DICTATION GAMES – and our contest winner!

Nov 1st, 2011

Posted by Christine

I don’t know about the rest of the music teaching world, but almost all of the students that I’ve ever taught could fit neatly into one of two categories: "prefers to learn by listening" and "prefers to learn by reading". The listening ones resist sight reading exercises and the reading ones resist ear training exercises – and all music students need skills from both camps, which I guess is why I spend so much of my time creating games and amusing activities to cajole students into developing skills that, left to their own devices, they would never bother with.

Of course, all these musical subjects that begin as separate topics in the early stages of our studies eventually converge upon the ultimate arrival point known as musical proficiency. The topics of ear training and sight reading can meet and mingle (and help each other) early on in the form of melodic and rhythmic dictation exercises, which require the student to notate what he or she is hearing. Our introduction to melodic dictation is Eggs – the student hears pitches, follows our quirky “egg notation”, and locates the egg that is out of place. Very little musical training is required to be able to play the easiest version: there are only two different pitches and three eggs, one of which isn’t available to be selected. Add more eggs and more pitches as the student progresses.

Magnets is more challenging: instead of identifying one incorrect note, students must move the notes on the screen to match the melody that they hear. Other than the lowest levels of this game, which require a minimal amount of note movement, the melodies that you’ll hear in Magnets are the same as in – yes, you guessed it – Robot and Player Piano. Many students find Player Piano and Robot to be quite challenging so I thought it wouldn’t hurt them to be faced with those same melodies in a slightly different exercise. And some users will be happy to learn that we recently changed the sound effects in Magnets so that playing it will feel more like learning about melodic dictation and less like sitting in a dentist’s chair.

We’re a little low on rhythmic dictation games. We have exactly two – Trains and Jack-o-lanterns – and both were mentioned only a couple of weeks ago in the post about visual rhythm games, so I won’t repeat what I said about them. Instead let’s move on to more exciting things, such as who won the little contest that I set up last week.

After writing about how "horribly" difficult Key Signature Snap is, I tried playing it again and it really wasn’t as bad as I remembered it. In fact our contestants all fared quite well in at least one of the three games that they were able to play in order to participate. Nobody scored 100% but the teacher that came closest was Luba, who has won a free one-page piece of piano music – a project upon which I am now getting ready to focus my extraordinary procrastination skills. Thanks to everyone who participated! That was fun and I think I’ll do another contest of some sort in the future.

What’ll it be next week? I believe it’s going to be a discussion of keyboard games. Until then, happy post-Hallowe'en teaching!