Making Music Composing More Accessible Through Numbers

For 21st century music artists, to be able to create an identity that speaks to audiences and sets them apart from other similar artists is of primary importance. With ever decreasing attention spans and distractions from digital environments and social media, the young artists need to be able to create pleasant surprises with their artistry of original recallable melodies more than ever. In an international school context then, the importance of such practices that boost their skills levels to produce melodic patterns from exotic scales in a multi-cultural context could take them steps ahead. 

The purpose of this experiment then, was to make self-composing and improvisational practices more accessible and simpler through numeric representation of notes which could help the target student group better understand melodic patterns and their intervals. Position based representation of pitches, based on measuring relation from starting pitch, allows for a flexible and robust way for encoding music compositions (D Matic,2010). Using numbers to represent musical notes could result in better understanding of mapping and visualization of notes in a scale. For students who have almost no prior experience with composing their own music in any setting, and are used to playing from written music, the sense of achievement that results from composing and exercising creative thinking through improvisation-based music simplifies through numeric representation, plays an important role in establishing identity and positive relationships among adolescents, especially in group settings, making them more confident and expressive personalities (Lauscher, Novak,2007).

In two such contexts, in a classroom in China and another in Dubai, students were introduced to two pentatonic (five note) scales namely: The Hirajoshi scale from Japan and Raag Vibhaas from India, respectively. Both are very different in their mood and emotions they generate. Hirajoshi uses root, major 2nd, minor 3rd, 5th and minor 6th and Vibhaas uses root, minor 2nd, major 3rd, 5th and minor 6th. Numbers from 1 to 5 were assigned to each like this. For simplicity, the Key was C major.

Hirajoshi:  (A)                  C  D  Eb G Ab

                                          1   2   3   4   5

Raag Vibhaas:  (B)         C  Db  E  G  Ab

                                          1    2   3   4    5

For example:

In A, numbers could be  4323, 2321, 3455, 3121

In B, numbers could be  2324, 2123, 4335, 5451

Students were then asked to play the number groups they generated on a piano (marked with the numbers) and turn and talk in pairs to discuss their observations. They were to focus on these questions:

1. Does the repetition of one number allow better recall value of the melody?
2. Does assigning numbers make it easier to combine the scale pitches, if yes then how?
3. If they were to research and find other scales, would it be easier to combine scale notes into melodies than before and why?

If you try this out with your students, especially those who have never composed a melody before, let me know your reflections through an email or LinkedIn. 

References