Technology is a wonderful thing (mostly)

October 18, 2007 at 4:36 PM

I finally got my violin bow re-haired, in anticipation of performing the 1st violin part to the Bach double, and Fantasia on Greensleeves on December 2. It meant I had to schlep my violin case around, bring it to work and back on the bus, so I would have somewhere safe to put the bow when I picked it up. "Rosin it up good," said the luthier, "or you'll be the quietest violinist around!"

That evening, while following his advice, it hit me how weird this whole process was. Why or how would someone ever think, in the first place, to rub dried conifer tree resin on horsehair and then pull that horsehair across a taut string to make a sound? And given how bad that process usually sounds at first, especially with less-than-optimal equipment, why did he/she/they press on and refine the technology? Why didn't they just give up? Amazing.

Then I started to help my daughter practice her violin with "Smart Music." Her break from Suzuki last year does seem to have helped her attitude, she enjoys playing again and has been an enthusiastic "teacher" with her best friend, who just started viola this year. The whole computer angle is a little scary: you play along with some electronic accompaniment, the computer listens to you and tells you whether the notes you played were in tune and on time. She loves it, though--and actually, so does my 4-year-old son. Smart music made him want to play her old, outgrown violin. All 3 of us were plucking our open A's and D's in time to the rhythm and trying to match what was on the screen. The software caught late notes and wrong notes and put them on the screen in red. The instant feedback seemed to be very motivating to both kids. They wanted to get all green notes, and were willing to try repeatedly to achieve that goal.

It seems like a good way to harness the computer game mentality and put it towards something useful. I can imagine there could be a concern that it's somehow reinforcing a computer game mentality, and that that could be inimical to the development of "musicality." But I don't think you ever get to explore musicality in a meaningful way if you don't have basic rhythm and pitch under your belt first. And my daughter is challenged by basic rhythm and pitch: her Suzuki teacher noticed it, her piano teacher noticed it. She has a hard time keeping a beat, or especially generating any kind of internal beat. She's instead very focused on tone and tembre. That is, does it sound "screechy" or "scratchy"?

I recognize these characteristics, or related ones, in myself too: what I hear first, naturally, when I listen to someone play are tone and tembre. I have to think about pitch and rhythm; it takes conscious mental effort and therefore it takes a split second longer. Of course over the years of lessons and practice that I've done, I've been trained to notice, and work on, pitch and rhythm, to the point that the early exercises in Smart Music are mostly trivial to me. But not entirely. I think that this type of training could probably help me clean up my own playing as well.

From Yixi Zhang
Posted on October 19, 2007 at 2:19 AM

Intriguing thought on Rosin. It’s not just the violin, but the Erhu also uses rosin on the horse-haired bow, and so far as I know, these two instruments don’t share a common ancestor. Even if they do, I suspect rosin was widely used those days for all sorts of purposes, including coating and adding friction to certain surface. So using rosin for bow-hair may not be as much of an invention as a natural choice at the time, as natural and obvious as useing wood for the body and gut for the strings. Just a hunch.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on October 19, 2007 at 3:59 AM

Smart Music sounds interesting. Too bad it's not free. I can't even get it to download and play its samples.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on October 19, 2007 at 4:08 AM

I got it to play, but I didn't see the very elementary exercises you described. I understand that a computer can be a good teaching tool, but playing with other humans is instructive, fun, and reality grounded. Each parent and/or teacher must make a lot of decisions regarding computer based music training. The only case in which I would wholeheartedly support computer use is a situation in which there are no violin teachers the students can go to. One of my students grew up in a very isolated rural area, and she tried to teach herself violin from Essential Elements. It didn't work too well.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on October 19, 2007 at 10:07 AM

Pauline, you're right, I don't think this would work at all without a teacher. My daughter has one at school and another in the Saturday school. And she has me :) Part of the issue here is that she's still bored with the school curriculum and needs something fun to hold her interest. In spite of all her complaining and whining at the time, she learned quite a bit from her Suzuki teacher and is pretty far ahead, in some ways, of what they are doing in class. In other ways though, such as reading music, she's right where she needs to be.

And happily, this is not taking the place of playing with other people: it actually got all three of us (me, my daughter, and my son) playing together or in combinations. What it seems to be taking the place of, much to my relief, is the nagging mother/sullen, recalcitrant child dynamic.

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Technology is a wonderful thing (mostly)

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