KEYBOARD GAMES

Nov 9th, 2011

Posted by Christine

Last week I wrote about the importance of melodic and rhythmic dictation, which requires students to “hear what they see”. But even for people who don’t read music, pianos (and other keyboard instruments) offer another way to make a connection between sound and sight. No other instruments provide such a clear visual representation of what we hear.

I have played the piano for what seems like my whole life. In my youth I also played the violin, and for a few years in elementary and junior high school I played the French horn. I’m very glad that I had the opportunity to play these instruments, and although I ultimately gave up on violin and French horn, studying them helped my piano playing (and my understanding of music in general) immensely. As well as such considerations as bowing, breathing, and intonation, which piano students don’t need to think about, I had the opportunity to play in ensembles and this did a lot for my sight reading as well as for my rhythmic sense.

However, I would not have been able to learn the basics of those instruments as quickly as I did had it not been for my knowledge of the keyboard, which I think is important for all instrumentalists. On no other instrument can you "see" all the pitches neatly arranged in front of you. And as well as seeing and hearing the individual notes, you can see and hear how they work together to form intervals, chords, and scales.

I wanted our keyboard games to highlight all of the ways in which knowledge of the keyboard can be useful. Each game focuses on one topic except for Player Piano, which can be used in a number of ways. Here’s a list of games and topics:

Finger Puppets: finger numbers. Okay, this isn’t exactly about keyboards, but you’re going to have trouble playing the piano without this knowledge. Finger Puppets is officially our easiest game: it has no score and is impossible to lose.

Piano Keys: names of individual keys, beginning with just CDE and progressing all the way to double sharps and double flats.

Piano Chords: all kinds of triads and seventh chords, in all keys, with or without inversions. An interesting feature about Piano Chords is that the chords don’t need to be played in close position – students are free to experiment with different chord shapes as long as the inversion is correct. If the “relative to key” switch is set to “on”, dominant and diminished seventh chords will be named according to the key with which they are traditionally connected in tonal music (such as “dominant seventh of D major”); if set to “off” these chords will be named according to the root note, like all the other chords (such as “G diminished 7th”).

Planets: scales (everything from major pentascales to wholetone, octatonic, and modal scales).

Jungle Journey: intervals. Teachers can choose between steps and skips, whole steps and half steps, numeric intervals on the white keys, or proper intervals with quality and quantity. Mean teachers can add a timer for an added challenge.

Player Piano started out just being a melody playback game. I wanted it to be an easier version of Robot, which many students find very difficult. I later added options for major pentascales, major scales, and intervals up to an octave, in case anyone found them useful. I was looking forward to students finding Player Piano quite a lot easier than Robot, but as it turns out they still find it difficult. Feedback from my own students indicates two common problems:

1) Some are probably trying to play the melody back too quickly – they don’t need to play it at the same speed that they hear it;

2) Some click the ear button to hear/see the melody, click the first few notes of it, forget what comes next, click the ear button again, and then expect that they will be able to start from the beginning. This isn’t how the game works: once the player starts clicking the melody back, he/she needs to keep going until the end of the melody (or until he/she makes a mistake and loses a life). Most of my students only click the ear button once before they try to click the answer, and I often need to remind them to hear/see the melody several times, or even many times, so that they know exactly what they are doing before they begin their answer.

These are all of the games in the keyboard section, but Tonic Tutor has four other games in which keyboards are featured: Robot (melody playback), Baseball (note reading), Stars (note reading), and the December’s seasonal game Carol Clues, in which students identify carols after seeing (but not hearing) them on a keyboard. Finally, in a slight twist on the standard keyboard, Lollipops features a keyboard that consists only of lollipops.

I think I've now covered all categories except for aural rhythm games. I will get to that one soon, but next week I'm going to take a reak from discussing games and touch on the extremely important topic of motivation - that is, making sure the students keep playing the games.