




My Success Story
‘I was inspired to change my approach to teaching meter and tonality when I studied Cohn’s (2019) (Yale) music theory during my Master of Music (2018). I realized that music theory needed to develop for my own students and that Cohn’s work could be adapted to suit all ages of students including very young students. After introducing the new theory, I observed positive results for so many aspects of learning, such as reading notation, problem-solving, rhythmic stability, and more confident performances. I began teaching students to visualize and sonify (sound) the mathematics (beat-class) they experience through ski-hill and cyclic graphs and annotating scores. I then saw the potential for developing applications for students to assist the pedagogy of mathematical music theory. Thus, recent research informs my music teaching and the data is contributing to music (interdisciplinary) research to show how students learn music theory through the world’s first comprehensive theory of meter and one which is based on the psychoacoustic experience of ‘sound rather than on notation.’