ThumMusings

Bringing the user interface of music-making into the 21st Century, and changing the world... one note at a time.

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Name: ThumMeister
Location: Austin, Texas, United States

In the late 1980’s, I tried to write insanely great code for the Mac and help others do so, too. When Windows swept through the Valley in 1991-2, I realized my great code would become worthless if the Mac platform sank. I became very interested in knowing how to spot winning platforms. Since Microsoft clearly knew how to make its platforms succeed, I joined its Systems Strategy Group. While designing and executing practical "technology evangelism" campaigns, I studied the theory behind the practice, eventually teaching mandatory "how-to" seminars to Microsoft's new evangelists. I left Microsoft in 2000, looking for a new industry to disrupt. When my wife quit her piano lessons after six months of diligent practice, saying that “music is just too hard,” I knew I’d found it. Hammering the Web relentlessly, I found a novel combination of old ideas which could make music dramatically easier to teach, learn, & play, more emotionally expressive, and expand the frontiers of tonality. This blog tells the story of my bringing those innovations to market.

Friday, October 12, 2007

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.

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