The Nirvana effect

I’m currently working on a book chapter about the use of video games in music education. While doing my research, I came across a paper by Kylie Peppler, Michael Downton, Eric Lindsay, and Kenneth Hay, “The Nirvana Effect: Tapping Video Games to Mediate Music Learning and Interest.” It’s a study of the effectiveness of Rock Band in teaching traditional music skills. The most interesting part of the paper comes in its enthusiastic endorsement of Rock Band’s notation system.

The authors think that Rock Band and games like it do indeed have significant educational value, that there’s a “Nirvana effect” analogous to the so-called Mozart effect:

We argue that rhythmic videogames like Rock Band bear a good deal of resemblance to the ‘real thing’ and may even be more well-suited for encouraging novices to practice difficult passages, as well as learn musical material that is challenging to comprehend using more traditional means of instruction.

Popular musicians do most of their learning by studying and emulating recordings. The authors observe that this method is quite at odds with the way that we in the western world teach music:

In traditional music education curricula, the listening experience and the act of performance are often kept separate by a focus on how music is notated, with the memorization of note names, key signatures and tempo markings being a central focus… Upon learning how music is written down, most music students are then set down a path of mastering their instrument through repetition of difficult passages, a practice that emphasizes the eye over the ear and renders aural emulation near-obsolete.

[T]he environment in rhythmic videogames presents the aural and the notational elements of the music as intertwined by linking recordings of a master musician’s performance to a scrolling notational system. This, in effect, presents the best of both worlds, with musicians’ understandings potentially augmented by connections they can make between sound and visual representations. Even those trained in formal notational systems report hearing new elements in the music through this activity than from score-reading or listening, alone.

Music students in school have to learn a substantial amount of notation and instrumental mechanics before they’re allowed to make any music. This is usually a tedious and frequently demoralizing process, and too many kids see no reason to persevere until they get to the fun part. Music game designers make sure the fun part begins immediately, simplifying the technical requirements for beginners and only gradually making the game’s complexity level more realistic. The games carefully balance challenge and “forgiveness,” steering a course between frustration and boredom and maximizing flow. While critics decry the games’ simplification, it’s this very simplification that gives beginners a much-needed foothold.

Rock Band doesn’t literally teach you how to play the guitar (unless you play in Pro Mode with a specialized controller.) So what are players learning? Peppler et al say that first and foremost, music games teach you how to listen like a musician. Instead of hearing the music passively, players have to attend actively. You begin to follow individual instrumental parts, rather than hearing the music as a single undifferentiated mass. Non-musicians who have never even considered the existence of a bassline may now find themselves studying them in considerable depth, vividly experiencing their interaction with the chords and melody.

The authors also believe that the games’ method of notating music has considerable pedagogical value in and of itself. The notation is interactive, enabling the games to give crucial real-time feedback. Failing to hit a note correctly both sets off an animated visual response and causes the player’s instrument to temporarily drop out of the mix.

This dynamic feedback is rarely afforded to musicians outside of game play, who must be told by someone with more experience (usually a parent, bandmate or teacher) if what they played was contrary to what was written on the page. Furthermore, the 1:1 relationship between the length and number of symbols on the screen, the physical act of manipulating one’s controller/instrument in time with the symbols, and the accompanying musical sounds from the game when the act is executed properly reinforces the symbiotic relationship between a notation system and sound, sensitizing players to the multiple parameters required to effectively represent music in a written form. It is our contention that the music concepts central to the comprehension of traditionally notated music are represented in rhythmic games’ notation system, including models of metric hierarchy, subdivision, measurement and pattern identification, which serve as a novice-friendly method whose lessons can be applied to more traditional forms of notation, affording beginning learners a ‘doorway in’ to more formal practices.

Once players have mastered game notation, they can recognize that other representations (like traditional notation) are describing the same musical concepts using different symbolic vocabulary. The authors list the advantages of game notation over traditional notation, particularly on the rhythmic axis:

• Game notation connects metric salience with spatial placement of notes, visually differentiating strong and weak beats. Traditional notation doesn’t require any particular relationship between time and note placement.
• In traditional notation, long and short notes are the same size. Game notation, like MIDI, shows longer notes as longer rectangles. Furthermore, games scroll the notation past the player in time to the recording.
• Game notation shows rests intuitively, as the absence of notes on the metric grid. Traditional notation uses a complex system of symbols to convey the same idea.
• At beginner levels, game notation is considerably simplified from the actual musical content; at higher levels, the notation becomes increasingly faithful. The beginner-level notation shows only the most structurally important events in each phrase, using an abstraction system similar to the reductions performed by music theorists when analyzing a piece. And even the simplified versions still preserve melodic contour.

So does Rock Band teach real music? The study suggests that it does, though the results are not conclusive.

[A]mong the whole sample, there was a large amount of variability in how the participants scored on their traditional music assessments… However, as the number of Rock Band sessions increased, the variability of the sample decreased, resulting in a significant correlation between the number of Rock Band sessions and the overall scores on the traditional music assessments.

Correlation isn’t the same as causation. It’s possible that the kids who did better at Rock Band were the ones who were already better at traditional music skills. But the authors believe that more rigorous testing will bear their hypothesis out. For one thing, participants in the study were more likely to enroll in formal lessons after their exposure to the game. But more to the point, music games don’t simulate the experience of music; they represent it, with a great deal of fidelity in the rhythmic dimension. The authors argue, and I agree, that Rock Band is a more “real” musical experience than beginner-level music classes in school. The games also have a crucial social component lacking in class.

Without the opportunities for performance, the students in [instrument lessons] were engaged in an activity that seemed, at least to youth on the outside, to lack in context or function.

Every Rock Band session is a performance, with clapping, dancing, joking and a general level of fun. And isn’t fun the entire point of music?

 You may also be interested in a post on visualizing music.