TEACH TUTTI
Learning Music
Issue 1: May 2015
Newsletter
Welcome To Our
Students, Teachers &
At Teach Tutti we believe that Music is for everyone. Whether
you’re 5 years old or 75, a beginner or advanced, we’d love to
help you on your journey.
Friends
Over the coming years, we aim to create a musical community. In This Issue:
 Do You Need A Music
We want to bring people together and provide you with:
Practice Life Hack?
 performance opportunities
 How Mozart Makes
 the chance to play in musical ensembles
You Smarter
 a way to learn a wide range of music subjects both in
 How You Can Get
person and online
Free Lessons
 a tribe of music lovers
 What Apple’s Top
You’ll be kept up to date with all the exciting developments,
Design Team All Have
fun and interesting articles and other content through this
In Common
monthly newsletter. So have a look inside!
Teach Tutti Newsletter Issue 1 – May 2015
Do You NEED A Music Practice LIFEHACK?
THIS FREE APP HELPS YOU LEARN TO DO ANYTHING IN 100 DAYS...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that to become skilled at anything, you need to put in time to
practice….
Whenever we start learning something all the determination, enthusiasm and commitment are in abundant
supply. We are and keen to learn, prepared to take our lives to next level, envisioning greatness……And
then…something happens…..suddenly everything else becomes more of a priority, life gets in the way
and you’re too just too busy to practice.
Just like those New Year’s Resolutions that all fade by the time February comes around, our good intentions
go to pot!
The week flashes by and before you know it, you’ve hardly done anything to practice. We know, we’ve been
there too!!
Here at Teach Tutti we’re always on the lookout to see how we can help you to get to the level you want with
your music practice and get as much as possible out of your lessons. And here is a fantastic website app that
can help:
GiveIt100.com
The website was created by Karen X. Cheng who challenged herself to learn to dance in a year. Like many of
us who want to get good at something, she started several times but got 'too busy’ or 'too tired’ and was
frustrated because she just couldn’t seem to get going.
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Teach Tutti Newsletter Issue 1 – May 2015
So as a way of keeping herself accountable and tracking of her progress she kept videos of herself on
her phone everyday in order to play back and watch her own moves. At the end of the year, she made
a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w) called “Girl Learns To Dance In A Year.
It went viral, attracting over 4 million YouTube views, and she knew she’d created something others
could relate to.
It was then that Give It 100 was born: a website, a community and a supportive platform for others to
accomplish their goals just like Karen. The site now has 40,000 users and growing, including several
stories that have gotten their own share of attention, including a woman who has lost over a hundred
pounds, and someone who has learned to walk again after being paralyzed.
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/13/cynthia-paralyzed-give-it-100_n_4267574.html)
As Karen says whenever you see an accomplishment on TV – scoring a goal, nailing a performance,
you’re seeing that moment of glory, not the decades of practice they put into it. To her, perfect is
boring. It’s the mistakes that are interesting and make us more human.
When she started getting emails from strangers she had inspired by posting her dance video, Karen says
she saw an opportunity. She imagined a website where people could post videos of themselves
practicing a skill.
“What really makes it come alive is what all our members are doing on it,” says Karen. "Take, for
example, the girl teaching her cat to use the toilet, the dozens of unicycle riders, or the man who
learned to touch his toes in 42 days. The online community is extremely supportive."
Karen hopes that the next Lady Gaga, the next Barack Obama is on there, as a child or as an amateur,
just starting out learning something new.
How Do I Use It?
When we can across giveit100.com we thought it was a fantastic place to track your progress and keep
you accountable. There are lots of other people using it to learn to play music so we thought it was the
perfect resource to connect you with others who are also learning. You can use it for music practise or
anything else you want to.
1. Head over to giveit100.com and get really inspired just looking at what other people are doing for
their projects.
2. Sign up and decide on a project you want to do for 100 days. You can create multiple projects if you
like, not just for your music practice.
3. Everyday you practice, simply take a short video of yourself and upload it to the site.
4. If you’re shy and want to keep your videos private, just change the settings.
5. You don’t have to do the 100 days consecutively, if you miss a few days you just simply pick up where
you left off.
We’d love to hear if you found this useful and what exciting projects you have lined up. Let us know at
[email protected]
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Teach Tutti Newsletter Issue 1 – May 2015
“How Mozart Makes You Smarter”
New research shows that your music lessons could not just be fun but also develop your inner genius!
Music Neuroscience is a relatively new field of scientific study. North Western University, USA, now has an
entire department dedicated to this area. You can check out their research here
www.brainvolts.northwestern.edu/. Nina Kraus is the lead neuroscientist and you can see her explaining
more about how the brain processes sounds in this short youtube video: https://youtu.be/43sruWn1Xk0
DID YOU KNOW …….Having concentrated music lessons for 1 year, improves your brain development,
motor skills and combines left and right thinking. The new neural networks created in only 12 months
become permanent and last you a lifetime, even if you subsequently stop playing!
We thought that was really exciting so we looked into a bit more detail for you so you can find out more
about how your lessons are making you perform in all areas of you life to a higher level….
Early Findings
Back in 1993 a study of college students showed them performing better on spatial reasoning tests after
listening to a Mozart sonata. That led to claims that listening to Mozart temporarily increases IQs.
But subsequent research then cast doubt on the claims. Ani Patel associate professor of psychology at
Tufts University, USA and the author of “Music, Language, and the Brain,” says that while listening to
music can be relaxing and contemplative, the idea that simply plugging in your iPod is going to make you
more intelligent doesn’t quite hold up to scientific scrutiny.
“On the other hand,” Patel says, “there’s now a growing body of work that shows learning to play a musical
instrument has impact on other abilities.” These include speech perception, the ability to understand
emotions in the voice and the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously.
Music neuroscience, which draws on cognitive science, music education and neuroscience, can help
answer basic questions about the workings of the human brain.
“How do we process sequences with complex hierarchical structure and make sense of them?” he asks.
“How do we integrate sensation and action? How do we remember long and difficult sequences of
information? These are fundamental questions, and music can help us answer some of these questions,
because it’s in some ways simpler than language, but it’s still of sufficient complexity that it can address
these very deep and important aspects of human brain function.”
Music neuroscience research has important implications about the role of music in the lives of young
children as well as adults.
“If we know how and why music changes the brain in ways that affect other cognitive abilities,” he says,
“this could have a real impact on the value we put on it as an activity in the schools, not to mention all the
impact it has on emotional development, emotional maturity, social skills, stick-to-itiveness, things we
typically don’t measure in school but which are hugely important in a child’s ultimate success.”
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Teach Tutti Newsletter Issue 1 – May 2015
There is a small yet growing movement in America; some schools ensure every student receives music
instruction, whether they have had music instruction before or not.
One Head reported “Music addresses some of the behaviors and skills that are necessary for academic
success”. “Since we started implementing our music program, as well as project-based learning, our test
scores have increased dramatically.”
Changing ‘Brain Plasticity’
Neuropsychologist Patel has developed a theory he calls the OPERA hypothesis.
“The basic idea is that music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there’s overlap,
that’s the ‘O’ of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in
other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth,” he says. “The ‘P’
in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch
is in key or not, and it can be painful if it’s just slightly out of tune.”
That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in
processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains’ musical networks may very well
enhance our ability to process speech.
“And the last three components of OPERA, the ‘E-R-A,’ are emotion, repetition and attention,” he says.
“These are factors that are known to promote what’s called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain’s
structure as a function of experience.”
Brain plasticity results from experiences which engage the brain through emotion, are repetitive, and
which require full attention. Experiences such as playing music. “So this idea,” he says, “that music
sometimes places higher demands on the brain, on some of the same shared networks that we use for
other abilities, allows the music to actually enhance those networks, and those abilities benefit.”
One striking example of this is the use of singing to restore speech. At the Music and Neuroimaging
Lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dr. Gottfried Schlaug has pioneered singing as a therapeutic
method of rehabilitating victims of stroke and other brain injuries, as well as people with severe autism.
.Nostrum
And some of the most recent music neuroscience research is using music as a tool to better understand,
and even predict, language-based learning disabilities.
Music neuroscience is paying off, not only in showing the tremendous practical importance of music
education, but also to help answer fundamental questions about the deepest workings of the human
brain.
Not only can you fully enjoy making music and the huge satisfaction from progressing in your lessons,
evidence shows you’re also causing your brain to work better.
Mozart does make you smarter!!!!
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DID YOU KNOW…
All the chief designers at Apple play music in their spare time. Looking at how
hugely successful Apple is and the beautiful designs they create, this could be
another huge indication that music makes you perform better!!
HOW DO I GET FREE LESSONS?
We’d love to reward you with something free ….if you recommend a friend for a half price
trial lesson and they become and regular student, we’ll give you a free lesson to say thank
you!!
We’d love to hear from you……did you like our first issue?
Would you like us to write about anything else?
Would you like to write and article for the community?
Please get in touch and let us know!!
Liam Hindson
Teach Tutti
[email protected]
020 8871 4513