Shapes

A Music Method for the Expert Beginner

Draft banner image: A Centered Keyboard and a Shape in a music video-as-world.

Welcome to Shapes

Shapes is a music learning method that zooms out from traditional ideas like chord, scale, and key, and introduces a different kind of concept—a Shape—that lets you immediately start playing along with any song you hear. It taps into the feeling an experienced musician has once they’ve internalized years of study, and reimagines the notion of musical “basics” from the top down.

While most methods are concerned with how to present established musical concepts, Shapes is concerned with the design of the concepts themselves. A Shape presents an idea that doesn’t quite exist in standard music theory—it’s much like a key signature, but it works at the level of a song’s chords. This subtle shift opens the door to entirely new possibilities for learning music, and to a different way of understanding traditional musical concepts.

More broadly, Shapes offers a vision for how a concept can work: not as a prescription for what to do, but as an environment to playfully explore and refine your intuitions. This positions music learning as a valuable model for other areas of learning, and for living creatively in a world that’s both highly rational and endlessly mysterious.

The Shapes Basics Course

The best way to get to know Shapes is to dive into the Shapes Basics self-learning course. This series of short videos, activities, and writings is the result of nearly two decades of lessons and workshops, and was developed as a PhD thesis at Harvard University.

Watch the first level video to get a feel for how it works:

And if that seems interesting, check out the full course.

🚧 This is a draft. More soon… 🚧