The Learning Pyramid

Visual Music SoundScenes' great strength is its flexibility. It can be just as useful for a musical beginner as it can to some who has studied music for decades. We use the metaphor of a pyramid in a desert to describe ViMS' flexibility advantage

The four faces of the pyramid represent "Performance," "Theory," (the two shown above on the two visible faces of the pyramid), Musical Creation, and Musical Education (the latter two being hidden on the back side of the above pyramid).

There are also four levels of attainment in music, as shown in the above illustration of a pyramid on its surrounding desert. The lowest level belongs to the "Uninitiated," who live without music on the desert; the second level, at the bottom of the pyramid, is for beginners, who learn here the fundamental elements of music; the next level up is for "Intermediates," who learn to apply the principles learned in the first level to performance, theory, creation or education--or to any combination of these. The top level is for experts, who will soon graduate from the pyramid entirely.

In the beginning, musical learning proceeds as a purely aural experience. Only as the basic concepts begin to form in the listener's mind through careful listening practice does the musical masterpiece become an aesthetic, and, eventually, an intellectual, or cognitive experience.  Initially, the beginner responds to musical rhythms and melodies as sequences of individual sounds in patterns that make sense.

Rhythmic pulses,  recognized simply as varying durations and accentuations of sounds, seem to require least training, perhaps because rhythms are a familiar part of every day life.  Heart beats, breathing, walking, talking, time-telling--all these and many more daily activities involve rhythmic patterns we live with.  This is fortunate, for rhythm is the philsopher's elan vital of music-- a force that moulds even the basic frequencies of the individual tones that make up melodies and harmonies.  For practicing listeners who seek continuing growth in musical understanding, this ease is doubly fortunate, for rhythmic patterns serve as clear mnemonic labels by which to quickly recognize motives, subjects and themes essential to the understanding of musical forms and formulas.  Ability to recognize these marks a vital set of skills for understanding musical masterpieces, such as those  which make up the repertoire of Visible Music SoundScapes.  Without this ability, the dramatic significance of such great forms as 'Sonata Allegro,' 'Concerto Allegro,' 'Rondo,' 'Sonata Rondo,'  'Theme and Variations,' etc., will be lost upon the listener.  oIn short, musical forms are very important to the art of listening.

However, for the beginner, the concept of musical form establishes a difficult conceptual barrier.  How can music, the invidible art, have form, which is a visible entity? Actually, musical form is a figment of human musical memory, both for the creater and for the listener.  Thus the term musical form can have no meaning for the novice until such time as his musical learning has progressed sufficiently to enable  his or her musical memory to recognize formal elements.  To recognize form, the listener must have achieved sufficient ability to parse the music being heard, to identify recurrence, whether specific, varied, or even quite vague.  Visible Music SoundScapes really aid this process by making vivid all the main actions of music, such as rhythmic patterning,  melodic, harmonic, and tonal progressions, and such advanced concepts as thematic transformation, motivic disintegration, etc. Once the learner has made progress with recognizing rhythmic patterns,m as described above, he or she is ready to develop more advanced skills in musical intuition.
 

Recognizing the patterns of melodic sequences is the next skill in order of difficulty for developing musical awareness.  For the rare individual blessed with 'perfect pitch' such recognition is made easy, since the ear automatically registers the names of notes for the listener.  For most, however, parsing of melodies requires the development of the sense of relative pitch whereby the listener measures the intervals between pitches that make up a given melody.  Though seeming difficult at the outset, the skill for measuring melodic intervals is rather easily formed, as Guido of Arezzo discovered nearly ten centuries ago. His method, which no doubt originated in the liturgical practiceof 'solmization,' is learned with ease, by means of solfeggio, as the Italians named it, or 'Sol-fa-ing' it was known after the seventeenth century in England.  In developing this skill, the listener first identifies the key-note of a given melody as 'Doh,' then names the other notes in ascending order as 'Reh,'Mih,Fah,Sol,Lah,Tih, and then again 'Doh.'  The popular show-tune, 'Doe, a deer, a female deer' makes the acquiral of this skill  very easy;

The above-described sol-fa names are colored in accordance with a color-coding scheme which not only is helpful in identifying melodic notes, but is equally helpful with harmony- and tonality-identifications, as discussed below.  Each of these colors identifies an absolute pitch.  That is to say, all "C's," (or "Doh's") are always blue; all "D's," (or "Reh's") are always green; all "E's," (or "Mih's") are always yellow; all "F's" (or "Fah's") are always orange; all"G's" (or Soh's") always red; all "A's" (or "Lah's") always purple; and all"Tih's" always grey.  The intervals between these notes, as shown in the following table, also are absolute, as shown in the following:

As these notes and intervals become familiar to the listener, chords, or harmonies next become part of musical awareness.  Harmonic combinations present the listener with simultaneous patterns of sound that at first seem difficult to identify, if only because of the wide variety of harmonic combinations that exist, the infinite variability, and the intrinsic complexity of each.  However, utilizing the color-coding discussed above greatly simplifies the matter for the beginner. Since the name of a note appears also in the name of a chord, more or less the same color coding applies throughout, the only differences arising from the need to distinguish between major, minor, augmented and diminished chords.  Quite simply, our recourse is to change the appearance, or texture, of the polygon surfaces--i.e. the "walls of the structures"  that represent harmonies, whereby major harmonies will be identifed by the same colors as the notes upon which they are based, while minor harmonies will show stippled versions of the same colors.  Diminished triad structures bear one downward chevron; diminished sevenths, two, and dimnished 9ths, three.  In similar fashion, augmented triads are shown by one upward chevron, augmented 7ths by two, and augmented 9ths by three.  When we come to extensions of these structures, particulaly in the works of Wagner and Debussey, other chevrons will be added for 11th-chords, 13th-chords, etc. Here is a simple table for identifying chords, or harmonies: