What and Why

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the AMEB?

 

AMEB stands for the Australian Music Examinations Board. This organization provides an examination framework for privately tutored music students. It is similar to schools in its grading and assessment, giving parents and students a more formal way of measuring their progress and achievements. 

 

When students take the examination, they prepare 3 to 6 pieces, depending on the level,  from different musical styles. They also prepare for an aural test which is about listening and singing, a sight reading test which is about note reading skill, and a general knowledge test where examiners ask student about their pieces and musical notation.

Various type of music theory tests are also available from the AMEB, and are taken separately from the instrumental examination. 

 

For more detailed information on the AMEB, please visit the AMEB website..

 

 

Why learn music?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                             Picture from terencehoo.com

 

Examination or not examination?

An examination is a great way to motivate students to practise. It also provides a kind of formal measurement of progress and assessment results the way schools provide examination results and reports. However students and parents are free to choose to have or not to have examinations. In Appassionato Music Academy, we put an emphasis on consistent practice and making sure students sound better from week to week. We do push for working seriously and learning the musical skills in depth, but the choice to take an examination is up to each family. Some families choose to do every grade, some only do every few grades or so, and some choose not to do any at all. We accept and support any decision parents and students take, what we do encourage students to do is to find more opportunities to perform. This can be in the form of a private family occasion, at school, an examination, or a competition.

 

 

Online or face to face music lesson

There is a growing number of teaching methods and lessons available online. Some books also provide DVDs of lessons. This is supposedly the new way of learning in keeping pace with technological advances in the 21st century. So is face to face going to be obsolete as some professions are already going online, or is there still a need for a real interaction between a teacher and students? Patricia Kuhl gave a very interesting presentation on TED talk about the ability of babies in acquiring their native language and second language. You can watch this video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954.

 

Titled "The linguistic genius of babies", she shared her research and laboratory's experiments on how babies learn to speak. Her experiments showed that babies learn a second language when being exposed to a native speaker of that language on a regular basis. However, these babies don't seem to learn that language over the same period of time if they were exposed to these same speakers through other media, such as a monitor, TV or recordings. Music is very much the same as language, indeed it is the one universal language, hence we can assume the brain responds to music in a similar way to language. It would seem that despite all the technological progress we've made, human interactions still count for a lot.

 

References for further reading.

The Australian Music Examinations Board     www.ameb.nsw.edu.au

 

Sinichi Suzuki    Nurtured by love

 

Sally Goddard Blythe  The well balanced child :Movement and early learning