Resources - Teacher Resources

Resources for Akousunesis Teachers and Students

Start your young students by learning chords and hearing melodies, stop teaching them how to read notation and get timing correct on traditional notation, at least for now, you'll gain more students this way.  The child needs to be looking at their hands, not a sheet of paper, you need to minimise the visual crutches. I'm currently creating a Songbook Pro Set for the John Thompson beginners series so the students can still sit for their classical exams. The set will contain all the exercises from the John Thompson book. Each exercise will contain, chords and lyrics, chords and intervals and the song skeleton.

Inline with Akousunesis teaching methods

Although we're open to new ideas and improvements, any new teacher who wishes to be included into the school needs to be inline with these basic criteria.  The main differences which distinguishes the Akousunesis method from all other teaching methods are;

• Focused theoretical knowledge will help students become better players, improvisors and composers. We don't teach theory for the sake of looking impressive to our peers, it must have a direct practical application. The ego often gets in the way when trying to communicate ideas, competition for ideas is great, however people need to release ego and focus on musical truths. To look objectively at different musical teaching styles and be able to recognise and extract the best approaches with a firm goal in mind, for student to develop into better players, improvisors and composers. 

• The primary focus is for student ear development, to hear intervals within a modal tonality and be able to describe what they hear through the language of intervals, chords and music theory.

• Because the Akousunesis method heavily focuses on intervals,  we doesn't use finger numbers, fingers are identified as T I M R P.

• Notation may be useful for displaying musical information, however we don't encourage students, especially new students to begin music by reading notation as a crutch.

• Reading timing information is discouraged, timing is something you hear, not read. Students will develop excellent timing once they stop trying to get timing correct from a sheet of paper. This is the biggest reasons why students quit learning music. The best method to teach timing is to listen and repeat, using the ears to experiment with melodic and harmonic rhythm. 

• Melodies are described using harmonic intervals, not absolute notes on a staff. Notation may be used to describe music, but never to be used as a crutch for real time playing, tradition notation will need to be converted to intervals and chords.

• When melodies are described, only these intervals are used 1, -2, -3, 3, 4, -5, 5, +5, 6 -7 7.  Locating intervals quickly in real time is the main reason these are used, the fifth interval becomes a reference interval and by applying the fifth rule it's easy to locate the intervals 4, -5, 5, +5 and 6.

• There are twelve key signatures in the Akousunesis method because there are twelve intervals in an octave. The classical minor key signature is described as an Aeolian or altered Aeolian and treated like any other mode or altered mode. The Aeolian mode is a beautiful sounding mode and probably deserves a promotion, but it get no favouritism here, theoretically it's treated like any other mode.