Notes of a Different Color

[queriquita]

I love the rainbow piano concept as a starting point for kids, but I've had problems finding anything to use that keeps the colors consistent with roygbiv.  Piano Wizard's colors are all over the place and SoftMozart uses symbols.  But, I did come across these videos and have been playing them and both kids love them (ages 8 and 29 months). I've contacted the creator and he says he's interested in doing more as well as some apps, he just wants to be sure that there's interest.

That said, here's the link.  Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/user/NotesofaDifferentCol/videos

[SoftMozart]

If we use colors or images, they should act as guides that can direct the viewer’s attention while viewing normal music notation. The graphics of the music staff and its auxiliary form should add to each another, not battle for primacy. A colleague in Ukraine helped me to understand this best.

Once she proudly announced that she’d been teaching children with a "colorful perception of music." Her students write down music dictations with colored pencils. Each of the seven notes is assigned a separate color, and it must be marked down with the right pencil. During the dictation, the kids not only have to understand which note is being played, but also remember which color it has been assigned.

My god! When I tried to imagine what was happening in the students’ minds during such "innovative" dictations, it made my head spin. Color and sound aren’t at all related in our perception because color is perceived through vision, and sound through hearing. I’ve read many scientific articles about the subconscious perception of sound in relation to a color spectrum, but nowhere has it been written that separate colors can logically be fastened to certain notes. These ties simply don’t exist. Of course, we know of several composers that were born with a "music-chromatic perception," such as Skryabin and Rimsky-Korsakov. But their color associations mostly didn’t coincide.

Hearing and the voice are responsible for the separation of sounds by pitch. Audio-chromatic associations are different for every person. They can even change depending on one’s mood! Because of this, color can’t be used as a focal point in the understanding of sound at all. Trying to rely on such a foundation will bring the perception to a dead end. No matter how hard the perception tries, it can’t tie one to the other.

Still, one often comes across attempts to coordinate each step of the music scale with its color, and to tie it to the keys and the music staff. But this barely helps the effectiveness of a lesson. First of all, under the laws of perception, a person can handle no more than 2-3 different colors (objects) at the same time. Memorization of seven different colors connected to their notes, in essence, is an entirely new and abstract language. Instead of aiding the student, this becomes a heavy and unnecessary burden for his memory.  Secondly, as has already been explained, sound and color aren’t at all associated in a person’s perception. It’s like trying to teach Finnish by translating into Turkish.

[queriquita]

H, thank you so much for reposting your reply - I believe I've read it before on another thread.  It was good to re-read, though.

I understand how frustrating it can be for someone whose learning curve has started to slow to try and throw an added concept like color into notes when it 'clearly' has nothing in common, especially if just learning to read notes.  However, I am not alone in realizing how useful a tool it is for students, especially younger ones who are mesmerized by varying colors and can easily distinguish the notes based on this.  It's not so different from using enlarged notes on flash cards so that little ones can see their positions on the staff without straining too much or losing their place.  Nor is it a far stretch to compare it to signing the solfege, which is incredibly useful for small children - anything that incorporates various learning styles further deepens what is being learned into the mind.  If we were to take it further and add a wonderful scent vs a horrific one each practice session, this wonderful scent would alter the mood of the child, aiding to make it a positive experience and would in turn remind the student of playing whenever they smelled it.  I am in no way trying to conjure synthesia in my children, but yes, anything to help them bridge the gap while learning, I'm in favor of. 

My 8 month old finds these videos much more enjoyable than if I were to just play them with her crawling on the floor.  Why?  Because she can SEE them, they are visually stimulating, and at the same time I am embracing her, which fills were with whatever mood I'm in at the time - loving, nurturing, encouraging.  My son is 2 and finds them attractive.  They add to his joy for music and intrigue his mind into making sense of it (ie read the notes and the words and make the correlation between what he's hearing and what he's seeing)  So, bringing this back to the original point of the thread now, I think they are great and am sharing in case someone else finds them useful too :-)

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