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Music Wizard Group is a software development firm that develops and publishes software products to teach students to play various musical instruments through MIDI software and a Guitar Hero-like interface. Unlike Guitar Hero, it uses real instruments and teaches to read sheet music as well. ==History== Founder and CEO Chris Salter entered Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU) in 1978 to study cinematography and began producing films about music. Shortly after, Salter met piano instructor Don Beattie, who came to the School of Music in 1979, and joined a group piano class. He was very inspired by Prof. Beattie's innovative work and approach, and began to take many other music classes, while studying directly with Prof. Beattie for the next 4 years. Parallel with this, he changed his major to Linguistics, and began to study French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese languages. It was in this way he got his key insights about developmental linguistics, and became curious about the potential of learning music as if it were a native language. He eventually took so many music courses that he ended up earning a double degree in Music and Linguistics from SIU. Combining his two passions, he was able to enter the nationally recognized Ethnomusicology program at UCLA, win a two year Organization of American States Fellowship to study abroad in Brazil to do his Master's thesis research, and then returned to get his Master’s in Musicology from UCLA in 1990. His insights on his thesis into the role visual cues have on teaching rhythm and guitar in Brazil led him to think about how that might facilitate learning to play other instruments like piano. Years before, Salter took classes to learn how to type, and failed pretty miserably at it, finding it boring and tedious. With the early Apple computers he played a typing game, and soon he was typing 40 words per minute. It was then that he first had the idea that a piano video game could have the same effect, with the added complexity of precision timing being much more important than with typing. Around this time the MIDI protocol for computers to deal with music was created, and the combination of the two concepts lead to the possibility of a game, with a twist. Salter's idea was to start with a simple game, but then transition to reading music notation, allowing even very young children to learn to play and read music without the traditional necessity of music theory and notation deciphering as a "prerequisite" to playing. After years of consideration, Salter decided to form a business to develop and manufacture the Piano Commando game (which went on to become Piano Wizard). Salter incorporated his new business in under the name Allegro Multimedia, although the company is better known under the DBA (Doing Business As) Music Wizard. Understanding how students can benefit from music education,〔()〕 Salter met with Don Beattie, his former piano teacher at the SIU school of music to see how piano teachers could best utilize the game in their classrooms. The plan was to introduce a short week-long summer boot camp at the school. After the success of the boot camp, in the fall of 2005, Don and his wife Delayna founded and directed the Piano Wizard Academy at SIU Carbondale. Over the next 3 years, their work as Academy Directors opened new horizons for young children and adult piano beginners, and they were challenged to "productize" their work, and create a self sufficient package to allow maximum utility of the video game's potential. Don and Delayna finalized the 100 Song Lesson Series that is now the "Academy music curriculum" for the game. Music Wizard and the Beatties then collaborated in the development of a series of 50 Tutorial DVD and Songbook lessons for the Academy Music Library. These materials were meant to empower parents, non-music educators and piano teachers alike to leverage the compressed concrete learning engendered by the game with the icing of musical artistic technique, and music theory as needed. This has proven to be a dramatic success, with hundreds of positive reviews, and testimonials. In particular, homeschool families and special needs communities have embraced this warmly due to the ease, affordability and sometimes dramatic success possible using these tools.〔()〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Music Wizard」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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