Update: see a more formal draft of my thesis proposal.
For my NYU masters thesis in Music Technology, I’m designing a beginner-oriented music learning app for the iPad and similar devices. It will approach music the way I wish I had been taught it, and the way I’ve been teaching it to my private students.
I’m motivated in this project by a few axiomatic beliefs:
- Everyone is born with the capacity to learn music. That capacity just needs to be activated in the right way.
- Anyone can and should participate in music actively. Like cooking or sports, music need not be totally mastered to benefit the participant, and it should definitely not be the exclusive province of specialists.
- Beginners should study music they’re familiar with, and that they like.
- Music teaching for beginners should follow an Afrocentric paradigm that relates to pop, rock and hip-hop. That means starting with rhythm, and treating melodic instruments as percussion.
So here’s what this means for music teaching.
- Beginners should learn pentatonics first, then mixolydian. Music education customarily begins with the major scale, but pentatonics and mixolydian are closer to pop, rock, hip-hop and dance common practice.
- Beginners should work modally for a long time. Being constrained to a certain unvarying group of notes frees up mental bandwidth to think melodically and rhythmically. The best mode to work in is the ambiguous major/minor tonality of the blues. Again, this reflects the majority of the American mainstream.
- Only after becoming familiar with blues should students embark on the major scale and diatonic harmony. Traditional music theory pedagogy is based on rules laid down in the eighteenth century. While these rules are of historical interest, their conflict with current music makes them tedious and alienating.
The app will start with drum programming, giving you templates for basic dance styles (hip-hop, techno, rock) and letting you customize them. Once you have some mastery of loop programming and rhythms, the app takes you into basic MIDI sequencing, first with single-note basslines, then simple pentatonics, and on to chords. For the visual aesthetic, I plan to avoid skeuomorphism entirely. The interface will consist entirely of geometric shapes in flat colors and large text. Here’s a concept image:
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