I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live.
In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project.
Live’s MIDI effects have some potentially profound implications for the teaching of music theory. Live’s Scale device allows you to easily play in any scale or mode. If you set the device to, say, F-sharp Lydian dominant mode, then any note you play on the keyboard will be mapped to the closest note from F-sharp Lydian dominant. I am a terrible keyboard player, so it is extremely gratifying to be able to load up the Scale device and confidently shred like Coltrane, knowing that I can’t play any wrong notes.
The other pertinent MIDI effect for music theory learning is the Chord device, which converts single notes into chords. If you set the device to Major, for example, then playing the note E will produce an E major triad, and playing the note F will produce an F major triad. This kind of naive parallelism is of limited musical usefulness. However, if you add in a Scale device, then all of your chords fit within the key or mode of your choice. So let’s say you paired a Chord device set to Major with a Scale device set to B Dorian mode. If you play the note B, the Chord device will turn it into a B major triad, and the Scale device will then convert that to a B minor triad to fit the mode. If you play the note C, then the Chord device will turn it into a C major triad, and the Scale device will turn that into a C-sharp minor triad. The practical consequence is that you can write a melody or bassline in some key or mode, and then effortlessly harmonize it with good-sounding chords, even if you have no idea what you are doing at all. This is a big deal!
Like all assistive music technologies, Live’s MIDI devices raise big questions for music educators. Isn’t it cheating to use these things? Shouldn’t a student learn what scales and chords are and how they work before they start naively fumbling around with them? (You can ask the same question about drum machines, or rhythm quantization, or Auto-Tune.) Are these kinds of shortcuts harmful in the long run? I know plenty of educators who insist on teaching music theory with pencil and paper, because while it may be slower and more difficult, it’s important to do these things “the right way.” As you might have guessed, I do not believe that there is a “right way” to learn anything in music. There are a lot of paths up the mountain. Live’s MIDI devices just happen to provide a delightfully smooth, broad, and well-lit path.
To me, the main issue with music theory is not, what is the optimal way to learn it? The important question is, how do we keep the kids from just giving up before they begin? Even within music schools, theory is not a widely loved subject. Most students treat it as an obstacle to climb over. And this is a population that chose to study music formally! Now think about all those informal learners, the self-taught bedroom producers who work by trial and error, the rock guitarists who learn from tablature, the singer-songwriters who learn entirely by ear. Many of these folks would benefit from learning some theory, if only to save themselves from a lot of tedious guesswork. But they aren’t necessarily interested in learning notation, or the conventions of Western European aristocratic music from the eighteenth century, and rightly so. We need new approaches to theory for these people, because they are the ones who are out there making music creatively.
Live’s MIDI devices are a new development, and there isn’t much data about their effectiveness as learning methods. (So far as I know, there haven’t been any formal studies of them at all.) The best I can offer is my own experience, and my anecdotal observations. From what I can see, the Chord and Scale devices are uncomplicatedly good. If a student can experiment around with a wide variety of harmonic ideas in a creative context, then it tends to make them want to go deeper and find out what all the terminology means, and how they might use these things on their non-digital instruments. Even if the kids never feel like learning what makes Phrygian mode different from Phrygian dominant mode, though, the fact that they can still use them for musical expression is a wonderful development.
By the way, you can read a formal/scholarly explanation of Live’s music theory teaching affordances in this review that I wrote for the Journal of the American Musicological Society.