VISUAL RHYTHM GAMES: three pedagogical approaches, and the story of Pizza

Oct 18th, 2011

Posted by Christine

Ah, the challenge of rhythm. We’ve had quite a few requests for new rhythm games and we hope to accommodate those requests in the near future. For now, we’ve got three games to cover some important basics.

Trains shows up in the RCM preset lesson topics as both an ear training game and a note reading game, since both skills are developed simultaneously. It’s an introduction to score reading, and an attempt to ensure that students’ eyes and ears are working together (our other score reading preparation game, Eggs, focuses on pitch instead of rhythm). There are seven levels: the easiest uses only quarter notes and half notes, and the most difficult includes combinations of quarters, eighths, dotted eighths, and sixteenths.

As well as needing to know how the note values sound, students need to know what the notes and rests are called. This topic is covered in Piggybank, which is a simple multiple choice quiz. Teachers can set the game to include as few as three note values (such as whole, half, and quarter) or as many as twenty notes and rests – everything from dotted whole notes/rests to 32nd notes/rests. (For extra reinforcement of note and rest values, check out Boxing Glove.)

To round out our studies in rhythm we need to examine time signatures. Quite a few method books ascribe beats to notes in concrete terms (one beat to a quarter note, and so on), but I wanted to avoid making a game using that information since as we all know it’s not always true. Instead I wanted to require the student to look at the time signature in order to determine the number of beats assigned to each note or rest, even if the student only knows one time signature. This is what happens in Pizza. Teachers can choose time signatures with which the student is familiar, and a range of note/rest values (because of the mechanics of the game, the narrowest range is from eighth to half, which means that Pizza is not a good choice for the very early levels – this is unfortunate but unavoidable). Then the game will quiz the student on the durations of the note/rest values based on a given time signature. Once correctly identified, the notes and rests go on to become toppings on a slightly strange “music pizza”. The idea came to me while ordering a pizza online and being provided with a “blank pizza” image on which one could add and delete toppings. It was fun. Having only just finished a week of adjudicating at a music festival, there were musical thoughts colliding with food thoughts in my jumbled brain and lo, Pizza was born.

One other small and not-very-significant point about Pizza: while the score of most games can be set to twenty, the maximum score for Pizza is ten. This is because the more toppings you add, the more information the game is required to store, and after about ten toppings this results in a glitchy and unreliable pizza. But who would want more than ten toppings on a pizza anyway?

Our final visual rhythm game is October’s seasonal game, Jack-o-Lanterns. It’s similar to Trains in that it focuses on score reading, but with this game the student hears two melodies and has to choose which of them matches rhythmically with the notation on the screen. I wish that a game like this could be made available year round, but sadly the number of sound files that it would take to keep the game interesting and challenging for an extended period of time would make the game enormous – and it’s already pretty big.

Join me next week to take a tour of our theory games - and if I haven't changed my mind by then, there may be a chance to win something!