Wall Street Journal

Last week, the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition sent John Jurgensen, an entertainment features reporter, to Austin, in order to spend a day observing Thumtronics’ search for the funding needed to bring the Thummer to market.

John had written a WSJ piece on Les Paul, his contributions to inventing the modern electric guitar, and the fact that he was still playing regularly in New York (at 92). I emailed John, suggesting that now that he’d covered the past of musical instruments, he should consider covering their future, too. He liked the idea, his editor approved, and voila! out he came. Cool!

His angle on the story appears to be, “New musical interfaces are proposed frequently but not one has gained mainstream acceptance for over a century [with a few debatable exceptions]. Jim Plamondon thinks his new interface, the Thummer, can beat those odds – but to bring the Thummer to market he needs cash. Let’s observe as he makes his case to potential investors.”

John joined me at the following meetings:

• OpenLabs: Hank Coleman and Victor Wong stated that today’s commercially-successful musicians & producers were (a) computer-based and (b) not classically trained, so that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose by using an easier-to-learn and more-expressive computer-based music-control interface such as the Thummer. They demonstrated the surprising realism of software music synthesis using physical modeling (specifically waveguide synthesis) and emphasized how useful the Thummer would be in unleashing its expressive potential.
• CTAN: Jamie Rhodes discussed the relationship between angel investors & VCs and what both groups looked for in an “ideal” investment. No specific discussion of the Thummer, because Thumtronics had only submitted its proposal a few days earlier and CTAN had not yet had time to review it.
• Fito Kahn and David Peterman: Angel investors who are considering investing in Thumtronics. Asked questions about IP ownership, possible partnership with Chinese OEMs, other issues preparatory to making an offer (probably this week).
• Ian Varley: An archetypical Music Brain, Ian is a serious musical hobbyist – with an extensive home studio and a busy performance schedule – who works as a computer programmer. He demonstrated the Thummer and discussed its merits, including the simplicity of its patterns, its stimulation of creativity, the importance of novelty in capturing the attention of the audience, and the Thummer’s infectiousness. John videotaped much of this discussion, which will hopefully appear on the WSJ’s website.
• Wes Cole: A Venture Capitalist with Austin’s Gefinor Ventures, Wes was kind enough to set up this meeting on short notice. His responses to the presentation were right in line with those of other VCs – and more clearly enunciated than most – which was ideal for this meeting’s purpose.

In between meetings, John and I discussed issues such as why previous new musical interfaces had failed to gain mainstream commercial success, the characteristics needed for any innovation to succeed, and the reasons why some investors shied away from Thumtronics (all of which I will address in subsequent blog postings).

I also introduced John via email to people who could comment credibly on relevant issues, such as Stan Leibowitz on the Lock-In Fallacy, Roger Linn on new musical interfaces, Reuven Brenner on finance, Ajit Kambil on Value Maps, etc. (all without endorsing the Thummer per se).

John said that he could not guarantee that the story would appear, but that he was confident that it would – else his editor would not have approved sending him out to Austin in the first place.

If it does appear, it should be in one of the next few issues of the WSJ Weekend Edition.

This could be very cool. :-)

Project BarBQ

I spent last weekend (October 19-21) at Proejct BarBQ, billed as “The World’s Premiere Interactive Think-Tank.” As in all eleven previous annual incarnations, its sole topic was “Influencing music hardware & software over the next five years.”

Proejct BarBQ was, without a doubt, the coolest conference I have ever attended. Ever notice how the best part of every conference happens outside of the session rooms? It’s the informal exchange of ideas and the networking that makes conferences so productive – the actual sessions are usually pretty boring. Project BarBQ has no sessions, aside from a couple of introductory keynote sessions. Instead, the attendees – limited to 50 per year – decide for themselves what the top four problems facing the audio/music technology industry are, and split up into groups to work out solutions to those problems. Many significant advances in technology & business models have come out of these sessions. Sound boring? Hardly! Not only is it a gas to engage really smart people in heated debate, but it’s even MORE fun to do so when exchanging volleys from rubber-band guns or toasts from seemingly-bottomless margarita pitchers. These ancillary activities loosen people up to approach their shared problems in a fun and creative way.

I had hoped to get the attendees to agree that one of the top four problems to be solved was “increasing the success rate of music education,” but I was unable to attend the first day of the conference, and therefore was not able to make my case. Rats! The closest topic agreed upon was “user interface” – a rather broad topic! – and that topic’s members decided to focus on the needs of the prosumer audio engineer rather than the novice musician, so I was not able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

I got two main benefits from attending Project BarBQ. First, I got a lot of excellent feedback from its attendees on ways that I could make the Thummer even better (the top request: including an old-fashioned “MIDI Out” jack, even if the Thummer’s expressive power is clipped to worthlessness due to the MIDI cable’s anachronistic 31.25 kBaud data rate). Second, I made some excellent connections, some of whom agreed to help me make some connections to move Thumtronics forward. For example,

• George “The Fat Man” Sanger, organizer of Project BarBQ and music technology legend, agreed to introduce me to some top-flight engineers once Thumtronics gets funded, and
• Tom White, head of the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association, agreed to introduce me to some OEM manufacturers who might be interested in partnering with Thumtronics.

All in all, well worth attending.

Semmelweis Reflex

Established hierarchies do not embrace revolutionary ideas. They exist to defend the status quo. They reject revolutionary ideas reflexively, without giving them the slightest thought.

Here’s one historical example. In 1848, Ignaz Semmelweis, a trained physician, collected iron-clad experimental data showing that having a physician wash his hands in a chlorine solution prior to the delivery of a baby reduced the maternal death rate in his clinic from 18% to 1% – yet twelve years later, due to the medical hierarchy’s reflexive rejection of his ideas, the death rate at that same clinic had doubled to 35%. Semmelweis became distraught at the resulting unnecessary deaths, so his “friends” had him committed to an insane asylum, where he fought to be released – as any sane person would – and was beaten to death.

Semmelweis’ experience was not an isolated incident – far from it. To quote Reuven Brenner’s excellent book, Rivalry (with links added):

Murray’s (1925), Tratnner’s (1938), Polanyi’s (1974), Cohen’s (1985), and Ben-Yahuda’s (1985) detailed and systematic studies of scientists reveal the same pattern: In spite of evidence, innovations were frequently greeted with disdain and incredulity by members of the profession where the innovations were to be applied, professions were hierarchies depended on preserving the paradigms. The reaction to Mesmer’s hypnotic cures, Jenner’s An Inquiring into the Cause and Effects of the Varioloe Vaccination (1798), to Simpson’s discovery of chloroform (1847), to Lyell’s publication of Principles of Geology (1830-33), to Helmholtz’s discovery of the conservation of energy (1847), to Joule’s discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat (1843), to Darwin’s, Pasteur’s, Lister’s, or more recently Barbara McClintock’s and Benoit Mandelbrot’s and other discoveries and innovations shows the same patterns that Morison described in the military and the ones described in this book concerning the world of business.

First, the innovations came frequently from outsiders: Pasteur was a chemist; Helmholtz’ training was in medicine; Darwin started with medicine, arts, then wanted to become a clergyman; Huxley turned from physiology to paleontology; Lamarche from botany to zoology; [Julius] Robert Mayer was a physician (he came up with the idea of conservation of energy, and Helmholtz was annoyed that this idea was conceived by an “unknown physician”); as was Thomas Young, a Quaker to boot; Barbara McClintock, a woman working at a small research institute; and so on.

Polanyi (1974, p. 54), who examines these and additional cases, concludes that the hatred against the discoverers of facts that threatened the cherished beliefs of science was as bitter as that of religious persecutors two centuries before and was of the same character.

These observations are made in numerous studies examining patterns of behavior not only across very different fields but also different countries and times.

In honor of Semmelweis’ tragic but exceedingly common experience, the dismissing or rejecting out of hand any information, automatically, without thought, inspection, or experiment is termed “the Semmelweis Reflex.”

Does the existence of the Semmelweis Reflex mean that innovation is impossible? Obviously not, since you're alive to read this, which you almost certainly would not be if the ideas of Semmelweis, Pasteur, Lister, etc. had continued to be rejected. What it means is that thre's no point attacking established hierarchies directly. Instead, an innovator must build its own hierarchy -- what Bhaskar Chakravorti would call a new equilibrium -- without engaging the established hierarchy directly. Harvard's Clayton Christensen endorses this approach, saying that "disruptive products require disruptive channels."

As Everett Rogers points out in Diffusion of Innovations, the adoption of new ideas is a social process. Invention is just the start of the diffusion process, and quite possibly the easiest part, given the resistance of the status quo. Knowing this, investors and innovators can put their efforts into ideas that offer the greatest chance for successful and profitable diffusion.

Music & Technology

Today, I stumbled across this interesting and detailed article on the intimate relationship between music technology and musical styles over the last few decades.

Faster = Cheaper = Easier

I think I've been explaining the benefits of the ThumMusic System to music educators in the wrong terms.

• When I emphasize cost reduction, some educators freak out, associating lower cost with lower quality.
• When I emphasize ease of learning, some educators freak out, associating easier with dumbing down.

Instead, I think I need to emphasize "increasing the rate of learning." Music educators don't seem to have a reflexively negative association with the concept of "increasing the rate of learning." By avoiding their negatively-charged reflexive responses, I give music educators the opportunity to form a reflective response.

Cost, ease, and speed are all just different facets of the same gem. If a given level of musical understanding and skill takes a long time to acquire, then it's hard and expensive (in hours invested). If the same level can be gained in less time – that is, more rapidly – then it is easier and less expensive. Increasing speed increases ease and lowers cost.

It's my understanding from research papers that I read on the Web a couple of years ago (I'll look for them again later) that the #1 reason why students quit their music lessons is because they don't feel that they are making sufficient progress to justify the hours invested. Rapid progress is exciting; slow progress is boring. By speeding up the rate at which students acquire a given level of musical knowledge and skill, music education becomes inherently more exciting, so its drop-out rate should decline, and a higher percentage of students should be successful.

This is exactly what I've been saying all along, but I've been saying it in economic terms or ease-of-use terms. These terms resonate very well with investors and technology folks, but have not proven to resonate well with music educators. I'll try casting the ideas in "rate of learning" terms, and see if that works any better.

This is just a choice-of-language issue. I should speak not to music educators in the language of economics any more than I should address a Chinese audience in Japanese. Bad associations, either way.

Music Education & Dead Cows

For thousands of years, cattle had died of an unknown cause that sometimes affected cattle herders, too. In the late 1870's, French farmers recruited Louis Pasteur to help them understand and prevent this cause. Why Pasteur? Because he had previously identified the cause of spoilage in wine, beer, and milk, thereby increasing the efficiancy of those industries, and had identified the cause of death of silkworms, increasing the efficiency of the silk industry.

As a result of what he learned in these previous cases, Pasteur was formulating his "germ theory" of disease. He wasn't sure that he could help the French cattle ranchers, but then he looked at the dung of the dead cows, he found it to be swarming with germs -- bacillus anthracis, identified just four years earlier as the cause of anthrax -- that were not present in the dung of healthy cattle. Following Edward Jenner's work on vaccination, he developed (and patented) a vaccine, and thereby saved future cows and cowherds from dying.

What is the moral of this story?

If you are looking for opportunities for innovation, look for dead cows.

For me, the "dead cows" were the high percentage of students who failed at music education. Everyone knew that music education was hard, but they ascribed the high failure rate to lack of talent, diligence, properly-trained teachers, or any number of other likely suspects. And of course all of these are indeed contributing factors -- but then, some of the suspected "causes" of anthrax infection, such as overcrowding, did indeed contribute to the contagion of anthrax, even though they were not its root cause.

When my wife Patti explained to me why she was quitting her piano lessons, she said it was because "music notation is stupid. Sometime C is on a space; sometimes it's on a line -- and it's on different places in treble clef than in bass clef! It's like reading German with your left eye and French with your right. What moron invented this stuff?"

In that observation was the germ of the idea that became the ThumMusic System, with which I hope to increase the efficiency of the music education industry.

ThumMusic & National Standards for Music Education

As stated in the first line of MENC’s summary of its National Standards for Music Education, “There are many routes to competence in the arts.” The ThumMusic System is a new route.

How does the ThumMusic System help students, teachers, and schools meet the National Standards?

1. Singing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music: Many vocal music education methods, including those of Zoltán Kodály and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, make use of tonic solfa (“moveable Do”), which focuses on intervals rather than pitches as the essential focus of music education. The ThumMusic System provides a convenient musical staff for tonic solfa, making it ideal for use with these systems, and providing a convenient stepping-stone towards the traditional pitch-based staff. Furthermore, the ThumMusic Keyboard can be played in Just Intonation in any key, making it ideal for use in accompanying singers. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
2. Performing on instruments, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music: The ThumMusic Keyboard is polyphonic, so enables the playing of a wider repertoire of music than that available to monophonic instruments. The ThumMusic Keyboard’s logical arrangement of notes reduces to a minimum the number of individual gestures that a student must learn, and reinforces the structure, meaning, and consistency of those gestures through the senses of sight and touch in addition to hearing, in a manner not done by instruments without isomorphic control interfaces. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
3. Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments: The ThumMusic Keyboard places the notes of the diatonic scale of a given key in a dense vertical column of note-controlling buttons, and the notes of the pentatonic scale in a proper subset thereof. Within this vertical column, as elsewhere on the ThumMusic Keyboard, the “shape” of each musical interface is always consistent, facilitating improvisation. The geometrical relationship between the ThumMusic keyboard and the tonnetz, being concrete and tangible, makes movement through modes, chord progressions, and key modulations easier to visualize and grasp (literally) on the ThumMusic keyboard than on non-isomorphic control interfaces. These benefits reduce the amount of time and effort necessary to master the concepts and skills of improvisation. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
4. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines: The ThumMusic keyboard makes the relationships among intervals, chords, keys, and modes visual and tactile in addition to aural. ThumMusic notation (ThumLine) abstracts staff notation to the level of intervals, so that every octave and key is notated in the same manner, facilitating composition and arrangement. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
5. Reading and notating music: By abstracting staff notation to the level of intervals, ThumMusic notation (ThumLine) notates every octave and key in the same manner, making music notation easier to teach, learn, read, and write. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
6. Listening to, analyzing, and describing music: The ThumMusic System makes ear training something that happens naturally in the regular use of the system, so that it need not be taught in a separate course. The ThumMusic Keyboard is a tangible, concrete manifestation of the tonnnetz (harmonic lattice) used in neo-Riemann analysis, making its concepts something that students can see and feel as they play. In ThumMusic notation (ThumLine), the use of tonic solfa, along with indication of the current scale and current tonic (mode), notates the song at the same level of abstraction at which structural analysis occurs. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
7. Evaluating music and music performances: If students can learn to understand music’s basic concepts and skills more rapidly, then they can devote much of the time gained to learning the expressive, emotional, and analytical aspects of music, such as those required to meet this standard. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
8. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts: The ThumMusic System does not directly contribute to understanding the relationships between music and other arts. However, is makes tangible and concrete the relationship between music and mathematics, and, by extension, between music and physics. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.
9. Understanding music in relation to history and culture: One aspect of the history of music that is not often taught is the history of tuning, because tuning theory is considered to be arcane and complex. The ThumMusic keyboard exposes the geometry of music in a tuning-invariant manner, so that the tunings of many other times – and other cultures – all have the “same shape” (and hence the same fingering) on the ThumMusic keyboard. No nion-isomorphic instrument has this capability. This makes the ThumMusic System uniquely well-suited to studying the music of many different eras and cultures. Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet this standard in less time and at lower cost.

Using the ThumMusic System could help students, teachers, and schools meet all of these National Standards in less time and at lower cost.

Is the Thummer “Music Technology”?

When I show Thumtronics’ innovations to music educators, the word I hear most often is “brilliant” – which is very gratifying! – but what I sometimes hear next is very disconcerting: “You should go talk to Dr. X, he’s our music technology guy.”

If the Thummer were acoustic, they wouldn’t send me to see Dr. X. They are clearly making a simple association between “electronic” and “music technology.”

That seems very strange to me. All musical instruments are pieces of technology. Throughout history, the very latest technologies have always been applied to music making, including Neanderthal bone flutes, ancient Chinese bells, Industrial Era brass instrument valves, the Boehm System flute key plate & lever system of 1847, stringed-instrument strings, the early electrical Telharmonium in the 1870s, continuously-drawn high-carbon steel piano wire in the 1890s, the lap steel guitar in the 1930s, the CSIRAC computer playing tunes in 1951, analog synthesis in the 1970s, FM synthesis in the 1980s, waveguide synthesis in the 1990s, and even polymer chemistry for guitar strings. If you’re making music with anything beyond your skin, you’re using music technology.

Advances in technology are often important to the development of music.

• The harpsichord’s plucked strings produced a very bright sound, in which harmonics that do not fit the 12-tone equally-tempered scale are clearly audible. The piano’s strings, on the other hand, are struck by felted hammers, which dull these higher harmonics into inaudibility, making the piano’s sound spectrum and excellent fit with equal temperament.
• Before the invention of the brass instrument valve in 1814-15, brass instruments were like bugles – they could only play the harmonics of a given note. Many had “crooks” – sorta like little trombone slides, of varying lengths – which you could use to change from one key to another, but within each key you were still confined to that key’s harmonics. Bach, Haydn, & Mozart made little use of the valve-less brass instruments of their day, whereas valved instruments were essential to the music of Wagner of military brass bands in the 1800’s. Indeed, Wikipedia says that “the first modern [brass] bands were developed early in the 19th century in Prussia, when all military and government bands were issued the new technology of rotary valve instruments and instructed to use standard tuning [12-tone equal temperament].”
• Rock and roll would never have happened if guitars had still been strung with sheep-gut. The electric guitar's steel strings are an integral part of its electical circuitry.

The Thummer is no more – or less – appropriately labeled “music technology” than is the piano, trumpet, or electric guitar. It’s just newer. Like felted hammers, brass instrument valves, and electronic music synthesis, Thumtronics' musical innovations are likely to affect the way music is composed and performed -- and not just by Dr. X.

Reducing the Cost of Effective Music Education

Traditional music education has a low Return On Investment (ROI) compared to alternative activities. These alternative activities return lower ultimate benefits, but do so at much lower cost, making their ROIs higher than music education’s. Because taxpayers demand the highest possible ROI from their tax dollars, music education budgets are under pressure in many regions of the United States and elsewhere, and many individuals who might previously have pursued music education now pursue alternative, higher-ROI activities instead.

Music education advocates have fought back by attempting to raise the perceived value of the returns gained from music education, thereby increasing music education’s perceived ROI.

Consider, for example, the Twelve Benefits of Music Education, a list which was apparently written up by the Music Educator’s National Congress (MENC) and which is included in many music advocacy websites, suggesting that it is an accurate indication of the music education community’s perception of the benefits of music education.

Four things strike me about this list.

1. No musical skills or abilities – such as “reading music fluently,” “composing music knowledgeably,” or “performing music expressively” – appear on the list.
   
2. Many of the listed benefits are clearly obtainable from non-musical activities, such as learning “the concrete rewards of hard work,” “teamwork,” and “to conquer fear and take risks.”
   
3. Music education is may not be the most-efficient way to gain many of the listed benefits. For example, participation in team sports may be a more efficient way to gain the benefits listed in Item #2 above.
   
4. Some of the most interesting benefits, such as the claimed “causal link between music [education] and spatial intelligence” (also see here), have no indication of their being unique to music education. They, too, might be more-efficiently gained through participation in other activities.

The claims on this list are perfectly valid – music education really does deliver all of the claimed benefits – but so may other activities. Music education advocates seems to be claiming every benefit under the sun to make music education’s returns appear to be as high as possible, to justify the high investment required to acquire those returns. Desperate times require desperate measures, apparently.

So…why not consider reducing the cost of music education?

If the cost of delivering an effective music education could be lowered sufficiently – to perhaps a third or a quarter of its current cost – then music education’s ROI would become highly competitive. Taxpayers would continue to demand the highest possible ROI from their tax dollars – that’s never going to change – but a less-expensive means of delivering effective music education would meet that demand.

Furthermore, lowering costs increases access. If an effective music education could be delivered at a quarter of today’s cost, then four times as many students could receive one, all else being equal. If music education does indeed deliver important benefits – which I take as given – then it is morally imperative to share these benefits with as many people as possible. An increase in music education’s perceived benefits cannot, in itself, broaden access to music education. A dramatic decrease is its cost can.

Therefore: I submit that anyone who is serious about music education advocacy has a moral obligation to seriously consider any proposal that has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of delivering an effective music education.

Music Education’s ROI

People are smart. By and large, they do what is in their economic best interest, choosing to invest their limited time & money in those activities which deliver the highest Return on Investment (ROI).

Over the last quarter of a century, the cost of acquiring the benefits of many activities has fallen dramatically, largely due to the falling cost, and increasing power, of computing. The cost of finding and acquiring music, videos, and information has fallen to nearly zero. Video games are cheaper (after inflation) and more engaging than ever before, and have become more social. TV has zillions of channels. Chatting with friends – always a popular pastime – is cheaper, easier, and more convenient than ever, even if those friends are far away.

These competing activities almost certainly have lower ultimate benefits than music education, but they deliver those lower benefits with a much lower investment, therefore delivering a higher ROI. For example, imagine an activity that delvers only 10% of the benefits of music education, but does so at just 1% of the cost. Its ROI is ten times the ROI of music education. If a student were to invest her limited time & money in ten such activities, she would gain benefits equal to those of music education, at just 10% of the cost.

Because of music education’s declining relative ROI, people are making the rational decision to invest their (and their children’s) time in activities other than music education. They aren’t doing this because they are stupid, ignorant Philistines; rather, they are doing it because they are smart.

Many music education advocates have responded to this challenge by providing evidence that music education delivers many non-musical benefits, too. By increasing the perceived returns from music education, this activity increases music education’s perceived ROI.

However, this approach does not address the elephant in the kitchen, which is music education’s cost. That’s the biggie. If the cost of music education – in time & money – could be dramatically reduced without also reducing its benefits, then no “advocacy” of music education would be required. Consumers and schools would choose to invest their scarce time and money in music education, because doing so would give them an ROI that was highly competitive with alternative activities.

That’s where the ThumMusic System comes in. By enabling students to understand and play music in a shorter time, on less-expensive instruments, it can reduce the cost of music education dramatically, thereby increasing its ROI.

Learning Styles

According to Wikipedia, “a learning style is the method of learning particular to an individual that is presumed to allow that individual to learn best. It has been proposed that teachers should assess the learning styles of their students and adapt their classroom methods to best fit each student's learning style.”

However, that only works if everyone in the class has the same style. Better, perhaps, to find a teaching method that addresses the special needs of all learning styles simultaneously.

The basic learning styles are said to be sense-based:
Auditory learning occurs through hearing;
Kinesthetic learning occurs through touching and doing;
Visual learning occurs through seeing, demonstrations and body language.

The ThumMusic System is unique in that it presents musical information to all three of these senses in a simple, consistent, logical manner, with each sense reinforcing awareness of the consistency of the information presented to the others.

For example, the shape of any given interval – say, the perfect fifth – is the same everywhere on the ThumMusic Keyboard. Auditory learners can hear this interval’s consistency; kinesthetic learners can touch it; visual learners can see it. Each sense reinforces the other, emphasizing the consistency and importance of intervals to the structure of music.

No person learns exclusively through one learning style. Visual learners may learn more efficiently by sight, but they learn by touch and hearing, too, although not perhaps as efficiently.

Because the ThumMusic System presents musical information to all three of these senses simultaneously, in a simple and consistent manner, it increases the learning efficiency of

1. Individuals, whose primary learning style’s needs are met – and their secondary styles, too; and
2. Classes, by meeting the needs of all the different styles equally and simultaneously.

Growing the Market

The goal of Thumtronics’ musical innovations is to grow the market for music-making products by reducing the amount of time necessary to achieve a self-sustaining level of musical knowledge and skill.

According to NAMM's tri-annual Gallup surveys, nearly everyone in the First World attempts to play a musical instrument, often more than once (as a child, then as an empty-nester, and again as a retiree). Despite this near-universal attempt to learn to make music, US census data shows that only 4-10% of the US population plays a musical instrument regularly (depending on how you define “regularly”). Yamaha’s 2005 annual report cites the optimistic 10% end of this range. If nearly everyone's already trying to make music, but only 4-10% are successful, then lots of aspiring music-makers are failing.

Why?

The #1 reason why students quit their music lessons is because they "get bored" – that is, they feel that, at their current rate of progress, it will take too long to attain a satisfactory level of knowledge and skill to make the investment of time worthwhile. This prevents these students from reaching a self-sustaining level of musical competence.

The 4-10% of people who do reach such a self-sustaining level of musical competence continue buying the musical instrument industry’s products – sheet music, accessories, upgraded instruments, music-related software, etc. Most of these products have higher margins than beginner's instruments do, so increasing the percentage of music-makers in the population should increase the industry's margins in addition to increasing its revenues.

Therefore, the key to growing the annual global sales & margins of the music products industry is to reduce the amount of time necessary to achieve a self-sustaining level of musical knowledge and skill.

To achieve this growth, three goals must be accomplished:
1. A new solution to the problems of music education must be found.
2. Beginners must have free and easy access to the new solution.
3. Beginners must become aware of, and choose, the new solution.

Goal #1: Find a New Solution
Goal #1 has been completed. The new solution is the ThumMusic System, which (a) abstracts the display of musical information to the level of music theory (intervals, rather than pitches), and (b) anchors this abstraction in the concrete geometry of a specific “isomorphic” note-pattern, in which a given interval has the “same shape” wherever it appears. This makes the fundamental concepts of music easier to visualize and grasp (literally), and has the potential to dramatically increase the rate at which students learn to understand and make music, according to many experts. The ThumMusic System acelerates learning not by "dumbing down" music, but by exposing the fundamental simplicity of music's structure in a geometrically consistent manner.

If you’re looking for an analogy, the ThumMusic System’s keyboard is to music what the Periodic Table of the Elements is to chemistry. The Periodic Table is a two-dimensional drawing that presents the complex structure of the atom in a simple and revealing manner; the ThumMusic keyboard is a two-dimensional drawing that presents the complex structure of musical sound in a simple and revealing manner. Just as the invention of the Periodic Table led to the discovery of new elements, predicted by “holes” in the Table, so has the Thummer’s keyboard led to the discovery of new musical properties, such as tuning invariance and Dynamic Tonality (which arguably solves the problem of temperament, which has been plaguing music for 25 centuries). The discovery of these properties is strong evidence of the validity of Thumtronics’ approach.

Goal #2: Free and Easy Access
To accomplish Goal #2, the ThumMusic System must be made freely available and easily accessible. This is accomplished by providing free (for beginners, at least), open-source, ThumMusic-based online music education courseware which uses the standard computer keyboard as a ThumMusic Keyboard. Thumtronics is working with the University of Texas at Austin to develop this courseware, and would welcome the participation of other universities, companies, philanthropies, and individuals.

But, can any new music notation succeed? Literally hundreds have been proposed over the centuries, and all have failed…except for guitar tab. Why did tab succeed? In part because it made a common interface (the guitar fret-board) easier to learn. The ThumMusic System will make music easier to learn, too, using the most common interface of all – the computer keyboard. The music products industry’s widespread support for the new universal music notation file format, Music XML, makes the success of ThumMusic notation much easier. So does the widespread use of music notation software, such as Finale! and Sibelius, since these programs can be retro-actively upgraded to support ThumMusic notation through the installation of a simple ThumMusic software plug-in, distributed free over the Internet. Using such a plug-in, all of the world’s music can be instantly available in ThumMusic notation, without making any deals with music software or publishing companies.

So, Goal #2 above – giving beginners easy, free access to the ThumMusic System – can be easily accomplished.

Goal #3: Awareness and Choice
To accomplish Goal #3, novices must hear about the new solution and be persuaded to learn music using it. NAMM’s Gallup surveys show that 70% of beginners choose their own instruments (usually based on wanting to imitate cool artists, apparently). So to get students to choose to play the Thummer, we need to get creative artists to use them first.

It’s well-known that creative artists choose to use those tools & instruments which allow them to do make new music in interesting ways. So we need a ThumMusic-compatible instrument that gives creative artists the opportunity to make music that is truly new, but which can succeed in the commercial mainstream, thereby inspiring non-musicians to learn to play music using that same instrument. That instrument is the Thummer, a new USB-MIDI music controller which can control the sound of any MIDI-compatible electronic synthesizer, and which uses the two-dimensional note-pattern of the ThumMusic System.

The Thummer provides simultaneous control over more independent variables (degrees of freedom) than any other musical interface, whether acoustic, electric, or electronic. The Thummer is the only polyphonic instrument with the expressive power to exploit music synthesis techniques such as waveguide synthesis, so its players will be able to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments with uncanny realism while playing accompaniment, too. Furthermore, the Thummer makes new musical effects – such as Dynamic Tonality, which is simply impossible with any other musical instrument – trivially easy to control. You just wiggle a joystick, and cool new musical effects happen, with no theoretical understanding required (although the music theory underlying these effects is deep and revolutionary). It is expected that truly creative artists will flock to the Thummer because its expressive power and Dynamic Tuning allows them to make music that is truly new, while still fitting comfortably within the mainstream.

This conclusion is supported by industry experts. "As a VP at BMG’s Windham Hill label," wrote Grace Newman, "I decided which bands to sponsor, promote, and endorse, from unknown bands to Grammy-winning artists. I looked for musicians that had something new, something different, that would stand out in the market... and so did every other label. The first musicians to master the Thummer will rivet the attention of the entire music industry. If you're looking for a way to break out of the pack, this is it."

The music of these creative artists – and the coolness of controlling sound through motion – is expected to inspire musical beginners to want to play the Thummer, too. These beginners will be able to start learning to play the Thummer online, for free, using the ThumMusic System and their computer keyboards, to which so many of today’s youth’s are glued anyway. Their progress should be rapid due to the ThumMusic System’s ease-of-learning. When they exhaust the expressive potential of the computer keyboard (which won’t take long), they can step up to a Thummer, the expressive potential of which is unlimited.

Here’s one small example of how the Thummer was designed to appeal to non-musical consumers in order to help grow the market. The Thummer uses control devices that non-musical consumers are already familiar with, such as a keyboard that is intentionally similar to the ubiquitous computer keyboard and the thumb-operated joysticks and electronic motions sensors that are now common in video game controllers. Millions of non-musical consumers have spent endless hours developing fine motors skills with these control devices. Using a Thummer, they can apply these existing skills to expressive music-making. Leveraging consumers’ existing motor skills presents them with a much lower barrier to entry than would requiring them to learn entirely new motor skills such as (say) manipulating a bow, developing an embouchure, picking a guitar, etc. Their success will tend to keep them in the MI market, stepping up to more advanced instruments, buying more sheet music, buying more accessories, taking more in-person lessons, etc. – potentially growing the MI market to double or triple its current size.

A “Pocket Thummer” could put four octaves of fully-integrated polyphonic musical power in your pocket for less than the price of a good harmonica. It could become “every beginner’s first instrument, and every musician’s second™.”

The Opportunity
Between the computer keyboard, the Thummer, and the ThumMusic System, a higher percentage of beginners could succeed at reading music fluently, composing music knowledgeably, and performing music expressively.

The Thummer has been designed to be enough better, in enough ways that consumers care about, to diffuse rapidly in the mainstream consumer market. The conservatism of traditional retail distribution can be overcome through direct sales over the Internet (see The Long Tail), which can aggregate thin global demand into very respectable volumes, allowing prices to fall and awareness to rise to levels necessary to support traditional retail distribution. Because the Thummer is so tiny, has so few moving parts, and is all-electronic, it is remarkably cheap to manufacture, store, ship, and stock – the ideal instrument for Web-based sales directly from manufacturer to consumer.

Because Thumtronics’ innovations’ many patent applications are sailing through the international patent process, it has the potential to erect high barriers to competition, ensuring that it and it alone captures the value of this future growth. This could make that company the industry’s revenue and profit leader within a decade. Market leaders are regularly toppled in this manner, as a result of paradigm shifts to solutions that are simpler, cheaper, and more powerful – solutions like Thumtronics’.

Growth, growth, growth. Thumtronics’ innovations are all about growing the market.

Conclusion
Shift happens. Industries and ideas that had seemed stable for centuries can shift with surprising speed, once a new approach comes along that is simple, cheap, and powerful. This can happen to the music products industry, too – and all indications are that Thumtronics has the innovations necessary to drive such a shift.

Hard Work

While the percentage of music educators that are enthusiastic about the ThumMusic System is high, those who are unconvinced sometimes seem to be opposed to anything that might make music education easier. They want music education to be hard. This view is captured in the Children's Music Workshop's Twelve Benefits of Music Education, in which Benefit #7 is described as follows: "Through music study, students learn the value of sustained effort to achieve excellence and the concrete rewards of hard work."

However, this benefit can be obtained from lots of alternative activities, including team sports, weight-lifting, macramé, and even video-game playing, just to name a few examples. Therefore, emphasizing this common benefit is a distraction from, and devalues, music education’s unique benefits.

Here’s another way to frame the issue. Let’s say that this minority of hard-work-loving music educators had to choose between making music education 10% easier or 10% harder, with all else being equal, and the status quo not being an option. Because these educators consider “an appreciation for the benefits of hard work” to be an important outcome of music education, then of course they would prefer the “10% harder” option. Surely one can’t increase a student’s appreciation for “the benefits of hard work” by making something easier!

Yet this is clearly self-defeating (which is probably why it is a minority viewpoint). Taken to its logical extreme, this viewpoint would make music education so hard that no one would be able to succeed. That's clearly not a desireable outcome, because then no one would attain the unique benefits of music education (whatever those might be).

On the other hand, let's consider the other logical extreme. Imagine that music educators could wave a magic wand and instantly change a non-musician's brain, muscles, cardiovascular system, etc. to precisely match the changes would have resulted from years of musical study and practice through traditional methods of music education (but without the Repetitive Stress Injuries). Let’s further imagine that waving this magic wand was guaranteed to deliver the unique benefits of music education with no unpleasant or unexpected side-effects. Talent and inspiration would not be guaranteed, but then, they never are.

If the unique benefits of music-making are good for individuals and for society, then waving this hypothetical magic wand would be, too, wouldn’t it?

To argue otherwise would be, in effect, to advocate educational flagellation in the belief that the self-mortification of unnecessarily hard work will deliver spiritual benefits.

According to the Twelve Benefits of Music Education, Benefit #3 is that "Students of the arts learn to think creatively and to solve problems by imagining various solutions, rejecting outdated rules and assumptions. Questions about the arts do not have only one right answer" [emphasis added].

A high percentage of music educators have acquired this benefit, and are eager to deliver the unique benefits of music education to as many students as possible, by any means necessary -- magic wands, the ThumMusic System, or whatever. The flagellants, on the other hand, would apparently rather see students fail with traditional methods than succeed with a new one, lest -- God forbid! -- they attain the unique benefits of music education without as much hard work.

Thank goodness that music education's flagellants are in the minority!

ThumMusic & IT’s MIS Bridge

Later today, I have my first meeting with a team of students from UT/Austin’s McCombs School of Business’ MIS Bridge. They will be working to define the technical infrastructure of the ThumMusic System’s online courseware. My objective for this first meeting is to scope out what they can reasonably be expected to do within the time they have available, given their existing knowledge and skills.

The general idea is for them to identify and specify the reusable software objects that must be developed in order for Web-based ThumMusic courseware to be developed and deployed using open source methods, such that the resulting courseware is highly interactive.

For example, the courseware should be able to use the computer keyboard as a musical keyboard; display any arbitrary piece of MusicXML in ThumLine staff notation, preferably in an interactive manner (for example, illuminating notes as when they should be played and/or when they are played); show animations of chord progressions, key modulations, etc. on the tonnetz in a manner similar to Mathieu’s excellent use of the tonnetz in his book Harmonic Experience, but interactively, and again driven by any arbitrary MusicXML file; and so on. The goal is not to have the students implement these software objects, necessarily, but rather for them to identify and specify them all so that they can be implemented by others. If the students can also implement some or all of the software objects, then all the better, if only to help them hone their specification skills.

I have suggested that the project be based on Moodle – a free, open source course management system (CMS) that appears to have attained critical mass. Using a free CMS will facilitate having the lessons themselves be free, and also facilitate having others contribute lessons for free.

Free, free, free. I love free. It’s my favorite price – and yours too, I bet. The freer the ThumMusic System is, the more rapidly and widely awareness of its benefits will spread, and ultimately the more Thummers I’ll sell. Thus does the Invisible Hand of economics direct our private actions to the public good.

"Obviously"...in Retrospect

After a new product has turned its industry upside-down, people always say “well, of course! That product was obviously going to be a success.” But it is rarely so clear ahead of time.

For example, in 1968, HP introduced a desktop scientific calculator which weighed 40 pounds and cost $5,000. It was the smallest, lightest, fastest, most powerful, and cheapest calculator of its day. After it was demonstrated to HP co-founder Bill Hewlett, he suggested that they should make a new calculator that was ten times smaller, faster, and cheaper – the first pocket calculator.

HP’s marketing studies suggested that this would be a mistake. Apparently, the price and size of the HP 9100 conveyed a sense of value and reliability, whereas a pocket-sized calculator at a lower price would inevitably seem more toy-like. It was believed that the total world market for pocket calculators was perhaps 50,000 units. Bill Hewlitt, company co-founder, developed it anyway.

Within the first few months that the HP-35 was available in 1972, HP received orders exceeding their guess as to the total market size. General Electric alone placed an order for 20,000 units.

How could HP have so badly under-estimated the demand for pocket-sized scientific calculators? My guess is that they looked at the market for the HP-9100 and multiplied it, rather than looking at the market for slide rules and multiplying that.

The real target market was not just those who used slide rules, but also those who attempted to use slide rules and failed. Such failure was hardly surprising, since using a slide rule requires (a) understanding logarithms, which most people can’t even spell, yet alone understand, and (b) performing the desired calculation in your head first, to get an idea of where the decimal place should go in the final result. The pocket calculator eliminated this significant learning-and-use barrier to scientific calculation, thereby expanding the market beyond that of the ubiquitous slide rule.

It’s all so obvious in hindsight, isn’t it? Simplicity, affordability, power, portability – the HP-35 had it all. Obviously it was going to be a run-away success. Right?

Now, look at the Thummer.

Enough said?