Using Different Colors for Different Notes - OPINIONS PLEASE!

[KL]

We will be adding a new icon set to LMs which will be regular notes, except using rainbow colors - ie., C will be red, D will be orange, E will be yellow, etc.

For the full range of colors, please see the attached "BrillKids Rainbow Colors" powerpoint file (bottom of this post). Notice that we will have different colors for black keys too.

See Rainbow Colors in action:

If you want to see it in action, please DOWNLOAD and open/run the attached Rainbow-notes.lmss file to import a rainbow icon set into your LMs. (Note: black keys do not have different colors - we will add this function before launch.)

To apply it to all your lessons, use the OVERRIDE function:

- Press the Override button on the Play Panel at the bottom, so that the button is green.

- Click on the Settings button next to it

- Click on "Display & Sound"

- Tell LMs you want to override all icons by clicking on the "Icon:" label so that the red light turns green.

- Click on the icon menu on the right to search for BK Rainbow Colors. Click on "Icon only" and "Sets" and scroll down to find it.

- Press Save.

Now, for all lessons showing notes on the staff, the note heads will show the BK Rainbow Colors instead.  You can go back to the original by just turning Override OFF.


Discussion:

NOW HERE ARE MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU:

- Should we incorporate Rainbow colors into the curriculum?

- If so, how much?


MY THOUGHTS:

- If your objective is to teach your child to read notes on the musical staff, then I think having different colors for different notes is a distraction and conveys a false association.  Instead of noticing that the pitch changes depending on where the note is in relation to the staff lines, the focus may be purely on the note color, with the note position ignored, either partly or completely.  This is actually the reason why I had initially resisted using note colors in the curriculum.

- If your objective is to train the EAR to recognize pitch, then I believe a color association would be very helpful when starting out.  The more associations there are to something, the easier it is for us to remember it.  I believe this is scientifically proven as a general concept, and also common sense.  This, I believe, is also the same reason why solfege hand gestures help children learn solfege, why the Eguchi method also associates colors with chords, and why several other systems also adopt different colors for different notes (both on the keyboard and as written notes on the staff).

- I believe it's more important to train the ear, than it is to read notes on the staff.  Luckily, I don't think it has to be an either/or.  I think one idea is to start with training the ear (ie., use note colors predominantly) for even the entire first 2 semesters, and then remove the colors in Sem3+4 and start getting them to associate pitch purely with the position on the musical staff.

Either way, you will be able to choose, using the Override function described above.  However, I would like to decide which approach we take by default in the curriculum, so I'd like to get as much input as possible asap to decide this.

So, what do you think?

[Mandabplus3]

Hmmm I am not paticulalrly for or against the colour as yet. My thoughts so far
Firstly I don't know if the colours my kids use at school are these rainbow colours, but I think it would be fairly safe to assume that for now. I really need an interview with the music teacher soon I think. 
So would I set them as a permanent feature if I could? ..well in all honesty probably not, now that I think about it. I wouldnt want to replace the random icons my kids love so much with one icon always the same. I would need a variety of different icons all in the right colours. So each colour icon could have a group of random shapes and objects to randomly display. Is that even possible? or maybe all spider man icons could be DO
I would love if one section could be set to play always in the colours though.
I can see merit in gradually fazing them out, but think they need to be fazed out either before or after you switch from solfege to CDE, definately not both at the same time. So i suggest don't do both during term 3, colours could stay in the note letters through the first part of semester 3, for kids to use as an anchor point.
Just so you know where I am coming from, my aim is to teach music pitch (ear training) while learning to read notes. I think a year of daily teaching solfege should be plenty and may need notes in CDE sooner. I love solfege and we use them for our softmozart lessons, but I think as my kids are older they will actually find knowing the CDE positions on the treble and base staff quite a usable skill at school and outside school activities. Perhaps the option to switch between them would be good.

[lois1]

Very impressed, I like how you have designed the lessons; introduce it at the beginning then repeat it later in the lesson. A lot of hard work obviously but very good. I think it will be very effective.

I think rainbow colours would be a good idea - my pre-verbal son can sign colours but not letters, can't sing yet either:-) so he might be able to show me he recognises the notes by their colours but otherwise he wouldn't be able to.

Teaching my toddlers has a thread about the notes/ colours/ signs & she has taught her daughter using it (also translates into a physical game, i.e. "which sound is which coloured ball"); consistency would be good. Think her thread was titled, teaching perfect pitch using LMs. They colour coded the keyboard & her little girl can play it. i'm sure she's giving you plenty input as it is though. I would definitely like to see the colours.

Re: the clapping. Can you just introduce the more difficult beats or rythms as the curriculum moves on? I suppose that's a pretty obvious solution, but 2 semesters is a long time in a baby's life, it will help motor skills develop nicely:-)

(Agree that there should be something on the screen while the music shorts are playing. It's a good opportunity though for the baby to move about & "dance" so not a major deal.)

Thanks again
Lois

[pitchperfect]

I suppose there would be problems if a child has synesthesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Sound_.E2.86.92_color_synesthesia), but in general I like the idea of using it at the beginning, as KL as suggested, but only in certain activities to avoid a dependence on it at the cost of reading the pitches on the staff.  (Similar to how a piano student would never learn to read pitches if all their songs used notes with the note names inside of the heads.)

I think using colors also gives you the opportunity to add some tonal personality to the notes.  For example, Do and So are the strongest degrees, so they should be solid, sturdy colors.  Mi is bright, maybe yellow?  La is sad (it is the homebase for minor), maybe purple?  Re, Fa, Ti are all slippery, unstable.  Teaching these "personalities" of each scale degree is very important; it is the basis for understanding harmony and melodic movement.  One must have a good intuition for them to write one's own music.  (The traditional Curwin solfege hand signs accomplish this same thing.)

Maybe only use the colors for ear-training activities and not for sight-reading ones?  Although, it may not be easy to separate them sometimes...

[TeachingMyToddlers]

For those of you who have not seen this, I feel strongly about incorporating color into ear training because I did it and it worked for my kid(s).

http://forum.brillkids.com/little-musician-general-discussion/perfect-pitch-videos-t14037/msg83835/#msg83835

My vote: Use color and use it like you mean it!  Rainbow icons of every variety, on every page, program wide.    When a child develops perfect pitch, THEN Mom & Dad can introduce the wonderpets or spiderman icons. Just be consistent until the job is done and it will go faster!  I get the sentiment of variety, but create variety within the rule set that will help kids progress without confusion. Color allows for variety of objects so they don't get bored, while the message remains the same.

Incorporating color into LMs solfege training gave my daughter perfect pitch. I was not raised in a musical household, I was not taught any music theory in school, nor do I play an instrument. Even so, sometime last year I decided that I was going to do everything in my power to teach my kids perfect pitch. I began scouring the internet on how to make it happen. What I initially learned was that a high percentage of people with perfect pitch have individualized synesthesia that correlates color and pitch—meaning, they can “hear in color.” One thing most synesthetes can agree on is that the higher the pitch, the brighter the shade of a particular color and the lower the pitch, the darker the shade of the same color.

While researching absolute pitch, I’ve learned that just about all of the programs that claim success in teaching perfect pitch have two things in common….COLOR & REPETITION.  One training program assigns color to the chords and the others assign color to the individual notes.  Some programs extend those colors to reading sheet music it seems, while others do not. But why would COLOR, something we SEE, matter so much when it comes to PITCH, something we HEAR?  Because it gives the brain multiple pathways to locate the information it’s trying to retrieve.  Assigning color to pitch provides yet another memory recognition trigger, incorporating sound, color, and location on the keyboard/staff (either visually or kinesthetically.) Overall, it helps create a richer experience rather than just a simple auditory memory. This reminds me of  mathematicians who teach their students to assign color to numbers as a memory trigger to them assist with mental math tricks. If this is a tried and true memory technique for learning math, then of course it should be no surprise that it would serve a similar purpose in music. It’s just another layer to deepen the impact.

In every situation, however, auditory memory proved to be systematically inferior to visual memory. This suggests that there exists either a fundamental difference between auditory and visual stimuli, or, more plausibly, an asymmetry between auditory and visual processing.....For several decades, we have known that visual memory for scenes is very robust. In the most dramatic demonstration, Standing showed observers up to 10,000 images for a few seconds each and reported that they could subsequently identify which images they had seen before with 83% accuracy. This memory is far superior to verbal memory and can persist for a week. Recent research has extended these findings to show that we have a massive memory for the details of thousands of objects. Here, we ask whether the same is true for auditory memory and find that it is not." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2667065/

-TmT

[Mandabplus3]

Woaah! I read all that! 
Ok so as I am not particularly opinionated, I just want my son to like it,  I have a wonderful solution
Can you create an icon group of multiple images  in red that is always used for Do. Then a different set of icons in yellow for Re that randomly appear. That way the colour theory people are happy and those of us who like interesting icons are also happy I realistically need about 6 different icons in interesting shapes to keep my son looking and guessing. the older girls just don't care what they look at so they will be happy with a red circle.
For the mums worried about the colour becoming a crux, we could make ( if it isn't already there) an LR file to flash standard black notes with CDE or solfege on the staff with piano sounds accompanying the picture. that way you can teach you kid both methods at once. That is what we have had to do with formal piano lessons and softmozart overlapping.

[TeachingMyToddlers]

Yes, exactly what I was getting at.  I edited down my response for clarity, I tend to get carried away sometimes. 

[Mandabplus3]

Carried away? I would never have noticed   

[TeachingMyToddlers]

Kids are so creative! My daughter was just sitting at the kitchen table with her colored unifix cubes making and lining up all the new chords she is learning in LMs. The possibilities are endless!

[pitchperfect]

Hmm. I guess brighter colors for higher and darker for lower might be a better system for absolute pitch.  The funny thing is, though, in my experience people with perfect/absolute pitch aren't particularly visual people.  But if using colors is working for people (and not just advertised to work), then we should try it.  But if it is used exclusively, it will hinder students from reading standard music notation.  That can always be taught later, but one of the stated goals of LMs is to teach it from the start.

[TeachingMyToddlers]

I didn't get too caught up on that part, but when talking to my kids I discussed/discuss bright notes versus dim notes while we play on the piano, etc. The point being that the color is the same regardless if it is higher or lower. I actually tried out the ball game shown in the videos as inspired by a musician in California who follows a color-note association system, he taught his own children perfect pitch this way as well as many others. When I made up my mind to teach my kids absolute pitch, I reached out to him via the internet and he is extremely knowledgeable on the subject. Hopefully he will chime in soon on using color and pitch.

Only 3% of the population has absolute pitch. How many people know how to sight read? Consider sight reading by color equivalent to the whole word method of reading, the first rung of the music-reading ladder. Voluntarily encountering that small hurdle of weaning off colored notes is a small price to pay.

[KL]

OK, looks like we'll be incorporating rainbow colors into the curriculum!

If anyone thinks differently, now's your time to speak!!

We'll be doing this:

- Creating lots of rainbow colored icon sets which can be randomized, to maintain freshness

- Incorporating it into some, but not all, of the lessons, like what pitchperfect suggested - yes for ear training ones but not sight-reading.

I think using colors also gives you the opportunity to add some tonal personality to the notes.  For example, Do and So are the strongest degrees, so they should be solid, sturdy colors.  Mi is bright, maybe yellow?  La is sad (it is the homebase for minor), maybe purple?  Re, Fa, Ti are all slippery, unstable.  Teaching these "personalities" of each scale degree is very important; it is the basis for understanding harmony and melodic movement.  One must have a good intuition for them to write one's own music.  (The traditional Curwin solfege hand signs accomplish this same thing.)

So strange - you've just described the rainbow scale!  If you haven't already, download the PPT file I attached in the first post.

I don't think we'll go with the higher=lighter/lower=darker method.  I believe we need to make the colors very different between the different tones.

Thanks all for your input!

[kauaiheidi]

I'm sure that most kids won't end up playing harp, so this is a minor point.  But just btw, on a harp the C strings are red and the F strings are blue and in some of the early harp books for children the C and F notes are also colored red and blue.  Are there other instruments that have distinct color associations with notes? 

[Mandabplus3]

Yay for colours and double yay for rotating random icons in colour! You guys can do anything!!     
Ps did I mention how much I love this LMusic? 

[pitchperfect]

I think using colors also gives you the opportunity to add some tonal personality to the notes.  For example, Do and So are the strongest degrees, so they should be solid, sturdy colors.  Mi is bright, maybe yellow?  La is sad (it is the homebase for minor), maybe purple?  Re, Fa, Ti are all slippery, unstable.  Teaching these "personalities" of each scale degree is very important; it is the basis for understanding harmony and melodic movement.  One must have a good intuition for them to write one's own music.  (The traditional Curwin solfege hand signs accomplish this same thing.)

So strange - you've just described the rainbow scale! 

Wow, you're right!  I guess it's meant to be.  You'll loose the tonal definitions of the colors when you transpose to G and F keys though.  How early does that happen?

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