Long back I heard about Math and Music being the two universal languages. I think it’s true. The idea is that while the normal day to day spoken languages require learning, interpreting and figuring out the real meaning of a sentence from the context, math and music are a lot less ambiguous and the same music could be appreciated by anyone on the planet (or should I say Universe as they are universal). A great example for music is the infamous song that first broke the 2-billion limit of view count on Youtube, I don’t know the language but I myself watched it several times :).
My son has been learning his Piano lessons for more than a year now. Given his desire to do a lot of other things such as playing minecraft or ipad games, he has no interest in practicing the lessons at home. But nothing happens without practice unless someone is a prodigy in it. He is given some lessons to practice and only after he clears them he can go to the next song. Some times he is stuck in the same song for a few weeks. Given my lack of education in music, I feel helpless. Every week, the music instructor advises to practice and my son practices it in his own way and I don’t even have any idea whether he is doing it correctly or not. Sometimes we just rely on Youtube to see someone else playing the same song and see if he is doing it similarly.
One day after the class I told his music teacher that when it comes to Math I teach my son myself but when it comes to Music I am helpless. The teacher had an advice that I could also sign up for the lessons and learn :). My lame excuse was that I am super busy.
But this whole episode got me into thinking about the stuff I am more comfortable with, Math. I know many busy working parents have no time to teach their kids. Some of them may send their kids to tuition or special classes. What’s hard to send a kid to classes spending hundreds when the parents are earning thousands right? Of course, there may be another situation where the parents are not educated enough (or long forgotten what they learned) and so can’t help their kids. Now say the kid is doing poorly in the tests. What can the parent do other than being helpless? Just like I feel helpless when the music instructor tells my son he is not playing the notes correctly and I know I can’t help him back at home during his practice.
While I still can’t help my son with his music practice, I did do one thing. I figured out how to record the music on our digital piano and play it back. This helps us at least validate if the tempo is correct because of the metronome. This is doing two things. It’s helping him get better. It’s helping me to tell him to practice again and again till he is getting the tempo correct 🙂 Essentially the subjective music could be objectively measured by a piano noob like me in whatever small way.