Does your five to ten year old have musical ability? It's getting harder to tell. There's less music in schools than ever. Piano teachers may or may not perceive your kid's genius, or lack thereof. And besides, of what does musical ability consist, anyway?
Making Music might have some of your answers. The author is a well-known composer, Morton Subotnick, who narrates in the overview his ideas behind this program. It allows users to experience "what composing music is like before they embark on a formal music education. In art, students use the `studio art experience,' a modal creative process, where they experience creative processes before they `learn to draw.' " Making Music is the music equivalent.
Subotnick says, having watched his daughter paint, that "as children you can be creative in all sorts of activities. . . . but you can't quite do the same thing with making music. . . . in music, if you sing or play it, it's gone as soon as you are finished." True enough. And notation, which composers use, "takes many years of training and practice." His solution is to "make it possible to write and create music as easily as painting on an easel."
This program makes it possible to compose "music" without mastering the art of 18th-century Euro-American musical language. So be ready: the music your child will make using this program will not sound like anything you've heard before, unless perhaps you studied music in college. This "music" is made not to please the ear, but to please the user's natural tendency to organize materials of sound. That's all composers do. And if a child demonstrates this proclivity, it can certainly be taken as musical ability.
The opening screen provides modules called Building Blocks, Mix & Match, Melody & Rhythm Maker, Games, and the Composition Screen. Audio help is easily accessible by clicking on a question mark in the lower right portion of the screen, then moving the cursor over any button to hear the explanation of its function. On my Pentium computer the help came around a little slowly.
The composition screen provides two drawing tools, a paint brush and a conductor's wand. You drag these over a blank screen and they work like a graph: pitches ascend toward the top and descend toward the bottom. If you hold the mouse down and drag it horizontally, the note is sustained. Playback is from left to right. If this sounds complicated, believe me it isn't.
These are essentially drawing tools, and whether you draw a picture of a car, a sun shining, a stick figure, or a linear graph, it's all going to sound pretty much the same, depending on some of the other choices you make.
Key choices include the instrument palette, with any one of 16 sounds. It's possible to keep overlaying instruments and musical lines until you have a virtual orchestration. A child with a sensitive ear and patience could explore far and wide in this area.
The easiest way to make music with this program is to use the Building Blocks. It allows even the youngest child to compose by dragging and dropping musical phrases and playing them back. Another great feature for the youngest users is the Games module, which reinforces some basic ear training exercises. The Melody & Rhythm Maker works the same way, but the choices are slightly more complex.
In order to be satisfied with this product, you must agree that the end result is not what matters here; it's the process that's important. Since the natural inclination with drawing tools is to draw pictures, you also ought to expect that initial interest will be sustained and reinforced chiefly in seeing how a drawing sounds, something most people have never thought about doing. And a fair amount of adult supervision is necessary to get a child going on this program's powerful features.
With those caveats, what you have here is a very powerful suite of tools, with well-constructed help features, which would not limit a child in any way from making music. This is a big statement to make. Making Music does away with all the prerequisites and gets right down to the business at hand, letting a child compose. I highly recommend this program for a child-Morton Subotnick and Voyager have done nothing less here than challenge conventional assumptions about teaching children music. Approach it with an open mind, and you will probably end up fighting with your kid over who gets to play it!
