Lesson 6

Here's Lesson 6, on modes and mode degrees.


I finally replaced the previous lessons' state-controlling button bar with a simple "Next" button, which only shows up at the appropriate time. This is much simpler and more intuitive, but restricts the user to a single path through the lesson, with no backing up. Good enough for now.

This lesson is, I think, an excellent example of the advantages that animations bring to online music education. The animation of the mode degree labels is impossible to replicate in a book, on a static web page, or even in a live lecture. (Compare it to this, for example.)

JiMS iGetIt! Music System (JiMS) doesn't use the traditional mode names -- Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, etc. -- because those names are meaningless, and therefore must be memorized, which increases the cognitive load of the overall system.

Instead, JiMS names a mode after its scale and starting note-class -- "diatonic Do-mode," for example, or simply "Do-mode" if a diatonic context can be correctly assumed. This mode-naming system requires no memorization because it "says what it means." The name and the meaning are the same thing. Why require students to memorize the fact that "Phygian" means "diatonic Re-mode," when you can just call the mode "diatonic Re-mode" instead?

Furthermore, this same mode-naming pattern can be applied to any scale, whereas the traditional mode-naming scheme requires a unique name for every combination of scale and degree -- yet there is no standard for such unique names for non-diatonic scales.

A fundamental premise of JiMS is that using its non-standard nomenclature will increase students' learning-efficiency by a factor of at least three (and perhaps much more), producing a time-savings that will far exceed the time-cost of learning, in later lessons, to translate between JiMS and traditional nomenclature. As yet, of course, I have no hard data to support this premise, but the winds of cognitive science are at my back.

Next up: Diatonic intervals.