Gestural Learning Interval Exercises

Gestural Learning Interval Exercises (GILES)
The immediate recognition and description of the thirteen enharmonic intervals within the octave is a quest that students of music regularly undertake but rarely achieve. The problem often lies in a disconnect between the sound heard and the sound recognised when the task is undertaken without recourse to an instrument. During the 11th Century, Guido d’Arezzo is known to have used the joints on the hand to help music students to recognise and sing intervals from hexachords; Gestural Learning Interval Exercises considers a rethinking of this tool with regard to recent investigations into corporeal intentionality and presents a methodology for the 21st Century musician.
In the June of 2007 the first iPhone was launched, and the arrival of this smartphone with a multi-touch interface fundamentally changed the way in which a generation access and engage with knowledge. Indeed, it is worth remembering that many current finalists on undergraduate programmes were only 13 when this device was first released and that the majority of current UK school pupils are growing up either owning or having access to a multi-touch screen technologies and thereby assimilating its associated motion gestures into their learned behaviour patterns.
It is the physical action of using the smartphone that is of interest to Gestural Learning Interval Exercises and that the corporeal intention of the hand being an active agent of knowledge interaction has become a relatively common action of the iGeneration.
One of the reasons why this action is so powerful is due to recent neuroscientific discoveries in regard to mirror neurones which appear to fire simultaneously between observed and heard gestures. Put simply, and to paraphrase the research of Kohler et al. (2002) in their paper ‘Hearing Sounds, Understanding Actions: Action Representation in Mirror Neurons’ Science ‘these audiovisual mirror neurons could be used to execute actions of our body gestures (such as the hand actions of pointing from thumb to the phalanges of the hand) and to recognise the action of sounds heard (such as the musical intervals) by evoking these motor ideas. This may well explain the success of not only the Guidonian hand but also recent aural recognition methods such as those proposed by Kodály and Curwen.
So why do we need this method? The reasons is because it is a simple set of three exercises that can be completed without the need for specialist training and it is a method that speaks to the iGeneration.
Dr Paul Fleet has trialled this research at Newcastle University and asked students to keep a diary of their progress by using this method. Whilst there has been varying degrees of success depending upon the student, all students recorded an improvement in their aural recognition abilities.
There are three short tutorials on YouTube which explain this method to students, musicians and indeed anyone who wishes to improve their interval recognition abilities.

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