I was at the WOMAD festival over the weekend and had a great time listening to a huge a range of music and enjoying the sun. A lot of the time I was watching the artists I was thinking about the role rhythm and movement in mental development and the part learning an instrument plays in a child's life.
For people with educational problems, learning an instrument can be as over-demanding as learning anything else. The basic coordination and rhythm needed to learn an instrument is often too much and musical notation can be a nightmare. Such problems (and I'm speaking for personal experience) can make the child very resistant to lessons leading to ever escalating stress and a war of wills that completely destroys the development value of the lessons.
But not all children with education or development issues have this problem. Some, maybe because of the skill of their teacher or a natural empathy for a particular instrument, fall in love with music. These children will practice, study and work hard by choice because they enjoy playing the instrument. How much benefit this brings the child in academic success is hard to measure but it certain boosts confidence and that in itself is worthwhile.
Watching the various musicians I was working ways to use the Wii controller to mimic the playing action for that artist's instrument (and being WOMAD, there was a huge variety of different instruments). The forthcoming Wii Music will have some ideas I'm sure but its designers have a different objective to WyyMi because they simple want people to have fun. With Wyymi we want to users to learn various movements with a high degree of accuracy and also enjoy it.
One of the easiest instruments to mimic and the most direct way to learning about rhythm is by playing the drums. There are lots of different styles of drums and drumming. Western pop-band drummers have great coordination to use both feet and both hands independently. More traditional forms of drumming are simpler and often a group activity. Because the drums are bigger, the movements are more defined and the group aspect means a level of choreography is required. One particularly good example I saw of the weekend was the Japanese drummers GOCOO .
From the video you can get a taste of the amount of physical activity required coupled with whole body coordination. Shown is a fast paced track but in the live shows they also do slow numbers where the grace of drummer's movement is as much part of the experience as the noise of the drums.
WyyMi needs to capture the range of movements used in GOCOO's drumming and also the spirt and enjoyment that drumming can bring to its players. On top of that it needs to teach its users from very first principals to complex rhythmic patterns. Building this system is not going to be easy or quick but it will be worth it.
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