I’m going to break with my normal practice in this blog and describe briefly the photographs below, relating to the Fundacíon’s Special Education Programs.
The first four pictures of the gallery form a pedagogical unit, so to speak. The salient feature of the first image is the multi-coloured strip of tape crossing the fingerboard of the violin. This colour-coding of the strings by open note is (I believe) an extension of the practice of colour-coding notes for music in early childhood. In this instance the instructor (image 2) rang similarly-coloured bells (image 3), and the musician was then able to match both pitch and colour. More advanced students are then given music with the same colour-coding (image 4). The colourization is form of notation that captures pitch, but not rhythm, so the latter is learned aurally, or in the case of hearing-impaired students, through timed gestures from the instructor.
I make no value-assessment of this method, but will say only that from observation that it appears that students are able to use these tools as gateways to music-making, and that the steps are progressive, and that skill acquisition is cumulative. If you’d like to see some of these techniques in action, Video FVS005 from the data-gathering study presents a 3-minute synopsis of the SEP in Mérida, where these images were taken.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 