A piano teacher in Cologne, Germany has developed the app YMA: Gamified Music Learning to help students master various music theory concepts. He sent me a free code to check it out, so here’s my review of it after spending some time exploring what it has to offer.
The colors and theme are vibrant and appealing! When you first open it, you will see an overview of each chapter and what you will learn in it.
I clicked Chapter 1: Get to Know the Notes, which took me to a screen with two options – Lesson or Games. I selected the Games option and it immediately started a two minute countdown while displaying a key name and waiting for me to tap the corresponding key on the pictured keyboard. Just before it completed the countdown, the app crashed, so I had to reopen it and start over. This time I made it through the two minutes (that felt like forever!) and was awarded the High Score award. There was no indication of which keys I played incorrectly (even though I did intentionally play several wrong). While playing, a repetitive jungle drum beat played in the background, so I had to turn the volume way down to avoid the distraction. I know for some that might not be an issue, but I’m quite sensitive to ambient sounds when I’m trying to work on something. A couple other observations: there is no settings option, so the player must play the game for two minutes and be prepared for all the notes indicated, which included sharps but no flats (other than a strange BB, which, upon further investigation appears to be the way the app displays and also names flats: “Bee-Bee”).
In order to get a screenshot of the end, I restarted the game and let it run down the time while I just randomly played a few keys. At the end, a popup announced that if I had reached 15 points or more I should move on to the next chapter. In this way, the games are self-directed rather than being programmed to recognize the achievement and then progress or replay the levels accordingly.
I swiped back to the Lesson area to see what it was like. A similar keyboard is pictured and a scroll above it has rows of text that you can swipe through to read information about the key names. It would be nice if the animated “Flora,” who serves as the guide, would read the text or otherwise walk students through the information because most young students either can’t or wouldn’t be interested in reading the text themselves.
From there I moved on to Chapter 2: Thirds. The terminology used is “Small Third” and “Big Third,” and it is used interchangeably with “Minor Third” and “Major Third.” On this one, when I intentionally played some incorrect intervals, the screen continued displaying the same one until I played it correctly. At the conclusion of the two minute countdown, the same popup screen indicated that if I had reached at least 15 points I should move on to the next chapter.
I quickly scanned through the rest of the chapters. Each one offers one game option for the specified area of focus. It would be nice to have settings in order to customize the game for the students’ level of knowledge. For example, in the chords perhaps select only Major chords. Or with the scales, set it to just natural minors. It’s also somewhat limiting that the student must use the pictured keyboard on the screen and doesn’t have the option to play their own piano or even a MIDI-connected keyboard. This works great for practicing music theory away from an instrument, but isn’t as useful for applied learning at the piano.
A section called “Get in the Song Quick” featured questions/riddles with multiple choice answers. Above is one example. Hmm…What do you think?
Overall, I can appreciate the developer’s desire to provide an attractive and fun approach to learning music theory. The app attempts to cover a lot of variety and in the process I think misses the benefit of perhaps fewer areas of focus with more options for customization. If it was updated to include more customization of each area and perhaps some more clear feedback so students could learn from their mistakes, I think it would be more useful. Oh, and perhaps an option to turn off the background drumbeat where applicable! The app has a cool vibe, so with some tweaking it could be a lot of fun for students!
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