Week 3 - Observation of Use
This weekend I had the opportunity to watch a friend and colleague use the Yamaha Harmony Director keyboard with students. Mike Arthur, Director of Bands at Eastern High School in Louisville conducted the Southwest Area Honor Band, in which some of my student participated. It was a great opportunity to watch someone who has implemented this technological tool in his teaching for many years. His first comment to me when I asked him to come work with the students was that he was going to bring his keyboard because at this point in his career he wasn't confident teaching without it. I was able to observe his use of the many of the functions of the keyboard as well as the positive affect it had on the student's performance. Because he is a veteran user of the keyboard he was able to implement numerous functions that I intend to spread over the course of the semester to slowly introduce them into my teaching habits. Because it will be overwhelming to try and list all of the functions I observed, I will focus on his use of tuning.
The keyboard is designed to let the students experience two different types of tuning, just temperament and equal temperament. There's a cool video that explains both of these tunings and allows you to hear the difference, you can check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqa2Hbb_eIs . The basic difference is that equal temperament adjusts the chord tones to get the chords better in tune. When the tuning feature was used the students learned how to adjust their note to make the chord better in tune and ultimately sound better. The beauty of this feature, beyond simply making the music sound better, is the fact that it puts the responsibility on the student. The keyboard provides a model and even a baseline for the pitch, but it is the responsibility of the student to listen to the pitch and make adjustments.
I intend to implement this tuning feature into my lessons this week, in hopes of my student being able to notice when a change needs to occur and how to make the proper adjustments to their note for better intonation. Overall this should not only help the music we are playing sound better, but ultimately make my students better listeners and musicians.
The keyboard is designed to let the students experience two different types of tuning, just temperament and equal temperament. There's a cool video that explains both of these tunings and allows you to hear the difference, you can check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqa2Hbb_eIs . The basic difference is that equal temperament adjusts the chord tones to get the chords better in tune. When the tuning feature was used the students learned how to adjust their note to make the chord better in tune and ultimately sound better. The beauty of this feature, beyond simply making the music sound better, is the fact that it puts the responsibility on the student. The keyboard provides a model and even a baseline for the pitch, but it is the responsibility of the student to listen to the pitch and make adjustments.
I intend to implement this tuning feature into my lessons this week, in hopes of my student being able to notice when a change needs to occur and how to make the proper adjustments to their note for better intonation. Overall this should not only help the music we are playing sound better, but ultimately make my students better listeners and musicians.
It is always better when you can see a technology tool in action! Let us know how this turns out in your class.
ReplyDeleteDonna Brown