What if learning to read music didn’t have to begin with Every Good Boy Does Fine?
My guest today, Rowina Sidler, grew up surrounded by music. In fact, playing by ear had been passed down through several generations of her family. Rowina could play the piano, compose music, pick out tunes, and sing harmonies—but reading music was another story.
When she began formal piano lessons at age 11, the experience was frustrating enough that she quit after about ten weeks.
Years later, after receiving a special birthday gift from her mother and having children of her own, Rowina decided she wanted something different for them.
That decision eventually led to Noteology, an app designed to help students learn notes using memory techniques rather than relying on mnemonics and constant mental calculation.
Listen to the full episode here
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From Playing by Ear to Reading Music
Rowina’s musical upbringing was anything but conventional. Her mother, grandfather, and great-grandmother all played by ear, and music was often passed from one generation to another by rote.
By the time Rowina began traditional piano lessons at 11, she had already been playing and composing for years.
Suddenly being asked to stay in one small area of the keyboard, identify individual notes, and play beginner music felt restrictive and frustrating.
Looking back, however, Rowina recognizes that her unconventional musical upbringing also gave her some wonderful skills: a strong ear, an ability to pick up melodies easily, and a natural understanding of harmony.
A Concert That Changed Everything
One of Rowina’s strongest childhood musical memories is hearing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata performed live when she was about 12 years old.
She was so inspired that she went home and immediately began composing a piece of her own.
It’s a great reminder for us as piano parents: take your piano kids to hear live music!
You don’t have to be a musician yourself to expose your child to beautiful music. Attend a concert together—or even find a wonderful performance online—and let them experience what music can become.
Why Do So Many Piano Students Quit?
Years later, Rowina began thinking about the large number of students who start piano lessons compared with the much smaller number who continue to advanced levels.
Why do students lose interest?
One important reason is frustration.
If reading music requires a child to stop repeatedly and calculate the name of every note, playing a piece can become much more work than music-making.
Rowina began wondering whether there was a better way.
Memory Champions Meet Music Reading
With a background in computer science, artificial intelligence, and education, Rowina began exploring techniques used by memory champions.
One especially powerful technique is the memory palace—using memorable places, characters, stories, and images to help information stick.
Rowina combined those memory principles with intervallic reading.
Rather than memorizing only a handful of landmark notes and calculating everything else from them, her goal was to help students eventually recognize all 29 notes as landmarks.
That’s how Noteology was born.
Camels, Dolphins, Towers, Cottages, and Fortresses
Noteology doesn’t look like a typical note-reading drill.
Instead, students enter an illustrated world filled with memorable characters and places.
Middle C, for example, becomes a magnificent winged camel.
Students encounter dolphins, goats, dragons, castles, lakes, cottages, fortresses, and other characters and locations that correspond with notes on the staff and keys on the piano.
There’s a reason for all that quirkiness: unusual and vivid images are easier for our brains to remember.
Rowina also created all of the artwork herself using watercolor and pencil—more than 300 hours of illustration work!
Learning, Then Removing the Training Wheels
Students begin with stories, pictures, characters, and note names. Little by little, those clues disappear.
Eventually, the student is looking at a plain musical staff and identifying or playing the correct notes without the characters at all.
The app can even listen as students play the piano and give them immediate feedback.
Rowina describes the process as three stages:
Encoding → Storage → Retrieval
The stories help encode the information. Games help store it. Finally, students retrieve the information without visual support.
Noteology also incorporates spaced repetition afterward to help move those notes into long-term memory.
And Piano Parents Can Learn Too!
When Rowina first tested Noteology with homeschooling families, many of the parents couldn’t read music either.
One mother simply sat beside her child while he worked through the program. By the end of the week, she had learned the notes right along with him.
Imagine what that can do for piano practice at home.
Instead of saying, “I don’t know anything about music—you’ll have to wait and ask your teacher,” a parent and child can learn together.
It turns practice from a potential battleground into a shared adventure.
Why Are We Giving Our Kids Piano Lessons?
Near the end of our conversation, Rowina asked a question that gets right to the heart of the Piano Parent Podcast:
Why do we spend all this money and time giving our children piano lessons?
Part of the answer is that we don’t want them looking back someday saying, I wish I hadn’t quit.
We want them to experience the lifelong joy of making music.
As Rowina put it, music is deeply connected to being human—and, from our shared Christian perspective, to being image-bearers of our Creator.
That’s a beautiful reason to help our piano kids get past the frustrating parts of learning so they can discover the joy waiting on the other side.
Learn More About Noteology
Visit Noteology.app to learn more and try the Treble Notes system for free.
And whether you read music fluently, play completely by ear, or still have to whisper Every Good Boy Does Fine under your breath occasionally, maybe it’s time to meet a winged camel named…well…Camel.
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