Why Distance Learning?

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.686)
Hello everyone and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for educators who are engaged with live virtual learning experiences, whether they be content providers who produce and facilitate or educators who want to complement their curriculum and learn more about the medium. We interview content providers, industry professionals, field experts and educators who love and use live virtual learning. But today we have a special guest who is outside of that world. His name is Patrick Boylan. Welcome Patrick. Thank you for being here.

Patrick Boylan (00:26.836)
Thank you so much for having me.

Seth Fleischauer (00:29.35)
So Patrick has a product, a business called Museflow. It's a really interesting take on how to teach music over distance and his innovative approach really makes learning an instrument more accessible, engaging, adaptable for diverse learners and in that way it is perfectly aligned with this podcast mission to explore how distance learning can create unique and impactful virtual learning experiences across disciplines.

so that's why he's here. Tammy, could you take a moment please and introduce Patrick?

Allyson (00:58.886)
you

Tami Moehring (01:02.139)
I'd happy to. Patrick is a multi-instrumentalist and lover of all things distance learning. Eight years of grueling piano lessons drove Patrick to invent a new way of learning an instrument. 15 years later, he co-founded Museflow, a music ed tech startup dubbed the Duolingo of music education. Museflow emphasizes learning bite-sized skills through sight reading, the act of reading music at first sight over the sheer repetition of songs.

making the learning process more engaging, effective, and gratifying than traditional methods. When he's not working on Muse Flow, Patrick can be found playing piano and singing at the LA piano bar Tramp Stamp Granny's. He also enjoys exploring the great outdoors and listening to a good audio book while sipping a nice tea and watching the sunset.

Allyson (01:43.747)
Okay.

Seth Fleischauer (01:43.862)
You

Seth Fleischauer (01:51.726)
that's lovely.

Patrick Boylan (01:52.719)
Yeah, that's me.

Allyson (01:55.352)
Yay!

Seth Fleischauer (01:55.79)
Tramp stamp grannies, you want to, what's it like there? Paint a picture in 30 seconds or less.

Patrick Boylan (01:58.702)
Patrick Boylan (02:05.074)
It's a musical theater, Disney, millennial pop rock stuff. It's not your typical like piano bar where it's like a dueling piano. No, no, no, no, no. This is like me sitting there for four hours, taking your requests. And it's a bunch of theater nerds just sitting around, just loving. I'll play Bell from Beauty and the Beast, the opening number, which is like a solid seven minutes long. And people will sing the entire thing. It's one of those kind of places, yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (02:27.03)
Eh. Eh.

Tami Moehring (02:31.497)
You, Alison is hooked. She's gonna find it. She's gonna look it up. Google search it, stalk it, Facebook it.

Allyson (02:33.468)
I know, I'm like, I'm coming to visit, when do you play next? my gosh. And I, I just so many feelings right now. I'm like, my gosh, yay. I can't wait to visit.

Patrick Boylan (02:34.728)
You look it! You look it!

Patrick Boylan (02:46.492)
It's a haven for us theater nerds for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (02:46.702)
You

Allyson (02:49.21)
Yes!

Seth Fleischauer (02:50.894)
Fantastic. I am also a theater nerd. I played Orin Scrovello, DDS in Little Shop of Horrors in college, The Dentist. That was my best role. Yeah, was awesome. It was an experience. I fell into it very naturally. Little Shop of Horrors was my favorite movie when I was a little kid. So I had the whole routine down. I basically just mimicked Steve Martin's performance.

Patrick Boylan (02:57.652)
Fantastic, yes, I can see it, okay.

Seth Fleischauer (03:14.07)
Anyway, when Patrick and I met a couple of months ago, one of the things that we discovered, which was really funny, is that we both played clarinet and then tuba. he joked, was like, you play clarinet. Did they make you play tuba when you got to marching band in high school? And I was like, yes, they did. How did you know that?

Patrick Boylan (03:14.314)
Great.

Allyson (03:14.503)
Nice.

Patrick Boylan (03:23.058)
It's so wild, like what a transition, right?

Allyson (03:26.29)
Yes, interesting.

Patrick Boylan (03:34.538)
I was like, wait, what? Yeah.

Allyson (03:36.56)
Yeah, why why that transition? Yeah

Tami Moehring (03:37.957)
Why, why would they? Yeah. Why that one?

Patrick Boylan (03:41.308)
Well, for me, it was because I'm 6'2", and I was one of two clarinetists who were also 6'2", and there were way too many clarinetists in marching band, right? And so there was only one tuba player in marching band, and our band teacher was like, hey, do you guys, you and Matt, do you guys want to like just learn how to play tuba and like become a sousaphoneist and like do it during marching band over the summer? And I was like, I mean, sure, why not? That sounds fun. Let's do it. And so we learned.

Seth Fleischauer (03:45.624)
Yeah.

You

Seth Fleischauer (04:10.288)
you got a whole summer? I got like five days. They were like five days play tuba go.

Patrick Boylan (04:14.2)
no. No, yeah, I had like I had like three like he prepped us. He was like, we are only going to have one sousaphone is in marching band. And he asked us like three months beforehand. So we did have a little prep time. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (04:28.174)
Whereas it was my band leader's dream to have like a whole tuba section so he like converted several people I was just one of them being a six foot one clarinetist I guess. Anyway Patrick could you tell us the story here right like you know what inspired you to create Museflow was there like a defining moment that

Allyson (04:29.167)
nice.

Allyson (04:35.951)
Patrick Boylan (04:38.324)
There you go. Right. It's just the thing, apparently.

Allyson (04:39.218)
Ambition.

Seth Fleischauer (04:54.434)
that led you to reinvent the way that people learn music? Like what happened?

Patrick Boylan (04:59.626)
I took the eight years of lessons and I hated every minute of it. I did not like the repetition of the whole thing where you had to go home and you had to practice that song to boredom and then come back and your teacher either stamped approval, perfect on it, or you had to go home and practice that same song again. Did not like it. That didn't work for me, you know? My ADD brain, and I know it doesn't work for a lot of other people too, 85 % of people drop out of music lessons.

by the time they end high school. And you're like, that's crazy, why? And so I ended up, when my teacher retired, no fault of my own, he just retired, my piano teacher, you know. I've honestly had the thought of like, what if he just told me he retired, when in reality he just kept teaching everybody else? Because I was a terrible student, my parents had to ground me because I didn't practice. So it was...

Allyson (05:40.26)
No.

Seth Fleischauer (05:41.112)
We did not think you forced him into retirement.

Seth Fleischauer (05:48.282)
you

Allyson (05:55.643)
there.

Patrick Boylan (05:56.922)
It was not a good situation, right? And so I did eight years of that, my teacher retired, and then I ended up taking a break and then going back to sheet music. And my parents had a bunch of musical theater. And so they were like, I found these little motifs, these little phrases that I really loved, whether that's a pattern or a melody or something like that. And then I was like, cool, I pulled that out, I put that in my brain and closed the sheet music and I played around that. I improvised around that.

Allyson (06:07.495)
Yay.

Patrick Boylan (06:21.748)
put that in different musical contexts. I inverted them. I changed the key. I changed the time signature. And I was like, cool. I really fleshed out that motif, right? And then I just kept doing that. Fast forward to college, I realized when people were throwing musical theater pieces in front of me, I was able to just play them verbatim because I had done that with a bunch of core building blocks of what makes up that genre. I had improvised around, fleshed out the concepts outside of

pieces of music outside of repertoire, right? And so that concept, was like, okay, cool. And then again, flash forward to I'm here in LA, I'm a professional pianist. I play at three different places, right? I'm like, what if there's a way for teach to be able to teach people the way that I taught myself? What if we added another step before we got to repertoire that was engaging and effective and fun for people?

Because the problem with that sort of methodology of like, let's learn these skills, these building blocks of what makes up music. The problem with that becomes like, okay, we don't have enough music to be able to do that. We're not able to just generate music constantly to be able to work at the specific skill level. You know, it's difficult to be able to do that. And so we were like, well, now we have the technology to do that. So what if there's a way to be able to generate music at a certain level?

that is constantly iterating on how the user is playing. I went down this mindset. I was like, my god, this is so cool. What if we gamified it? so I was like, OK. So I brought it over to my music teacher friend, Stephen Gizzi. And he's like, no way, Pat. I've had the exact same idea. And he pulls up all of these notes that he has on his screen, on his computer. And I'm like, no way. And he brought up the idea of what if AI generated the music?

Allyson (07:57.191)
Yes!

Patrick Boylan (08:18.794)
Because that's how it scales. Because otherwise we'd have to write all of this. No pun intended, all pun intended, I guess, right? Yeah. So I'm like, that's how this product, that's how this idea actually builds and scales to its fuller vision. And so we fleshed out the whole concept. We got the three-prong approach to music education. We've got sight reading. We've got repertoire. And we've got exercises and theory.

Seth Fleischauer (08:21.617)
skills.

Allyson (08:25.466)
Yes!

Seth Fleischauer (08:25.672)
You

Patrick Boylan (08:44.916)
where you can dive deeper and like all of them are interconnected and there's an ecosystem of features and it all flows together. And so we ended up bringing that to some friends who are software engineers and two of them actually pitched themselves to us. Cause they're, they make way too much money and their day job, you know? And I was like, there's no way they're going to be interested in this. And they ended up like, one of them created an entire like, this is why I should be working for Museflow deck for us.

And I was like, I'm honored, utterly honored that they are interested in this. The other guy I met over at a jazz gig that I was playing, he was playing the piano before I got in for my gig. And he was just sitting down playing some Chopin. And I'm like, who is this guy? And so I go up to him, I'm like, who are you? And he's like, my name is Andrew. I live right around the corner. I just come on in here sometimes to play piano and they let me. So I just do it. And I'm like, do you wanna go back and forth?

Allyson (09:37.497)
Yeah.

Patrick Boylan (09:40.746)
Like you play a song, I play a song, you play a song, I play a song. And it was like, it was super organic that way. And so like, so I met him and he turns out he's a software engineer and he's a classically trained pianist. like, so all of these things just really kind of like formed and we all started building Museflow. And here we are today, a year and a half later with 40 people that are using Museflow, paying for it that we don't know. You know, we've gotten it out there into the world and here we are just, you know, telling more people about it. And yeah.

So we're super stoked. This never would be able to come around without the technology that was available to us at the time. That's why this method has never been born before, because the technology was never there. And so now we just implemented the technology into the music education system, and here we are.

Allyson (10:26.612)
my goodness, yay. And the universe has put everything right in front of you too. Just who you were meeting, how you were meeting them. That's such a wonderful way for the story to unfold.

Patrick Boylan (10:36.916)
think we got really lucky, you know? But I mean, like, I'm not going to say we also attracted that type of talent, but like, look, we... I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it, but I'm going to say it.

Seth Fleischauer (10:44.334)
Sure, why not say it?

Allyson (10:45.744)
Yeah. I mean, you had a vision and you had the vision that it was all able to come together. it's great to hear when you're embracing technology as a tool as opposed to being fearful of it because while technology can be a trend, each trend can work for somebody in their own way and it can continue to work for that person or that group or that individual or situation.

So it's nice to hear a story where you trusted not only the technology and the other tools, the music and such, but also each other. Because collaboration really is the way to bring together wonderful, wonderful opportunities for more people to learn and engage with one another.

Patrick Boylan (11:27.018)
That's so... Yeah, yeah. It's so key to be able to like... egoless decision making is so a part of what we do. It's about the product. It's about what's best for what we're making, not what's best for us. don't like... Forget about us. We're just cogs in the machine of building this thing, you know? So we're happy to just relinquish our ego and say it's all about the product, you know?

Seth Fleischauer (11:27.118)
and play music. Yeah. Yeah.

Allyson (11:29.106)
Yeah, nothing like a pencil.

Allyson (11:35.506)
Mm.

Allyson (11:52.721)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (11:52.92)
So here's something that your story made me think of, and I'm going to get a little deep into like teacher land here. but I'm a huge fan of common core math and that might make me extremely unpopular with most parents in the country. side note is that I feel like one of the huge failures of education in the past 20 years was not rolling out common core math in a way that parents could understand. because ultimately what it does is it takes a lot of the ways that I solved math problems in my head and

and makes them the strategies that are actually being taught. Right? So like I was a good math teacher, a good math student. And I like there's the algorithms of like how you work it out on paper. But then if you switch it into mental math, you had to have different strategies because you weren't about to like, you know, borrow from the, you know, tens place and like move it out. Like that's too much to do in your head.

there were like, you know, counting up strategies or splitting strategies or all these different things that I just naturally did in my head to solve these math problems. Once it came to the point where I had like had to do them mentally and not on paper. And your story reminds me of that, right? It's like, it's like you kind of cracked the code of a way of a way of learning that was not previously codified. And you're like, how can I create something that allows for that way of learning?

Patrick Boylan (12:48.618)
Right, totally.

Seth Fleischauer (13:13.772)
to be presented to other people. I do want you to like kind of break it down for us, right? So it's like, like, how does this thing work? Like I am a student, I just downloaded the app and I'm sitting down in front of it. What next?

Patrick Boylan (13:29.736)
Yeah, great. Because I think it can be kind of like, OK, this could go in so many different directions, right? And you take this idea, and then you try to implement it. You're like, this could turn out so many different ways. So here's how we implemented it, right? We took the concept of sight reading, the act of reading music at first sight. And we give you the building blocks of music. We tell you, OK, here's a new note. Here's a new rhythm. Here's a new time signature, whatever it may be, the building blocks of music, right? We say,

Allyson (13:34.448)
you

Patrick Boylan (13:57.406)
Great, now let's go practice that in music that you've never seen before that never repeats. And let's get you playing right off the bat. We can do that with one note, two hands, and three rhythms. That's where we start, okay? And we teach you all about like what a piano is and how you play a note and then what is holding down a note. What is duration of a note? We teach you all of that in flow. We teach you all of that through interactive exercises.

that go from video to seamlessly into interaction to video to interaction. We're using some really cool software there. We love it. And so that's really, really cool that we're able to do that. we've put flow and personalization at the core of this whole thing, right? So here you are. You know what a piano is. You know what these three rhythms are. You know what the un-note is. You know what middle C is. And you know how to place your hands on it. Great.

Allyson (14:52.178)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Boylan (14:55.434)
So you just go. We give you music that continues to flow. The cursor goes across the music. You continue to play note by note by note. Accuracy is in top right hand corner. Your tempo is right there with you. You can adjust that if it's too hard, too easy. And then you have to get four phrases for lines of music in a row at the goal tempo, 95 % accuracy or higher to be able to pass that level.

And then we're like ostensibly, you've played four phrases of music at 95 % or higher. Great. You have successfully mastered that new skill. And then we move you on to the next one. We add D, D4, which is right next to C, right? In the right hand. Great. We do that in isolation first. We do C to D, C to D between the right hand next. And then we add in the left hand C. Great. Now you've successfully mastered D. Then we add in B in the left hand. That's the next note.

Allyson (15:31.622)
Yes.

Patrick Boylan (15:53.108)
Right here, now you got these three notes with three rhythms. And you're going back and forth and you're doing it. And you're in flow, you're playing the music that's continuously generating that never repeats. And then you continue on there and then boom, your first piece of repertoire is unlocked. Your first song is unlocked and you can go apply the skills that you've learned there to actual songs that get unlocked. And then every level after that, that's level three. And then every level after that, we have more songs that get unlocked, more songs that get unlocked that are

more complex that add in the new notes and new rhythms that you add. And so we're just adding another step before we actually get to songs. But we're doing it in a way that is very flow state and through sight reading and personalization and engaging and gamification, all that good stuff.

Allyson (16:39.568)
Yes, and I love how you just broke that down because I totally see the connection to Duolingo from, and just language learning in general and the connection with how you're breaking down the music and giving those foundational skills, the idea of all the different rewards you can get, and also just the opportunity for individuals when they're playing the specific game or when they're practicing their skills virtually, if they have the opportunity to be familiar.

Patrick Boylan (16:47.892)
Totally.

Allyson (17:08.58)
A big thing that we talk about with distance learning or virtual learning and those experiences is while they're really, really wonderful, they never replace an in-person experience. So it's so great to hear about that familiarity that you're getting with the piano. So if you see one, if you're able to engage with one, you feel a sense of ownership in your skill and also opportunity to be able to share or play or engage in a...

Patrick Boylan (17:18.612)
Totally. Yeah.

Patrick Boylan (17:30.751)
Hmm.

Allyson (17:35.27)
you know, when before maybe you had an interest and maybe a little bit of ability, but you don't feel as comfortable. So I think that's so interesting. And, you know, I'm a big gamification person. So I love that aspect, but also the idea of the AI. I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit more about that because personalization and learning, think that's where AI can be such an effective tool. And it's really wonderful to hear how you talk about it because I think a lot.

about how well I wish I could, while I love musical theater, my voice could never reach the place that I wanted it to, not even in the shower. just am like, secretly, this is just who has to deal with me and they have to hear me sing. But I also would try to play the...

Patrick Boylan (18:10.663)
Sure.

Patrick Boylan (18:18.346)
you

Allyson (18:20.07)
the video game that was the guitar hero and then the band. And I would be like, my gosh, this is just moving too fast. Like I could get some instruments. could get some, never any real notes, but I'm singing. But the idea that you could slow down that process with your tool, I think is really exciting and doesn't make things feel as intimidating. So I wonder how you thought about that idea of personalization and AI.

Patrick Boylan (18:24.201)
Yeah.

Patrick Boylan (18:45.63)
Love that.

Patrick Boylan (18:49.266)
I think there's two factors here. Sidebar, we can't do this right now, but we are literally building the algorithms that are doing these things. We are building them right now. So just full disclosure, we've currently written every piece of music that is in Museflow. We've written like 10,000 phrases we've written. But we are building a generative AI that, and we are training it currently on the different levels.

of Museflow that we have so that it can scale. Like that's the whole point is that AI and this personalization aspect, that's what's really going to allow this product to scale, right? But we talk about it in terms of there's two sections, there's two kind of parts of personalization that we think of. Tempo and complexity. We think about it in terms, and we can adjust both of those things. So if we recognize that you're having a problem on a specific interval, say,

Say you're having an issue between C and E in the right hand at the beginning of a phrase. We recognize that. Why? We don't really know why. But we can recognize that. There's pattern recognition. That's ML. That's machine learning. And we've got a guy that's currently working on it. He's amazing. He's done a ton of machine learning for other NDAs, and he can't really talk about it. But he's done it for other projects and other major companies. He's amazing.

We're stoked about this because we're literally training the model to recognize this interval that then we give you music that exercises that specific interval more and more and more. It's just exposure therapy at that point. And you can then work on that. You're never going to know that you were doing this. The music might turn a bit harder for you because there is going to be that specific interval that you're exercising more that you're having trouble with. So we might lower the tempo at that.

These are the two levers that we can kind of adjust. Complexity and then tempo, right? So first thing is going to be complexity. We'll adjust it depending on how you're doing. We'll recognize if there are patterns within your playing that you're having problems with. We'll add more of that there. And if you're still having problems at that tempo, say you're at 75 % accuracy and you're just continuing to mess up, when you're hovering right around 75, we'll lower the tempo then. We'll bring it down to if you're at

Patrick Boylan (21:14.748)
you know, 75 beats per minute, we'll bring it down to 65 beats per minute. And then you'll continue to work on that new skill. You'll work on that new skill at that tempo. And then we'll bring it up. And it's all seamless, you know, it's all preserving the flow of the whole thing. We'll tell you as you're going along, okay, we're going to lower the tempo here. We have a really cool graphic that comes on screen that is in the music itself that literally is like, it's an arrow backwards as you're continuing to go on. It slows down within that time period. And so...

Seth Fleischauer (21:28.856)
Hmm.

Patrick Boylan (21:42.748)
It's all preserving that flow and you're continuously playing and you're constantly working and you're in that groove. And that's the goal, you know, is to personalize education while preserving flow to get you to levels of all of these meta skills that we're kind kind of recognizing, you know, and we want to get you to that level where you're proficient in all of these meta skills. And then you'll have successfully passed that level.

Seth Fleischauer (22:08.172)
And so you've mentioned this word flow. It's in your company name. Why is it important to be in a flow state when you're learning music?

Allyson (22:08.284)
So exciting.

Patrick Boylan (22:20.894)
think it's one of these things that we undervalue significantly. We talk about determination. We talk about grit. I just think those are the wrong words. When you're learning something, I don't want to necessarily have all of this grit and like, I don't want to be trying to reinvest constantly in the process of learning.

Allyson (22:31.282)
you

Patrick Boylan (22:49.416)
Right? I want the process of learning to work with me. And think that's the problem with trying to retrofit all of our general institutions with learning, trying to make all of the humans fit within that process. That's not how it works. We know that there's so many different ways of learning nowadays. So why can't we work with that? I think AI is going to be huge in terms of this personalization aspect. It's not a part of like our forward front sort of value prop to the market.

That's not what it's really about. It's about using AI to really allow to make that personalization and that flow so ingrained within the process of learning. That's where we're using AI. I just think that if we talk about flow and personalization as the main factors of like, let's work with that, as like, we're trying to engage people in the process of learning.

We're gonna change the institutions that we've got, you know?

Allyson (23:52.188)
Yeah, I mean, and even inspire lifelong learning in groups that may not even have thought about being able to pursue something like music or language or different forms of trades or skills. Especially, I just am thinking so much of the implications for K-12 students and school-age students, but also thinking about aging adults and so many studies talking about how that cognitive stimulation is so imperative.

Patrick Boylan (24:04.702)
I

Allyson (24:18.47)
just being able and one of the main ways to really challenge oneself is the idea of learning a piece of music, learning a new instrument. So just thinking of all the implications of how this can inspire lifelong learning is exciting. Cause also with gamification, which is so exciting, you see more and more aging adults that are like so comfortable using all these different tools and being able to engage in these learning opportunities. So fun.

Patrick Boylan (24:32.744)
Yeah.

Patrick Boylan (24:45.064)
Yeah, huge. We've got retirees that use this. We've got people that work hard, hard jobs and they come home and instead of just putting on the TV to veg out, they throw on Museflow and they do it for 30 minutes a day. And you're like, that's incredible to be able to drop into this groove where time loses all meaning and you just are focusing in the present. To be able to be present.

Seth Fleischauer (24:49.486)
Hmm.

Patrick Boylan (25:13.364)
for 30 minutes straight a day is huge. We don't really think about the long-term ramifications of that, but that's what Flow can do for you. If you're perfectly challenged where your skill meets that challenge and that's when Flow engages, it's like, we're so lucky to be able to, yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (25:24.264)
I love it.

Seth Fleischauer (25:32.75)
And that's personalization piece. Yeah.

Allyson (25:33.84)
Yes, and flow in music and then you can bring music with the different hurts of music, how that can also help you stay in that type of state, that state of mind is just powerful.

Patrick Boylan (25:44.458)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (25:44.834)
I have a question and it's kind of two questions. One of the questions is a question that we ask of all of our guests. Typically we have guests that are involved in live virtual learning. This is an example of distance learning that is asynchronous, right? Like you, you as the teachers are creating something that the students go and they, they interact with in a different time than, than when you're interacting with what you're putting in front of them. But we ask about like,

golden moments, right? And it's like, you know, this is a moment when I observed something happening within my work and I realized, wow, this is exactly what I set out to do. And I want to couple that with the question, how do you know this works? Right? Like, how do know this works? And can you tell us a story about it working beautifully?

Patrick Boylan (26:38.098)
Let me answer that in one answer. Yeah, it's a perfect example, actually. So one of our engineers, he's a good friend of ours. He's our back-end engineer. He creates all of the databases that are necessary for the way that Museflow functions, right? He has never touched a piano in his life. He started playing with Museflow. Never took traditional lessons, nothing whatsoever.

So he just started with Museflow. So we got this raw, just like very, I don't know, just raw sort of look into somebody's usage of Museflow and learning through Museflow. I don't know if you've noticed this, but I've noticed that kids these days, and I think this is just generally how it happens with music education and with other educational processes, they, when they come across some form of pushback or failure, shall we say, they clam up.

because I don't, I can't really tell you why. Maybe you have more insight into this, but like they clam up and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're so afraid of failure. But, and it happens in music education. You get one note wrong, you get two notes wrong. It's too much. You've got to stop, right? That's traditionally what happens in the traditional ways of teaching. But I see Staley.

is his name, Steven Staley. I see him play. He just like threw up one day. He's just like, boom. You know, I just passed level 18. Cool, cool, cool. I'm just gonna play one of these songs that got unlocked, right, on level 18. Great, great, great. So he goes on into the repertoire section and he starts playing it. He's screen sharing and we're watching him play. And we've got me, who's a jazz pianist, Steven Gizzi, who is a music teacher, and Andrew, who is a classically trained pianist, all watching him play, okay?

And we're seeing him play and he's playing this one song. I forgot the name of the song, but he's playing the song. He just starts and he just goes messing up constantly. He's just messing up all over the place. He's screwing all, he's just, but he's got a smile on his face and he's going and he's continuing. He's just playing. He's just playing. And he gets to the end. He's like, that's a great song. And you look at the accuracy and he's like,

Allyson (28:40.466)
.

Allyson (28:46.54)
you

Allyson (28:54.77)
You

Patrick Boylan (28:56.308)
He's got 40 % accuracy. got 60 % of that song wrong. And you're like, all of us were mind blown because nobody in their right mind, right mind, nobody who had been taught in the traditional ways would ever have finished a song with that many errors. So what we're teaching here is like, that was something that we had never even expected, but I knew we had like kind of

Seth Fleischauer (29:09.699)
You

Seth Fleischauer (29:15.276)
Yeah.

Patrick Boylan (29:25.392)
worked, we talked about that a lot, like, errors just roll off your back. Failure just rolls off your back. We want to destigmatize failure with this process because failure is the only way we're going to learn. That's how we learn by failing. So we want, we need that to be a part of the learning process. And how do we destigmatize that? By only doing positive reinforcement, by talking about Montessori methods of positive reinforcement. We, we own, talk about process over perfection.

Allyson (29:39.334)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Boylan (29:54.59)
You know, we praise process over perfection. And we don't ever talk about negative reinforcement. We don't ever talk about the negative side of learning because our bodies are just inherently programmed to care more deeply about the negative versus the positive. It's just an unfortunate side effect about being human, right? It's what's kept us alive throughout evolution our entire time. So we're lucky to have it, but when it comes to learning, it's a problem.

Allyson (30:18.247)
Hehehehehe

Patrick Boylan (30:21.128)
Right? So we need to care about positive reinforcement more. And we saw that with Steven playing, and it just blew our minds. And then he did it again, and he got 60 % accuracy. And he did it again, and he got 90 % accuracy. And he did it again, he got it at 100 % accuracy. And you're like, that's so cool to see that it actually does work. That he had gotten to level 18 without touching a keyboard ever in his life.

And then he played a song for the first time, not even caring about the errors, one single bit, just rolling off his back. It's so cool to see that, you know? We've also gotten that feedback anecdotally from other users. They talk about it in a similar way, but actually seeing it in front of our eyes was like, amazing.

Allyson (30:51.615)
You

Seth Fleischauer (31:08.686)
Yeah, and I'm happy that he ended up at 100 % because I was kind of like, know, 40 % is not the goal, right? But like what you've illustrated is that, you know, that's a pretty rapid jump from 40 % to 100 % just playing it four times. And, you know, through that, through your process of like staying in that flow state, you can get to those level layers of improvement more easily than if you were to like, no, I missed a note, stop.

Patrick Boylan (31:24.904)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (31:38.07)
start over, gotta be perfect, which is, you know, that's kind of, that's how we learned music back when we played clarinet and tuba, right? Yeah.

Allyson (31:44.25)
Yeah. And it's also, I like the idea of the positive reinforcement. There's so many awesome models that you can follow with gamification that talk about experience points. You have the ability to earn this much, but no matter what you're earning toward that goal. So instead of everyone starting at A, you start at zero. We're all starting out at the same platform. You have the ability to achieve this.

Tami Moehring (31:44.483)
Exactly.

Allyson (32:05.97)
There's a lot of great models like that. And I think that positive reinforcement and also that internal challenge, like you're intrinsically challenged and you're like, I am going to beat this. I know I am going to replay this song, but I'm gonna move through to see how many times I may have to work something out. That's just what you have to apply in life. So it's great to see that opportunity. And also I do agree the idea that it's sometimes hard for students.

Patrick Boylan (32:25.075)
Yeah.

Allyson (32:32.37)
to not know that they're right. Or if there's a question, I taught a lot of, I taught archeology in the past. So there are just things we just don't know. Like we just don't know, but it's a great research question and being comfortable both as the teacher and to receive that as the student to say, we just don't know enough about that, but you could be the next person that helps us learn or you could discover that or you could, you know, just, you know, dive into that research I think is important.

because it doesn't have to be negative. It can be a really positive opportunity for teaching and encouragement.

Patrick Boylan (33:04.808)
Yeah, yeah, really cool. mean, Seth, going back to your point about flow, I also think that there's something that we're doing. It's not just flow. We're focusing on sight reading, okay, as the engine of our curriculum, okay? And so we think about it in two different thresholds. We think about what can you play at first sight? How complex a piece can you play at first sight? Just no practice whatsoever.

Right? And then we think about it at another threshold. What can you play with an indefinite amount of practice? It's not going to be infinite. You'll find that threshold at some point. what can you play with an indefinite amount of practice? OK, how complex a piece. We usually, in traditional lessons, focus on that top threshold. We're teaching students how to practice. OK? And it's this constant sort of upward working on that top threshold instead of that bottom threshold.

Now what we've realized is that when that gap widens, joy of learning goes down. Because you're continuously working on the practicing of that piece. It gets really boring. That's not where the fun of playing music comes into play. The fun of playing music is making decisions on a piece when you've technically perfected it. That's the joy of playing music. Like, why are you going to play it that

What about the crescendo or decrescendo here that why do you want to do that? How do you want to affect the audience when you're listening? That's the fun part of playing music. It's not practicing it so that you're technically proficient. No. So we're getting you to a place where you can play that repertoire technically proficient pretty much to a point where if you practice it four times, you're playing it perfectly. Whereas if you were to have done the traditional way of playing, you would have had to practice that all week to perfect it. It's a whole, it, it.

Seth Fleischauer (34:31.534)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (34:50.892)
Yeah, and here you're watching him do it right in front of you. Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Boylan (34:53.834)
It's amazing that way. It's like, wow, so fast, you know? So that's what the beauty is of focusing on the sight reading element first and then talking about repertoire later, you know?

Allyson (34:57.859)
Hahaha

Seth Fleischauer (35:02.41)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (35:07.0)
Well, Patrick, we, sorry, Allison?

Allyson (35:10.214)
no, sorry, I was going to go a little too philosophical there. I was like, that really makes me think of one of the five dialogues of Play of Socrates, where they're talking about the idea of the foundation. What is what you were just saying? That's the foundation and you can build from that. So just, yeah. We can link that dialogue if anybody's interested.

Patrick Boylan (35:27.732)
Cool. Cool.

Seth Fleischauer (35:33.678)
I love that you brought in Socrates. Patrick, we have one more question for you. It's the title of the podcast. In your case, it's not traditional distance learning, but this is a form of distance learning. So you can sort of take it more generally, or you can take it specifically for like, Museflow as opposed to like an in-person teacher. But Patrick Boylan, why distance learning?

Allyson (35:35.846)
Sorry, I was like, I'm get you down.

Patrick Boylan (36:01.218)
Well, let me kind of preface this as like we don't want to take away teachers jobs. We're not interested in that. We think that, again, we can teach you the technical aspects of playing your instrument pretty easily in flow state with this personalization aspect. But when it comes to actually the joy of learning out of like the joy of learning how to play pieces is like, again, why the musicianship of this whole thing, right?

Why do you want to play that piece the way that you want to play those pieces? Make those decisions and then actuate on those. That's the human element of playing music and performing music. And we don't think that we would be able to satisfy that. We think a teacher would very well satisfy that. Or just going out there and actually playing for people and starting to actually learn what people are liking, what people are not liking. That sort of interaction, that human element of performance.

is so key to music performance. So we're not trying to take away teachers here. We think it's a great accompaniment, all pun intended, to music lessons. A teacher can use this as a sight reading trainer. This is your practice. Go home and practice levels one through three of Museflow and then come back and then we'll actually, in lessons, work on repertoire together and make decisions on why you're playing the things that you're playing. That's the fun of teaching anyway, you know?

So again, we're not trying to take away teachers here, right? But for the, yeah, for exactly, exactly. But for the people that want to learn on their own, we also can satisfy that. Self learners are a huge part of the population. And so our business to consumer model is a full blown curriculum where you've got the sight reading component, songs get unlocked, and exercises will be focused on things that you want to work on. know, like, like we got the three.

Seth Fleischauer (37:30.03)
Yeah, you're making practice fun.

Patrick Boylan (37:53.876)
components of music education here. So it is a full curriculum in its own right, but then you're gonna have to work on that musicality on your own. Later down the road we'll tackle that maybe, but for now, for sure, we do not want to take away that teacher-student relationship. No way.

Seth Fleischauer (38:09.654)
Awesome. well, Patrick, thank you so much for being here. if you want to check out more of this podcast, if you like what you heard, please go to c i l c dot org slash podcast. You can check the show notes for any of the links that, Patrick mentioned here today, including a muse flow. thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar. If you want to support the podcast, you can rate it or leave us a review, tell a friend, subscribe.

Allyson (38:32.188)
Thank you.

Seth Fleischauer (38:37.836)
And if you want to know the answer to the question, why distance learning, please check out the people we highlight here. These are the people who are leveraging this amazing technology to truly transform the learning experience. Why distance learning? Because it's accessible and it's awesome. See you next time.