Test Hellene Hiner

If you think that general piano education is adequate, can you answer one simple question - how many people of your acquaintance are able to play the piano? Not one or two short tunes for two fingers, remembered from the school days, but the serious music of Chopin, List or Gershwin, reading it from music sheets, or playing it by heart. Moreover, how many people that you personally know can sit in the Christmas time at the piano and play a nice Christmas tune?

As a result of the ineffectiveness of the common piano (and music generally) teaching methods, most people are musically illiterate. The difficulty and inefficiency of the usual teaching approaches have created a wide public conviction that successful piano education is possible only for a few prodigies, or must be very expensive for an average student. This situation is amazingly comparable to basic education in the Middle Ages, when the ability to read and write was considered as a privilege of talented or rich people. In those days, the methods of teaching the Alphabet were often based on reading and memorization of large extracts from manuscripts, written in Latin. When education moved from the cramming of texts written in an unknown language to the usage of specially designed ABC books for children, it became really effective and affordable for the wide public.

We are sure that piano playing can also be taught as naturally and easily as reading, and become effective and affordable enough for anybody. We think that our new method of teaching piano is going to change children's notion that piano playing is something dull, complicated and incomprehensible. We want children, and all people, to consider piano performance as easy and entertaining as reading, video games or sports.

For centuries, music education has been based on the individual approach, which has been custom made for selected music lovers. The difficulty of learning music with the old means, especially for beginners, has always required constant help and supervision from the teacher. New computer technologies with interactive forms of training, especially our unique program, are capable of providing effective help and control during self-study, group, and home music practice. Our software can relieve the teacher from all of the monotonous work of building essential music skills. The learning of how to differentiate music symbols and read the music score, and the training of eye-hand coordination require hundreds of routine exercises, where the presence of a music teacher is not any help, but is sometimes just additional stress for beginners as well as for the teacher. Using interactivity, the Soft Mozart software can effectively control and guide students when they play and learn songs without a teacher's supervision, checking the strict correctness of their performance, and helping them in difficult places with visual hints. The computer will allow you to make hundreds mistakes, and will correct them all, without even raising its voice. Our program doesn't dismiss the importance of the music teacher when it comes to improving and polishing the student's music performance. It is rather an efficient tool for group and home lessons, and an invaluable instrument for self-study.

The Soft Mozart program may dismiss a bad teacher, who charges you thousands of dollars for lecturing you on what the Treble Clef and Bass Clef are, when all you want is to learn a song. Soft Mozart provides the student with effective training of the basic skills needed for playing piano and reading music notes, which you can do without any teacher during home practice. With this piano teaching software, it's possible to conduct an effective piano self-study by playing and learning songs.

However, our program can in no way substitute a knowledgeable and concerned music teacher who can give you a goal, bring your music playing to a performing level, and stimulate you to further achievements by being your most demanding audience. Such a teacher improves and polishes your piano performance, adding the technique and soul to it which can't be done by any software. Our software is big help for such a teacher, because it can relieve him from the long and monotonous work of teaching a beginner the essential music skills, like finding the correct key and distinguishing music symbols, and can drastically improve the student's home practice.

The winning point of our invention is that it doesn't conflict with any reasonable method of teaching music, and can be accommodated by all of the leading methods in the world. To the methods based on ear training, like Suzuki, the Soft Mozart can add effective training of reading skills. For the classical approach, our software can add effective music practice and ear training from the first lesson, in a group setting and at home. Any music teacher can easily use some, if not all, of the Soft Mozart computer games, to improve certain music skills of their students.

The language of music is very similar to the language we speak. It is interesting to know that the two centers of the brain responsible for speech and musical development are located close to each other. The main development of those two centers continues until the child is thirteen years old. Dipped in a new language environment, a child can easily learn to speak it without any accent, which is almost impossible for adults. In music education, small children can easily build music skills, effectively develop their music ear, and intuitively absorb all of the important laws of musical art. The playing and hearing of music can become as natural and easy for them as speaking. You can't achieve the same results with teenagers and adults. Many famous pianists and composers were lucky to start their music education in early childhood.

The notion that children should start serious music learning only when they are 7 years old, and maybe even older, after they can fluently read and write, may be explained by the inefficiency of the usual teaching approaches, and lack of effective home piano practice. The usual method of piano teaching is quite straightforward and designed for a student with an already developed sense of abstract thinking. For a small child, such an approach is very stressful and ineffective. Also, if the student's parents have no music education, it has been impossible to provide a productive home practice until the child is big enough to do it by himself. The fact that many children of musicians start to proficiently play on the piano at a young age shows what you can achieve with regular home lessons and a considered approach.

Apart from the enjoyment of playing music, and even prospects of a future music career, piano lessons give the child the much needed boost to their mind development. Piano lessons develop the child's cognitive ability, concentration, memory, and train their fine motor skills, when their mind coordinates the complex motion of two hands and all ten fingers.