RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY BASIS FOR COLORKEYS : Compiled by Felix Vikham

Introduction
Learning to play the piano is one of the most difficult, yet rewarding challenges in a person's life. ColorKeys is a patent-pending system that ensures beginner piano players of any age can quickly become proficient. The system uses color for written musical notation, which enables novices to more easily read music and thus bypass one of the most difficult hurdles in learning how to play the piano and other multi-octave instruments.

People using ColorKeys find it easier to relate the notes on a page of music to the keys on the piano. This reduces the time novices need to learn to sight read music, and to become proficient at their chosen instrument, both of which reduces the high risk of dropping out of a musical curriculum. Most importantly, ColorKeys facilitates the development of many extra-musical benefits of learning to play music, which include improved self-esteem, a better capacity for math and language, and even becoming better chess players.

How ColorKeys Works
The basis of the ColorKeys system is applying specially designed colors to the seven unique notes of the octave (A,B,C,D,E,F,G). Piano students learn to identify the colorized notes on their sheet music with keys on their piano, thus enabling them to more quickly comprehend how written notes and physical keys work together.

Difficulties Learning to Play Piano and the Advantages of the ColorKeys Method

Why Do Most People Drop Out of a Music Curriculum?
Every human being is born with an aptitude to play a musical instrument. Although history shows that musical prodigies and savants exist, it also shows that playing music is an evolutionary trait shared by every culture and civilization ever to exist on Earth. But, if every person is capable of learning a musical instrument, why do the vast majority who start to learn end up dropping outeven if they were at one point highly determined?

Traditionally, the reasons given for dropping out are: 1) that the person was not a good musician, and thus why should he or she bother? Or 2) that the person didn't have enough time to practice, and thus couldn't become proficient enough to make the musical experience worthwhile. Studies discount both explanations. Most proficient piano players don't exhibit a greater innate musical aptitude than non-proficient players. Rather, they showed an ability to stay in a program. The
argument that people drop out because they don't practice enough has also been discounted. Susan Hallam, an education researcher at the University of London,
has found that the time spent practicing is not an accurate indicator of whether a
person drops out of a musical curriculum. Her research demonstrates that the best way to keep someone involved and motivated is to continuously learn new songs and techniques. While practice might make perfect, finding new ways of exciting players ensures they will keep practicing towards perfection. The reality is that most students who drop out do so because of the nature of the musical curriculum. While most students are created equal in terms of musical talent, teachers and teaching methods vary greatly.

All music instruction shares a difficulty teaching sight-reading. For music novices,
the notation on sheet music constitutes a new written language, the reading of
which is as difficult as picking up written Russian for English speakers. Yet,
learning how to sight-read is essential to progressing on any instrument, especially the piano with its range of seven octaves and 88 keys.

This is why ColorKeys is so valuable: it makes notation easier to read. By making notation easier to read, ColorKeys reduces the risk of students dropping out at a critical point in the learning process. Most students learn to play music by matching
sounds from their instrument to the melodies of simple songs in their memory. While this process is essential for novices sitting behind a piano for the first time, it becomes a crutch when they move onto more complex compositions. Quickly, the determinate of whether People continue in a musical curriculum is not whether they have musical ability or motivation to practice, but whether they can read the notes on a page of music.

What We Can Learn From Dyslexia
Dyslexics are as capable as anyone of understanding complex and abstract ideas in all facets of knowledge. Their problems tend to be specific to transforming letters on a page into words and paragraphs. Yet most dyslexics learn how to read. Educators are now discovering how to accelerate literacy skills so that dyslexics don't become frustrated and ask, "What's the point?"

Interestingly, the sense of confusion and intimidation that a dyslexic feels looking onto a page of text of a dense book is the same as that of a musical novice looking onto, say, a Mozart composition. Even if music beginners have been told what the notes and staffs symbolize, they have difficulty deciphering meaning from the notation and struggle to apply the notes to their instruments. People thus drop out of a musical curriculum not because they are poor musicians, but because they have difficulty making sense of sheet music. Just as the most affected dyslexics learn to read, even the most novice musician is capable of learning to sight-read music.

Why Color In Music Notation?
The problem people have with reading music is that the symbols on the page represent a significant quantity and quality of information. Dots on a staff denote a scale of letters for instance, C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. Clefs represent which hand is used and where on the piano the notes are located. Notes can be natural, sharp or flat. Each element on the page adds a layer of complexity to the music. With so much information being presented, written music can seem like a jumble of dots and lines without meaning. Like dyslexics who are intimidated by too much information on a page, novice musicians are similarly page, frightened off when appraising even basic music scores.

The use of color in music notation can be thought of as a map to guide the eye through the maze of markings on a musical score. Instead of having to count how low or high a note rests on a staff, the eye quickly sees a blue note, which
represents G, or green that represents an E note. Color provides a secondary point of reference, making it easier to navigate the score. The technical psychological
term is "synesthesia," which is defined as a single stimulus triggering more than
one sense simultaneously.

Though synesthesia is also a term for a clinical medical condition that may manifest as a person actually seeing colors when listening to music, it is also the basis for pedagogical methods commonly used with younger children and dyslexics. Children, for example, are taught word meanings through pictures. Dyslexics similarly are taught to reinforce the meaning of complicated words with mental images. In both cases, students build mental associations as reference points for meaning. This is why ColorKeys works so well.

ColorKeys also has the added benefit of furthering pattern recognition in music. Nearly all songs and musical scores are based on melodic movements that are composed of patterns of repeating notes. With ColorKeys, a music student can clearly see the patterns and how they contrast against other notes on the sheet. Dyslexia again proves a telling model. The singular problem dyslexics have with reading is an inability to synthesize the letters into words. Dyslexia specialists have discovered that the best way to overcome the problem is to draw mental images when coming across complex words. For example, a dyslexic might at first only see the letters H-E-L-I-C-O-P-T-E-R, but when seeing the word again will be able to visualize the flying vehicle. In the same way, ColorKeys enables students to see musical phrases on the page rather than individual music notes.

Identifying musical chords, essential to playing the piano, is also made dramatically easier. In traditional sheet music chords are shown as stacked notes, which can be confusing to the novice eye. In the ColorKeys method, chords are "coded" with a unique color combination. For example, a C Major chord will always contain black, green and blue colorized notes, the combination of which is not shared by any other chord. This allows for instant recognition and identification of a chord, even when it is inverted, or played in an open or broken style.

The Problem With Color
The notion of applying color to music is not new. As early as the 18 century, Isaac Newton assigned colors to musical notes from the progression of colors in the spectrum of white light. Others have experimented with color through the years, all of which have faced the same problem: when placed close together on sheet music, colors tend to blend together and become indecipherable from one another. This is a function of sloppy color selection and of the historical limits of printing technology. Many of the systems devised before ColorKeys used the rainbow color scheme (red-green-blue) where colors blend together. At the same time, printing technology made color reproduction a faulty science that made exact color reproduction difficult and expensive.

ColorKeys uses the latest in digital printing technology to ensure color standardization across printing substrates. In addition, ColorKeys used a computer algorithm to determine the greatest possible contrast between colors on a single palette. With the ColorKeys printing system, colors can be accurately and economically reproduced, removing the difficulty and expense of printing music in color.

The Benefits of Learning to Play a Musical Instrument

Music and the Brain
ColorKeys is being introduced at a time when the extra-musical benefits of learning to play music are only just being fully understood. Amongst neural and psychological researchers, it is well known that learning to play a musical instrumentespecially piano or keyboardresults in a larger capacity for mathematics, reading skills, verbal memory and spatial reasoning . The latest research holds that these "cognitive transfer effects" are caused by increased brain activity in the areas of the frontal cortex stimulated by playing music.

"Music promotes cognitive development and abstract thought," writes Norman N. Weinberger, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California. "Within this realm, we include topics such as reading, the mental rotation of representations of objects, and creative thinking. These tap into three of the many aspects of intelligence."

One recent examination of musical cognitive transfer effects using an MRI scan showed that areas of the brain responsible for synthesizing auditory information is 25 percent larger in musicians with perfect pitch than non-musicians. Those same areas of the brain are also used for pattern recognition, essential to math and verbal skills.

"[C]ertain neural firing patterns organized in a complex spatial-temporal code over large regions of the cortex are exploited by both musical and spatial reasoning tasks," writes Frances H. Rauscher, a neural psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who is considered the world leader in researching music's effect on the brain. One recent study of 144 six-year-olds saw an average increase of 2.5 IQ points after a year of weekly piano lessons (versus a statistically insignificant increase for those taking drama lessons). Indeed, numerous studies have shown that school-aged children enrolled in private music programs quickly leapfrog their peers in math and language academic scores.

Passively listening to music has shown similar brain stimulation, but to a much smaller degree. Studies indicate that that these transfer effects are only fully realized by actively playing music. Piano and keyboard have been shown to be most beneficial in this regard. Rauscher speculates that the piano, by nature of the physical complexity required to play the instrument, Maximizes musical stimulation to the most number of areas in the brain.

For younger children, cognitive transfer effects manifest in an increased ability for math and language skills. Both effects have been studied thoroughly in children. A recent study published in Neuropsychology (published by the American Psychological Association) illustrated how learning music propels language skills. The study had children recall words from a list. Children with musical training recalled significantly more words versus children with no musical training. The same test was conducted numerous times over a period of two years, with the results showing the gap between experimental and control groups growing over time. The study's authors explain the divide by a "cortical re-organization in the left temporal region" of the brain in music students. In other words, the more the left side of the brain is stimulated, the more it is able to perform other functions.

Another recent study conducted over three years in Montreal, Canada, showed children taking piano lessons highly out-scored other students in standardized language tests. The findings mirror a seminal study from 1975 where students taking music lessons jumped from the 72nd percentile for threading skills to the 88 percentile.

Similar performance enhancements were seen in math skills. A longitudinal study conducted over three years with children taking piano lessons found that musically trained students substantially out-scored a non-trained control group at specialized math tests. In fact, elevated academic math scores have been repeatedly demonstrated for school-aged children over the past twenty years. Math is closely linked with spatial reasoning, which can enhance the ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives. Now that spatial reasoning has been linked to music training, numerous studies have shown children and teenagers have increased capacity for chess and solving engineering problems when enrolled in music training.

Music and Self-Esteem
In recent years, music therapy has been demonstrated as an effective treatment for depression and other clinical mood maladies such as panic and anxiety disorders. Most music therapy involves developing deep listening skills and an ability to learn and practice playing a musical instrument. Researchers postulate that music therapy works as a means for increasing self-esteem, which then alleviates most symptoms associated with emotional disorders. Music therapy is now commonly prescribed for those afflicted with autism and severe depression as well as for schizophrenics and the elderly.

Improved self-esteem is now believed to be one of music's most undervalued side effects. These improvements straddle age demographics, and have been shown to help those already self-aware and confident. There are numerous explanations given for how music affects self-esteem. Some researchers believe that music's positive effects result from music being used as a social tool, bringing together friends and family in song. Other researchers believe that the sense of Accomplishment derived from learning an instrument spills over into the rest of a person's sense of well-being. More recently however, researchers have examined how playing an instrument focuses and concentrates attention on the task at hand, and thus breaks patterns of negative thinking about the past and future.

Whatever the causes, music's ability to increase self-esteem is a well-documented phenomenon. A definitive study on self-esteem and music instruction was published in the Psychology of Music in 2004. The study placed 64 fourth-grade children in piano lessons for three years while studying 54 children without piano lessons as a control group. "The results of the study indicate that there are specific benefits associated with piano instruction, especially the development of self-esteem," write the study's authors. "The increase in self-esteem of the children who completed three years of piano instruction was significant while changes in self-esteem of those who never participated in piano instruction or who dropped out of the lessons were not."

Conclusion
The ColorKeys system of music notation makes sight-reading music easier, accelerating the pace of learning to play the piano. Additionally, it allows piano students to pass the major hurdle of progressing from music memorization to playing from written music. ColorKeys thus reduces the risk of new music students getting frustrated and quitting the piano before learning how to play.

By increasing the probability of music students continuing with their lessons, ColorKeys also increases the likelihood of students receiving the extra-musical benefits of playing an instrument. These cognitive transfer effects propel music students in other fields of mental ability, including math, language and verbal skills, as well as an increased ability for spatial reasoning. More importantly, students will feel better about themselves from the accomplishment associated with learning to play music. By using the ColorKeys system, virtually anyone can enjoy the rewards associated with learning to play music.

Previous systems using color in music notation have attempted to revolutionize the way music is written that make it difficult for people who already have the ability to read standard notation to read the new system. In developing ColorKeys all of the prior art has been examined and analyzed to determine exactly what the needs of the student are. Nothing unnecessary has been added, nothing necessary has been left out. ColorKeys is an easily accessible evolution of standard written music.

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