moving forward with music.

Imagine having some video games that allowed you to teach musical concepts to students on real musical instruments. Also, imagine that you were then able to watch their progress over time and track their development?

Well, the future is now!*

(*Kinda.)

Recently, along with Matthew Thibeault and Ben Smith, I had the pleasure to present at GLS 8.0 in Madison, WI. For those that don’t know, “GLS 8.0″ stands for “the 8th Annual Games, Learning, and Society Conference.” This is my second time coming to the conference and it is truly an inspiring event. (As an aside, it also has the distinction of being one of the most well-run conferences I have ever been to. Any conference that has a free ice cream bar case open for almost the entire day is fine by me!)

The presentation centered around some music games that we prototyped at the University of Illinois and tested with undergraduate music education students. Rather than your traditional Guitar Hero gameplay, these games used an instrument or voice to control what is happening on the screen. They’re very fun and have some real applications in the world of music education. You can read the conference paper here.

You can also download the games here! (Sorry. Mac only… for now!) The games are very simple, but fun! There’s a long jump game where you can work on long tones, a maze where you change your pitch to navigate a maze, and much more! There’s a “Read Me” file included in the file to answer your questions. Try it out and let us know what you think!

This will be a short post (since it’s Thanksgiving and nobody will read it), but I wanted to share some initial thoughts I had on Rock Band 3, since I have blogged about it before (here and here).

As always, the game is fun.

In terms of gameplay, Rock Band 3 runs well. I’m particularly happy that you can add players during a song. Otherwise, Rock Band 3 is like any other Rock Band game, except…

Keyboard Mode

Okay, I was really excited to play on the keyboard. For the most part, it is really enjoyable. You have the option to play the guitar and bass parts directly on the keyboard, which will be nice for people who might find the coordination required to play on the guitar to be too difficult. That’s awesome, right?

Here’s my problem: it is REALLY hard to play the keyboard using the standard Rock Band notation! Instead of just 5 potential buttons to keep track of, you have to know about 25 potential targets. It is helped a little bit by grouping keys into five different colors and by distinguishing between naturals and accidentals (black and white keys), but it’s still difficult. After playing for a couple of songs, I came to a simple realization:

I would do much better if the game simply used standard notation!

I know that’s not true for everybody, but reading the notes would provide a sense of structure that the current system seems to lack. I suppose my larger point is that the makers of Rock Band could have created a system that reinforced standard notation (perhaps with the help of colors).

The beauty of Rock Band is that the multiple levels of difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard, and Advanced) simplify rhythms and patterns to slowly learn how to play the game. Why couldn’t this be done with standard notation? Instead of a series of buttons, a series of notes scroll across the screen. At first, you could play every down beat or every first note of a phrase, then more notes get added.

I know this is overly simplified, but it’s something to think about. Can’t we all agree that it would be a benefit for music education?

I currently don’t have the game, but if anybody feels like donating it to me… (hey, it worked for my Golden Record!).

Here’s a video of the Pro Keyboard mode if you want to get a look.