Ear Training Game – It's Really That Easy

June 11th, 2014

Why the Ear Train-A-Tizer Is My Favorite Ear Training Game.

The problem with ear training games is that they’re just not gamey enough. Throughout my first two years or so at Cornerstone, I enjoyed using an ear training game for my basic musical development. But it just seemed too academic. More like homework and less like the game it seemed like it was trying to be. It also wasn’t free…

My favorite ear training game to date.

Music Interactive’s first attempt at making an ear training game was the Ear Train-A-Tizer. I like it because it gets straight to the point of what an ear training game should be. It has a score, levels, time limits, and teaches the user how select the correct answers. It gets progressively harder and even has bonus levels! But It lacks graphics and hand to eye coordination. It’s fun, but it could be more fun. It needs lasers and jumping. Something sweet.

But for now, it’s what we’ve got and it’s great! Here at Music Interactive our goal is to make your musical abilities develop as quickly and effortlessly as possible. The Ear Train-A-Tizer is a great way to help you learn how to identify sounds. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the best ear training game out there to date. It’s currently only browser based and works best in Google Chrome…But it’s also free!

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Distracted Culture – Entertainment Technology

June 7th, 2014

Distracted by the Eastern shore of lake Michigan

I have recently had the extraordinary opportunity to soar at 500 miles per hour 6 miles off of the ground. Not having flown since I was 14, I was in awe of the engineering capabilities that mankind has achieved. Then I realized that we had this capability long before I was even born! So…why aren’t we flying 60 miles off the ground at 5,000 miles per hour? I’m not complaining, it just seems like we haven’t come very far in the development of our mechanical capabilities. At least compared to what we did throughout and after the industrial revolution. Then I remembered that our planes are now equipped with wifi, movies, and games. The airlines even allow people to use their smart-phones and laptops. This entertainment technology is far more advanced than the computers that helped us get to the moon.

Computers are fantastic! Infinite knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips. But that’s just it. We’ve developed entertainment technology. In the meantime, other aspects of technological growth have been stunted. We created something capable of incapacitating us with distraction.

Everyone’s a Distracted Entertainer

This is directly related to our current surplus of artists and athletes. Entertainers are the idols of our culture. To many parents there is nothing better than vicariously performing a solo or scoring the winning goal through their child. This carries over into the college years. Becoming a top notch entertainer has become something for which we are willing to spend thousands of dollars. More importantly, we are willing to spend years of our lives training for the endeavor of incapacitating others with our prepared distractions.

As you can see from the rest of this site, I love the arts. But when more people know the name Lorde (I love her work), than Raymond Damadian, Seymour Cray, or Steve Wozniak, there’s a problem. Even Bill Nye is not known for his work for Boeing, but rather his entertaining style of educating children. We are a distracted culture that aspires to be entertainers rather than innovators.

Distracted into Enrichment

So where does that leave Music Interactive? The arts have value in that (besides beauty) it sharpens the mind and stimulates creative thought. It makes innovators more innovative. Our goal to make music education as efficient as possible so that you can get back to your work refreshed and focused more quickly and without being distracted. We have enough entertainers. Use the arts for inspiration and quickly develop your musical ability for the purpose of enriching your calling.

We’re still very small, but right now we are featuring a game called Upbeat Bird. It is a game designed to deepen your understanding of time and how to accurately dwell in and manipulate it. It is an entertaining way to develop a useful skill both musically and within the world around you.

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Manipulate Time – Develop Musical Superpowers!

June 3rd, 2014

Sound happens within time. So making music means you have to manipulate time. It’s not good enough to have your notes happen at any moment that’s convenient. They have to happen exactly when you intend them to. This is a skill that you have to develop. Commanding time to the extent that it is relevant to music is extremely difficult. It may as well be a superpower!

We’re not talking about just staying together. We’re not even talking about changing from an A to a B on the 3rd 16th note of beat 4. We need to manipulate time to the extent that we can make a noise one hundredth of a second before or after another event. This is beyond the capabilities of normal human reaction time. It requires such a deep understanding and mastery over time that you can use the duration of an event the just happened to predict when another event is going to happen. Then you can place your own sound one hundredth of a second sooner to account for the time it took for the other sound to get to you.

Learn to manipulate time using Upbeat Bird.

We recently released a game that produces in a person the ability to manipulate time to the 20th of a second or less. Upbeat bird doesn’t just develop the skill of accurately playing upbeats. It teaches you how to hit every part of the beat and deeply understand what a part of a second is. You can make the bird soar to the top, gradually drift to the bottom, or float indefinitely in the same spot on the screen by tapping at the correct time. A bass line produces downbeats that the player has to use as a reference. The further away in time from a bass hit, the higher the bird jumps. In this game, we have connected an entertaining visual gaming element with aural cognition to enable people to quickly master and manipulate time.

A skill that is useful to everyone.

Don’t think for a second that this skill is reserved for musicians and is only useful in the performing arts. This is a skill that helps a person master their physical world and perform any job better. If it has anything to do with doing the right thing at the right time, Upbeat Bird will help you to do it better.

I work at a coffee shop where I sometimes have to produce one drink every 30 seconds to a minute (usually with assistance from other amazing workers). Timing is key, and understanding the intricacy of time and manipulating time helps me both work faster by myself and more efficiently with other people.

Learning to manipulate time will make you more productive in many aspects of your life. And now you can learn to do it using a fun game on your phone!

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Timing – Upbeat Bird Teaches Accuracy

June 1st, 2014

This is a guest post by Zach Burnham.

Upbeat Bird teaches you to be better at upbeats and musical timing in a unique way. The game is simple – you need to tap the screen to make the bird fly through obstacles and see how far you can go. There are also bass notes playing a downbeat (so crank up that volume!), and drum hits play in between downbeats on the perfect upbeats and 16th upbeats. When you tap the screen, the bird flies higher if you are far from the downbeat, which means closer to the perfect upbeat. It looks like this: the bird jumps high if you tap right in the middle of two downbeats (the perfect upbeat), but only jumps a little bit if you tap right after the beat plays or right before the beat plays (the 16th upbeats). You use this to control the bird, with two goals: jump on the perfect upbeats and 16th upbeats, and fly as far as you possibly can.

But wait! If you tap on every possible upbeat perfectly in Upbeat Bird, you’ll be on your way to a great score but will definitely fly into a wall! The challenge is to know where those upbeats are and to use them to your advantage and get through those posts. This aspect of Upbeat Bird teaches you to think ahead, analyze the physical and musical landscape, and perform accordingly. When playing, you will undoubtedly tap on a few wrong beats. That’s okay! Just as with playing music, when you miss a beat you have to keep playing and have better timing on the next one. That is an important skill that Upbeat Bird will help you with – I know it is helping me!

Remember this: you can use a wrong beat to your advantage. Playing exactly with the downbeat in Upbeat Bird will make the bird stop where it is at and start falling. So, if you need to stop the bird in mid-air, by all means play on the downbeat! As the bird flies and the beats per minute increase, it gets harder. Give it your best shot. Even if you tap and you are nowhere near a perfect upbeat but you get through the posts, keep going! It’s better to be wrong than to crash.

Upbeat Bird teaches you to develop your timing skills surprisingly well. Start playing! You’ll see yourself improving drastically as you learn to time the upbeats better. After that, you’ll continue to improve consistently as you keep at it.

I (Zach) play guitar, and playing Upbeat Bird has helped me with timing. Now I feel comfortable practicing guitar along with a metronome. I can understand the rhythm of what I am playing and visualize the upbeats like never before. Thanks, Upbeat Bird!

Posted in Education, fun, Thought | 1 Comment »

Accurate Rhythm – Games to Improve Upbeats

May 29th, 2014

Why we should use video games to get students to play in more accurate rhythm.

my Dr. Beat

Any music educator will tell you that getting kids to practice with a metronome is a never ending battle. There are always exceptions, but most kids (and adults too) that I have taught lessons to claim that they have more accurate rhythm when they’re not using a metronome. Us educators know better. But it’s hard to explain the importance of something when the student doesn’t understand it. Particularly something that is as frustrating to learn how to do as playing in accurate rhythm.

I don’t like telling my students to do something they hate. There’s a great book called The Element by Ken Robinson that has convinced me of the importance of education being engaging. None of this “sit in this chair and bang on this drum to this monotonous click until you get it right.” There needs to be enough instant gratification to keep the student interested. Not because we’re entertainers (we’re not). Rather we need to make sure the student is receptive to teaching when being taught something new. Simply forcing a student into the discipline of metronome use is ineffective and as soon as your back is turned they will stop.

Download Upbeat Bird

Why not a game? Everyone loves games. But it has to be a game that interacts with the person. It also has to be a game that is able to create the accurate rhythm required to build the skill. Our recent release, Upbeat Bird, is just that. It’s an iPhone game designed to build the skill of accurate rhythm. At the same time, the user also learns about upbeats and how to play them accurately. They will not understand the importance of a metronome until they are skilled at using one. They will not become skilled at using a metronome or at accurate rhythm until they use the device. A vicious cycle that must be broken.

Check out Upbeat Bird, and urge your students to play it too. It will make for more accurate rhythm no matter the skill level, and it will be fun for them and less frustrating for you.

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