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.