AURAL RHYTHM GAMES: Feeling beat, finding patterns, detecting differences

Nov 23rd, 2011

Posted by Christine

Where would music be without rhythm? Some students have an innate sense of it, and others struggle with it, but everyone has room for improvement.

At the moment we have two lonely little aural rhythm games. For a while there was another – veteran Tonic Tutor users have surely not forgotten the infamous Light Bulbs, feared and loathed by students and teachers alike (for the information of newer users, it was a valiant attempt at a tap-back game, but it was just too finicky and difficult). We’re hoping to reuse those light bulbs for another game, since Will went to all the trouble of drawing them, but the rhythm tap-back concept itself has been languishing on the drawing board for quite a while. I am determined that we will add another aural rhythm game some time this year, preferably a tap-back game.

We are currently left with rhythm games that require the student to listen to rhythms but not to tap them. Dancing Jelly Beans was one of our earliest games and the orange bean is still one of my favourite characters in Tonic Tutor. It can be started early on – students simply listen to the rhythms to which the beans are dancing, and choose the rhythm that is different. Current rhythms are based on RCM requirements, although we recently had a request for some swing rhythms - I think this is a great idea and will get going on it just as soon as I find my Contemporary Idioms syllabus (my studio is a bit chaotic at the moment).

Dancing Jelly Beans remains challenging all the way up to late intermediate level because the rhythms get longer and longer, and there is a “difficulty” switch which, if on, ensures that the two rhythms in each question are similar to one another. It should be noted that the beans are not particularly musical in that they bop along somewhat independently of the rhythms. They’re just decoration really, or perhaps a distraction – students who have trouble with this game can try listening to the rhythms with their eyes closed at first.

Rhythm Zoo is similar, except that now the student is listening for patterns within a rhythmic sequence – specifically, two sections of one rhythm that sound the same. The game is relatively easy when the rhythm has only three consecutive sections, but when it has eight sections, it can be quite challenging, especially if “difficulty” is on – this will mean that the face-up card (i.e. the rhythm that the student is trying to match) doesn’t necessarily occur at the beginning of the string of rhythms, so sometimes a player would need to hear all the rhythms before finally hearing the face-up one. This setting would obviously only be appropriate for students who are experts in rhythm. Of course we also wanted this game to be accessible to lower levels, so in response to teachers’ requests, we recently added a feature that causes the game to pause between each card’s rhythm.

Closely related to the topic of comprehending rhythms by ear is that of being able to determine the time signature of a piece of music by listening to it. This is the challenge presented in February’s seasonal game, Hearts. This is such an important concept that I wish the game could be made available year round, but there are only 28 musical examples, divided into four levels (more than that and the size of the game would be enormous) which isn’t really enough to be practical except during the shortest month of the year.

I’ve now gone through all the game categories, so I’m going to take a bit of a break with these posts. Enjoy the rest of 2011! I’ll be back in January with some new ideas.