Monday, November 10, 2014

Boredom, Again, This Time Front Page News

In the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, Sunday November 2, is an Op-Ed piece by Dr. Richard Friedman of the Weill Cornell Medical School, a psychiatrist who is knowledgeable about ADHD.  In his view the cause of the "illness" is boredom.  A kid has trouble paying attention who is not given something worth attending to.  duh...


The thing that gets brushed over in teaching children music is the level of perception which is most real to them:  not notes but vibrations.  Tonal Refraction puts children in vivid contact with what they hear at a magnified rate of intensity so that they know it is real.  Because it is visualized they can also talk about it on a par with the teacher or a parent.  The method can also reattach adults to that level of intense perceptual alertness that was mangle-ironed in the process of churning out tons of reliable (i.e., boring) notes in music school.


I have long known that boredom is one of my prime motivators in life.  It conceals always the question: "What am I missing here?"


The all-new www.tonalrefraction.com is up and waiting for you to pay a visit.