short of what we need. I’ve been reassessing our IndieGoGo campaign to date and at some point, we knew we needed help. So, we got some.

My partner and I just got off the phone with an entrepreneur and business coach* who was very generous of her time and talent. What great advice she gave us! *(Cool lady and one of her clients is Johnson and Johnson.)

First, she GETS it. She really loves, loves, loves our idea and so much about what we’re doing. She says our app we’re developing has so many positives—reaching children all over the world, that they can learn substantive music content and skills while playing an engaging game. “Moms will love this,” she said. She says we have amazing credibility and a fabulous idea.

What’s missing? Our message isn’t working quite like it needs, or it’s not getting out there to enough people—folks like our new coach who really gets it. Also, we absolutely need a finished prototype that would make it easier for people to understand what this app will actually do, so it will be easier to understand, get feed back, and gain traction. Ideas are easy. What’s hard is getting them into people’s hands and reiterating until we have it the way it needs to be done right. We’re bootstrapping this, making our dollars stretch far, but we are asking for your support. Give us your feedback and/or money. And please share with your communities. They may “get it” and help us create a more musical world together.

Click here if you haven't seen what we're up to:  IndieGoGo campaign We appreciate you taking a look.

Patterns are the reason we understand anything—music included!

First, take a banana. Open up and smell it. Is it green, or over ripe, or somewhere in between? You "know" with your nose. You detect the smell and then compare that smell with other bananas you've smelled in the past. You can do the same with your eyes. You compare what you have seen in the past with the banana you have in your hand. The patterns that make you discern edible from inedible are automatically stored in your brain from previous experiences. Are you seeing the WHOLE banana? Probably not very much of it at all. You likely focus immediately on the badly bruised spots or the string hanging off of it. You're not taking in every cell. That's too much to comprehend. You detect the important patterns. Almost without thinking. That's very cool when you think about it. Ok, enough with the bananas and on to music.

Music. When you listen to music, are you hearing every note? Hearing? Maybe. That's physical. The sound IS hitting your ear—your cochlea is transmitting it through the auditory nerve to the auditory cortext and some other things between the air (on which the sound travels) and your brain.  Are you understanding every note? Almost impossible. You are comparing the patterns you are hearing (of tones and rhythms among other elements) with patterns you've heard in the past. Or in the case of reading language, 你是在比較你所看到的你已經看到在過去的模式的模式。Maybe you need that translated: You are comparing the patterns you are seeing with patterns you've seen in the past. You are NOT reading letters. You comprehend your language based on the patterns of letters you recognize as words. . . that carry meaning, but we must add one more thing—context. Context is decisive. It makes all the difference. If I said "to," or "two," or "too," or "tu" (fr.), which one would you hear? It depends completely on the context. Patterns and context are crucial in language and so they are in music.

Not letters, patterns! I've harped on this before but music educators teach note names (analogous to letters in language) often before we've taught patterns, or words. It's akin to teaching the alphabet to a child who cannot speak his own language yet. What does a 'K' mean? Nothing. In music, what does an 'A' mean? Nothing. Unless it's inside a pattern, say 'F A C,' but 'F A C' is still incomplete. There is no context—unless you gave it one yourself. So, I'm going to tell you that 'F A C' is the IV chord in C major. Now it has everything you need to understand it.

Music understanding is rooted in lots of songs and chants and movement and dance, but MUST eventually move to the understanding of patterns. How they are the same. How they are different. How the same patterns can sound in different contexts. The importance of patterns is hard to overstate. It happens to be how you can even read what I'm writing. Also, how you can recognize a loved one walking down the street. And of course, whether or not you should eat that banana.

Your brain is hard wired to make patterns in order to understand the world. Music must have as one of its cornerstones the teaching of tonal and rhythm patterns. Otherwise, we leave music understanding only to those who have high enough degree of innate ability that they can do it for themselves. I prefer another world where it's possible that all of us have access to understanding music—through patterns.

The Pitch (the sales kind, not the note). So, why not an app that teaches and scores you on your ability to hear and reproduce many of the most important patterns in music? There's no reason, except that its development needs to be funded. Would you consider helping us? Any amount is welcome. $5 even. 

Visit this campaign and see what we're up to. See the videos of what kids can do when they are taught to understand music through the teaching of patterns. It's quite amazing. Perks are available. Get on the ground floor of what could be a revolutionizing supplement to music education. Click here: http://igg.me/at/teachmusictokids.

And, thank you. Anybody that reads this blog is my kind of person.