Soft Mozart succeeds in one of the most important parts of music education that has been failed by all other teaching methods - helping the beginner to learn how to read music. New method of learning to read music notes is naturally easy and efficient even for the small child.
We have to admit that we live in a musically illiterate world and even advanced music students have problems with music reading. The lack of music reading skills sets limits to any music development and often is the main reason for quitting music education.
In the usual approach, before you can read and play even the simplest song, you need to spend several months in attempts to memorize music staves, note by note, and understand and remember its correspondence with the piano keys. Only a small percent of beginners are able to overcome all of these difficulties and develop their abilities of fluent music reading. All others, instead of reading, try to use their memory and music ear to reproduce a song. Most beginners quit piano lessons under the pressure of the first months of learning piano without the ability to play and enjoy real music.
The same reasons especially restrict the involvement of small children in music education. Serious music lessons start for children only after they are seven years old or older. Because of the difficulty in learning to read music notes, these music lessons mostly include the memorization of a few simple songs to play on the piano or another musical instrument.
Soft Mozart introduces a revolutionary approach to teaching any beginner or child how to read music.
Saving the general structure of the music score, it transforms and enhances the music staff and note representation to make them naturally and easily understandable for any beginner or child. In order to make the teaching process easy and comfortable from the beginning, the method gradually introduces and emphasizes the most important properties of the music score to a student to focus his attention on. The interactive computer program Gentle Piano provides visual hints and assists the student to give him ability to read and play real songs from the very first lesson, ensuring extensive piano practice.
*The Soft Mozart system is U.S. patent pending.
Initially the program uses the vertical orientation of music staves for natural association with the piano keys. With the assistance of the corresponding piano key stickers, the music staves are "reflected" on the piano keyboard. This helps any beginner or child to find the correct piano key and easily understand where to look for the next piano key. If the next note goes to the right, your fingers move to the right, if the note goes to the left, your fingers move to the left.
In the beginning level, this piano teaching software program takes control over the note duration, helping a student concentrate on the task of playing the correct notes.
Music score graphic enhancements:
- Staff lines are the same thickness as the spaces between them to emphasize their connection with music intervals and piano keys.
- The use of different colors for the Base and Treble staves helps children in distinguishing notes for the left and right hands.
- Special note pictures and key stickers allow the beginner to easily recognize and name any music staff note and piano key, and help even a 2-year-old child to find the correct key.
- The colors of the notes are different for the lines and spaces to help easily distinguish the closely standing notes.
Gentle Piano uses six different representations for the gradual transition from the simplest to the regular music score representation:
- Vertical music staves, thick and colored staff lines, moving simple notes with the note name symbols
- Vertical music staves, thick and colored staff lines, moving simple notes without the note name symbols
- Horizontal music staves, thick and colored staff lines, moving simple notes with the note name symbols
- Horizontal music staves, thick and colored staff lines, moving simple notes without the note name symbols
- Horizontal regular music staves, moving regular notes
- The regular music score
The gradual transition from the simplified to the normal music score representation provides the most effective and painless method of teaching piano and especially music reading. Usually, students begin learning a song with one of the simplified score representations. After some practice of playing the song, they gradually move to the regular music score. The speed of this transition depends of the abilities of a particular student, and must guarantee the productive and comfortable piano practice.
How fast a student will learn to read the regular music score depends of the age, abilities and amount of practice. If a 10-year-old beginner can move to the normal music score representation in several months, a 4-year-old student usually stays with the simplified score representations for first several years.
Together with Gentle Piano, the other Soft Mozart computer games focus on different essential skills of music reading to train the student to the mastery level.
In the past two years, the Soft Mozart approach has shown an amazing efficiency in helping any beginner to learn how to read music. With ability to read actual piano songs from the very start, any student plays piano in several times more during the piano lesson. But the most impressive and important feature of Soft Mozart is the possibility of the effective teaching of young children, pre-schoolers and even toddlers beginning from 2-year-olds, to read music and play the piano.
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