Color the Music

Hey all,

I wanted to take a moment to talk about something I do that I think is fairly unique and how it can be applied beyond my specific instance.

As a quick refresher, I teach a class called Beethoven's Buddies Clementi's Colorful Chimes Class (BB Chimes). In this class, kids play hand chimes that typically look like this.

However, mine look like this

What are those colors for you ask? Well I use the colors to help students recognize their note in relation to that color. For further example. My "scores" look something like this. 

There are a couple things to notice beyond just the colors, so lets get those out of the way. First is the fact that the time signature is notated as a number over a quarter note instead of another number. This means of notation is common enough that we don't need to spend too much time on it. Next is the use of numbers inside of the colored Quarter Notes. The numbers directly correspond with the octave numbers notated on the Chimes themselves. Unfortunately, the picture I used above was a work in progress picture of the chimes. Meaning I was changing from the dots to bands, and the numbers 1, 2, 3, to the octave numbers.

One more notable aspect of this style of notation is the use of standard notation. The quarter notes resemble quarter notes, the overall structure looks identical to a single line staff and the quarter rests look like rests. These are important because they are subconsciously helping the students recognize music.

With all of that said, I want to focus on the aspect of colors and melodic notation.

Why colors? Why not just make the students read regular notation?

Well let me tell you.

In the disabilities community, the most prevalent means of teaching is visual. One example of visual learning would be Boardmaker. Boardmaker is a tool utilized in the special education world to reinforce concepts such as sit, their turn, my turn, I'm mad, etc. the reason these are so valuable is because the child can SEE what is happening instead of having to infer what is going to happen. Does this make sense? So when we remove this idea of language, and instead focus on visual recognition, students can experience a making music and understanding music at an accelerated pace

We now need to ask, if colors are so good, how do we know what colors to use?

There is no agreed upon color scheme for this next part, but I propose using the following.

C: Red

D: Orange

E: Yellow

F: Green

G: Light Blue

A: Dark Blue

B: Purple.

First off, this follows the idea of a rainbow starting at C. Second, if you have students who do not play your hand chimes, hand bells will often come in this color scheme as well. In the interest of inclusion, WE SHOULD STANDARDIZE THIS!

How else can color assist in musical learning?

Lets break this down. When we are tasked with a challenging musical concept, do we just continue to grit our teeth and push through to learn it?

NO! NOT AT ALL!!

We slow down, we break it down, we deconstruct it. This begs the question then, what are we deconstructing by using colors. Well, we are removing the brains need to respond to two different languages (Rhythm and pitch) and are instead responding to one language (Rhythm) and recognizing something else (Color).

We can take this a step further by beginning to also implement color into standard staff notation which would look like this.

Notice how we are combining the colors with standard notation. If we already know how to read colors, than we can easily move to reading this because we have something to recognize.

Now music is definitely all about inclusivity, so why don't we make learning music more inclusive?

Bold statement, I know. But we NEED to be thinking of alternative means of music education for ALL TYPES of people. Not just the ones that can "understand" the regular way of learning. (I'm looking at you Every Good Boat Does Float….. )

This is a lot, but just some of my thoughts on alternative music education. Specifically, using colors to help learn music.

Plus, you get some pictures to look at.

Cheers,

Noel