#49 - Teaching Intonation with Tonal Energy, with Ben Denne

Music Ed Tech Talk

Learn how to teach your students to play in tune by taking advantage of the features of the Tonal Energy tuning app. In this episode, my colleague Ben Denne joins to talk about a comprehensive methodology for teaching your students how to play in tune using their ears, not their eyes.

In the episode, we overview the primary features of TE as they relate to playing with a beautiful tone and intonation. Features include: single and polyphonic tuning drones, modeling just intonation in chords and melody, visualizing pitch, and more!

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Philosophy:

- Prioritize these...

- Tone

- Intonation

- Balance/Blend

- Melodic Accuracy

- Rhythmic Accuracy

- Expression/Phrasing

- Technique/Articulation

- Sound Over Sight

- If we are asking students to use their ears, then why are we having them use their eyes?

- Natural Learning - think about how children learn to speak. Through modeling from parental figures, constant repetition, and encountering these repetitions in various contexts.

- Electronic tuners can only tune intervals of unisons and octaves accurately.

- We are used to hearing the piano in its slightly “out-of-tune” tempered state.

- Interval Adjustment

- Pure intervals have varying degrees of adjustment from tempered intonation to make them in tune.

- Scale Degree | Adjustment

- 1 | 0

- 2 | +3.9

- 3 | -13.7

- 4 | -2.0

- 5 | +2.0

- 6 | -15.6

- 7 | -11.7

- 8 | 0

- We must teach our students to HEAR when something is out of tune by listening for beats. But how?

- Resonant intonation is the result of two other important features: superior tone and balance.

- Good tone comes first.

- Learning balance is difficult in a room by yourself.

- Use of an electric drone helps.

- Turn the drone up to a level that equals the student.

- Song based learning that utilizes lots of simple melodies in standard keys teaches students to understand basic consonance and dissonance.

- Lots of repetition!!!

- Patients!

- Reinforce that one success does not mean that everything will be in tune from here on out.

- Don’t strive for a perfect intonation system. Resist teaching students the theory of intervals and focus on them hearing consonance and dissonance through listening to the relationships of intervals.

- Once you know what a 5th sounds like, you can tune it anywhere.

- Avoid technical talk unless something is absolutely in a students way.

- Daniel Kohut - Musical Performance: Learning Theory and Pedagogy

- Superior Concept

- Relaxed Concentration

- Focused Awareness

- Reasons teachers give up on teaching intonation this way...

- Fear of other areas of musical performance failing - wrong notes, rhythm, poor technique, inability to execute musically. The solution to this - pick easier music!!!

- Abstract nature of these skills make them less concrete to student minds and harder to teach.

- This is a long road. It takes time. But! - the end reward is ultimately better because students own their critical listening skills and now make musical adjustments themselves, even to features in the music that are not tone and intonation related. Each year will have an upswing towards the end. Independent musicianship is the result.

Features of Tonal Energy

- Overview of each feature and setting - Live Demo

- Strategies

- Everything with drone

- All music taught around tonal centers

- Students tune down to the tonic most immediately beneath where the majority of their part sits

- Students write tonal centers in their method books and concert music

- Analyze mode - Students practice scale patterns and songs in this sequence...

1. Visual and aural feedback

2. Aural feedback only

3. No drone at all

- Practice Guide

- You can balance to the drone

Tell students to match the volume of the drone at various levels.

- Play along melodies with students on a keyboard or on the display

A midi keyboard like the Xkey https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DU2VKV8/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 can play certain key areas in tune perfectly and can automatically tune chords to just intonation. Combined with an iPad, this is like owning a Yamaha Harmony Director.

- In rehearsal: Have students buzz along and find their place in the chord

- Use In-App Audio Apps to make play along tracks

- Making Just Intonation Play-Along Tracks for Your Performing Ensemble (Using Tonal Energy and GarageBand)

GarageBand for iOS allows easy creation of engaging play along tracks by using TE Tuner as a plugin and combining its sounds with other instruments.

Video demos of Inter App Audio Apps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMgypjhNPL0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmyw1j0vb4U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWsHqD816rw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM8dNCEbPro

- Tools for Making Play-Along Tracks

- Yamaha Harmony Director

- My Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks (CURRENTLY ON SALE)

- Farrago

- GarageBand Drummers

- Shure BLX14/PGA31 Wireless Headworn Microphone System

- Band in a Box

- My NAfME Article about teaching music in unison, making practice resources, and using drones/beats - Always Start from the Beginning: Developing Tone Quality, Intonation, Concert Repertoire, and Classroom Management through Unison Playing in Performing Ensembles

More Resources:

- Hal Leonard Intermediate Band Method

- Beat Elimination as a Means of Teaching Intonation to Beginning Wind Instrumentalists, The Journal of Research in Music Education, Winer 1972

- The Problem of Tonality in Seventheenth Century Music, Delbert M. Beswick, Music, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1950

- Musical Performance: Learning Theory and Pedagogy - Daniel Kohut

- Automating Band Warmups, Teaching Auditory Skill, and Managing My Classroom… With Solfege Bingo

Extra Show Notes from the Podcast Episode:

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