How Do I Keep Music Students in the Modern World?

By Steve Freeman

As music teachers, we compete daily with our students busy schedules and extracurricular activities. Add video games and social media into the mix and the battle for practice time is lost. How many times have we all heard “I didn’t have time to practice this week because…..” Now more than ever it seems like music lessons are viewed as just another weekly drop off activity that does not require any practice outside of the lesson. Students want instant gratification so what do they do? they jump on the internet to learn a song that they are not prepared to learn by someone not qualified to teach it, I hate that!

Like most of you I am constantly searching for practice tools to keep students motivated and engaged so they will continue taking lessons. There is a demand within the teacher community to find a solution to this problem. To fulfill this need, a group of well known educators have developed a new practice platform called Achieve Music. AM gives students a live performance evaluation during their home practice time. Practice results are graphically displayed on a computer or mobile device and can be monitored by the teacher and parent. Low scores and infrequent practice will alert the teacher and parent to intervene, all results can be viewed on a student dashboard.

Achieve Music provides instructors a seeded library of content including method book favorites, lead sheets, and exercises that can be assigned to students via email.
Even cooler, instructors can upload their own original exercises and record audio examples direct to Achieve Music without needing an interface or special cables. All content to the Achieve Music platform has the MatchMySound assessment technology attached to create a game like environment, truly an answer and solution to make learning easier, more efficient and fun.

Why is Feedback So Important in Music Education

Anyone who learns a musical instrument wants to know how is he/she doing. In other words, learners need feedback. Sadly, two of the most popular learning models today – online learning and learning by textbooks – tend to omit it almost completely. But what about the traditional and luxurious one-by-one teaching? While we must admit that this model is all about feedback, it is actually suffering from the same problem. For example, consider the 10 000 hour rule: if a student would practice only in the class and the lessons are twice a week, it would take 96 years to acquire the expert skills. So obviously most of the practicing is still done alone and without professional feedback. One may then reply ‘So what, it’s been like that for a thousand years!’, but the enormous and unprecedented competition that we have today puts musicians under considerably more pressure than ever before. People have less time and, at the same time, thanks to mass media are also too well aware of exactly how good the top players in their game are. That is the driving force behind finding more effective solutions for music education at all levels.

Human and Automated Feedback

Alright then, more and better feedback might help. But where to find such a super patient (while also good yet affordable) music teacher that stands by while a student is practicing and ensures that everything is done correctly? Would anyone want to practice under constant surveillance at all? Experimenting with automated feedback in music education already has some years of history and research suggests that the best results are obtained if human and automatic feedback are combined. There are certain things that humans do better than the algorithms and vice versa. For example, our MatchMySound can be very picky when it comes to technical details: correctness of intonations, length of notes (rhythms, articulations), accuracy and changes of speed. Even after 15 years of teaching and 2000+ students, I’m nowhere close to the level of feedback the algorithm gives. Not in precision or speed, and definitely not in cost.

Sound Recognition vs Comparing to Etalons

We are not the only ones aiming to fix the broken feedback link in music education. Existing solutions using sound recognition tend to compare user input to some form of notation: MIDI, standard sheet music or tablature. We believe that we have improved the situation a great deal as we are comparing the students’ audio input to what their teachers have recorded. On one hand it means that students do not have to watch the screen while playing. The computer is just an assistant: sitting quietly and listening. But most importantly – comparing the audio files of the teacher and student makes it possible to spot possible differences in great detail. Plus, the motivating effect of a teacher as a role model should not be underestimated. Exactly how often did your teacher play your homework fluently in front of you while you were studying?

Teachers Need Feedback, too!

Last but not least, while recording the audio etalons to their students, the teachers also get feedback on their own playing. Maybe even more importantly, the teachers also get feedback about the quality of their exercises. For example, some of their exercises may be completed too easily while the others take too much time to be mastered fluently. For many teachers, it is hard to admit that the exercise they have assigned is too hard for the student, so we just advise practicing more instead of adapting the exercise plan. That’s what I hated most about my own studies. Although I believe that there is always a lot to learn, leaving the classroom and knowing that I still cannot play the instrument although I had practiced 2 years, 6 years, ultimately 20 years, really killed the motivation. That is also where we can see that giving objectively measurable homework can help to motivate music students. Yes, these are just intonations, articulations, rhythms and tempos that we can measure today (with great accuracy, though!) but there will be no art until you have learned your scales and studies!

For those who are accustomed to reading research papers, here are two published research articles by Kristo Käo and Margus Niitsoo:

MatchMySound: Introducing Feedback to Online Music Education

Optimizing the Interaction Between a Self-Learning Guitar Student and a Sound Recognition Based Educational Game

Results of a Survey: Can Hobby Players Read Music

Some time ago we held a poll on a popular online guitar school’s website and asked visitors how do they learn their new pieces and first we asked them a very simple question: How do you mostly read new pieces? This is what we got:

Seems that we have an intelligent audience because the majority can read music 🙂 OK, these are mostly grown up people (mean age 27 years, 66% male) and this is they way it should be. To verify the results and to see if anything has changed, we repeated the poll a year later and got very similar results:

Here we have both polls together and it seems pretty safe to assume that these are the proportions that one could use when planning a product for hobby guitarists:

Then I thought: ‘Wait a minute, we asked how they learn mostly, but it can be that some people read both tab and standard notation.’ Again, we just asked them. This is what I got:

Seems like we were right – of course there are people who read both notations. And it looks like most of the people are happy with what they have as only about 15% say they don’t read music but would like to. Of course, the picture would be very different for pianists and string players as they simply don’t use tablature.

Rhythm, Meter, Tempo – What’s the Difference

When we started working on automatic feedback then pretty soon we had to start answering questions about the difference of some qualities of a sound. For example, when we talk about evaluating one’s timing then are we talking about rhythm, tempo or meter? All very different aspects. So what are they?

To produce rhythm, we need at least two notes, and they should not be played very far from each other in time. If I play one note today and the next one tomorrow, it won’t be perceived as rhythm. Rhythm is what characterizes the relations between lengths and pitches of notes.
Meter is produced by regular recurrence of stressed and unstressed beats. The rule of thumb says that that the first beat of a bar is always stressed. However, there are several types of dances where the stress is elsewhere.
Tempo is used to characterize how quickly it all is happening – the greater the tempo, the shorter each note will get, and vice versa.

If there is a dot next to the note, it will add 50% to its duration. For instance, a dotted quarter note would be the length of a quarter plus an eighth.

In time signature, the more important number is the upper one – it shows how many beats there are in a bar. Time signature C means 4/4. This is an ancient time signature, abbreviation from common time, and it is indeed the most common time signature.

One important feature of the MatchMySound automatic feedback algorithm is that in addition to assessing pitch it listens to the timing of the player and indicates where things go wrong (or, let’s not say ‘wrong’ but ‘different’)