M-SCAPE: PHYSICAL AND IMAGINATIVE TOOLS FOR MUSIC EDUCATION

Abstract: It has been proven that music education can have many benefits to the development of children. It can improve communication, reasoning, memory, coordination, spatial intelligence and mathematical skills as well as enhancing emotional and intellectual development. The current market provides a broad range of instruments and professional devices, but it lacks creative tools useful to educate in music theory and its abstract principles. By giving physical shape to a musical composition this project aims at helping users to literally “see” its underlying architecture, through the association of musical elements with three-dimensional and visual shapes for educational purposes. The research phase consisted in the analysis of academic literature on cognitive psychology of music and sound perception as related to different sensorial stimuli, visual or tactile. Once children were identified as the target group, a further research on didactics, educational methods and a market analysis of toys and didactic games as case studies were conducted. Interviewing a music teacher, it was found how two major difficulties in early music education is with feeling the underlying pulse and understanding how rhythmic values are related to each other. Rhythms can be sub-divided, and a visual subdivision can help to grasp this concept. Also pitch, harmonies and dynamics, more related to emotions and feelings, could be visualised in different ways. Following these principles, the first ideas were sketched, and a first user-test was conducted. The final prototype was then developed and successfully tested with a child. The result is a didactic tool which consists of various blocks of wood, representing different rhythms and dynamics. The blocks can be moved around in a display to visually devise a “musical landscape”. Wood, as a material, also becomes a simple percussion instrument for rhythmic exercises. This product - system is meant to be used by the teacher as a help to perform a diverse range of exercises with the child, attempting to create a more accessible, playful and imaginative experience for early music learning.