What is Soft Mozart?

Soft Mozart, also called the Hiner Method, is a new approach in teaching music. It was created by an American Musicologist and Pedagogue Hellen Hiner.

The uniqueness of this approach is in its reliance on visual perception.
Many think that Soft Mozart is nothing more than a software in a form of a computer game. Others think that Soft Mozart is a new method of teaching piano.

However, neither is entirely true as a stand alone concept.
Soft Mozart is not just a software, because Hiner method existed well before its computer interactive module was created.
Likewise, Soft Mozart  is not just a piano teaching method, because besides helping learn to play piano, it helps develop many other skills and abilities.

The main difference between the Hiner method and all other approaches in teaching music is that all existing methods make a student look for what they need to play, while the Soft Mozart learning system allows him/her to see the notes without having to look for them.

With Soft Mozart, students also are immediately able to see  the relationship between a note and its corresponding key.

In addition, the Hiner Method makes all the elements of the grand staff, including note duration, interactive and animated.

Soft Mozart transforms a static black and white music sheet into a responsive, interactive, and personalized user friendly interface.
Each touch of a piano key is animated and allows a student to see his/her own interaction with music through images.

This approach significantly speeds up simultaneous development of pitch, fine motor skills, memory, and discipline.
Prior to Soft Mozart, none of the existing methods were able to provide such an opportunity.

Originally, when one sees color coding and graphics, one may mistakenly think that there might be some new outside elements as we are used to seeing both music sheets and music keys in black and white.

With Hiner method, imagery and colors are used in order to highlight the essential elements of traditional music notation and make them more recognizable.

Hellene Hiner discovered and highlighted what the grand staff and piano keys had for hundreds of years.

The Hiner method is not an invention, but a discovery that helps unravel the new essence of concepts existing in musicology for centuries.

For the first time in the history of music pedagogy, Hiner designed a system that takes into consideration neuropsychological processes of a human brain, where the music notation adapts to the ability of the brain to perceive information.

 

The known fact that a human eye has a natural ability to focus point by point is one of the main concepts in teaching children how to read and write.

Once a student is able to focus on a single object with the help of ABCs, he/she learns to transfer attention from one word to another. It takes time for him/her to start reading lines of text.  That is why all the languages of the world are linear: we read from left to right, from right to left or from top to bottom.

Discovery and systematization of these and similar facts is the essence of the Hiner Method, implemented in the Soft Mozart Learning System.

Systematization of music facts in Hiner Method

FACTS	Systematization
Piano keys are visual continuation of lines and spaces of the grand staff.	1. Rotation of the grand staff with clefs positioned on top 2. Color coding of the lines of the grand staff 3. Corresponding key coding
The grand staff is perfectly symmetrical	Visual presentation of a grand staff as a «thermomether» with the Do (C) at 0 Degrees The lines of the bass clef are read from top to bottom vs. Bottom to top Beginning of a new octave is visually highlighted with blue color
Note duration is directly connected with the real time sound: sound has a beginning, development, and end.	Beginning – flower bud Development – opening of flower petals End – emergence of butterfly
Musical performance is an exact re-creation of sound pitches.	Correctly chosen sound - flower Incorrectly chosen sound - spider
The timing of music sound is determined by tempo, rhythm, and pulse. By missing notes and pauses, making mistakes or holding sounds longer than needed, we lose «the real time sound».	Flowers bloom faster or slower according to the note duration and their metric rhythm. Prematurely interruped sound - animation (Mr. Oops); absence of sound development – flower blooming; «stuck in place» – movement of butterfly wings, spider legs.   Playing the wrong key or holding the key longer than required leads to time delay
Lines and spaces are equal transmitters of information	Equal width of lines and spaces in Alphabetical presentations
All the notes are located either on or between the lines	Notes on the lines are «girls» and are colored in red Notes between the lines – «boys» and are colored in blue
Registers in music gradually transition from lower to higher pitches.	The Tree of Life represents the idea of music registers. The color of the trunk (brown) is used for the bass clef and the color of the leaves (green) is used for the treble clef.  We start with lower sounds (tree roots) and move towards the crown of the tree and the birds on the tree crown.

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