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Arts / Media

LessonFace wants to broker streaming video music lessons

A Brooklyn company is making all kinds of musical instruction possible online. We check in with a couple of instructors about how it works.

The more languages people know, the smaller the world gets. That includes the language of music.

LessonFace gives the whole world access to music lessons. That might not sound like such a big deal, but can you find someone to teach you bagpipes in Topeka, Kansas? What about harmonium in Nepal? What about lessons in beatboxing… anywhere? The site offers all of the above to anyone with access to the Internet via live, streaming video. Instructors teach one-on-one, remotely.

Keep an eye on the site for a chance to participate in “instudioNYC,” group classes over video with master instructors beaming out to students from a New York City music studio.

In an email to Technially Brooklyn, cofounder Claire Cunningham wrote, “More than half of Lessonface learners have taken multiple lessons, with the average time between a returning student’s first and last lessons being a semester-like 86 days.” The company recently released new features for parents that enable them to book lessons for multiple children and to check in on lessons remotely.

Cunningham also told us that their video system is currently a third party platform called Vidyo. They are working now on new features that will help students with tracking goals, achievements and practice consistency.

We reached out to two of LessonFace‘s Brooklyn teachers to find out about what LessonFace has meant for their work, Siv Jakobsen and Khabu Young.

Jakobsen teaches Music Theory, Song Writing, Classical Voice and Folk Voice over the service and Young teaches Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar, Electric Guitar, Ukulele.

Williamsburg’s Jakobsen told Technically Brooklyn in an email that the main advantage for her has been time efficiency for teacher and student. She’s picked up two students from the service so far.

Lefferts Gardens’s Young has found that participating in the site has caused his own teaching practice to evolve. He’s moving toward creating some video courses of his own and has started to put his ideas about theory and practice into writing. While it has expanded his reach, he has found that many of the students he gets online come to him with a specific question that they can explore in a few lessons.

The system has required Young to adjust his teaching, he told us, “This form requires that I be even more succinct and direct in my language, since the challenge is that real-time playing together with a student is rarely possible, given the time-delay in the virtual environment. Students are not able to get that direct ‘osmosis’ of learning that happens when actually playing together in real-time.”

The company is a team of three with a contracted developer working remotely. Have a look at this demo video showing different students and teachers in action.

Companies: LessonFace
Series: Brooklyn
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