What are syncopated rhythms?  And WHY are they important to students? Listen in on your students’ favorite music by artists like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar, and more - you’ll hear not only “downbeat” rhythms like quarter, 8th, and 16th notes, but a very rich presence of syncopated rhythms, too!  Syncopated rhythms - such as dotted, cut, and tied quarter / 8th, and 8th / 16th note combinations - have long been impossible for young students to learn in school music and band rooms, but syncopated rhythms give the popular genres of music our students love - Hiphop, Pop, Reggaeton, and now even Country - the flavor that makes songs so catchy and “danceable”.

Why have syncopated rhythms been tough to teach and learn?
Classical music notation took its present form in the 1700s, when music was composed of nearly 100% “downbeat” rhythms - Quarter, 8th, and 16th notes.  It wasn’t designed to express rhythms that flow “against” the downbeat - like dotted, cut and tied notes - rhythms that create the wonderful friction and flavor that makes popular music so captivating and tasty.  As a result, notating syncopated rhythms can be very confusing, demanding the student to add the values of quarter notes tied to 8th notes, “cut” notes followed by dotted notes, and so many more abstract details that were added to classical music notation to express its evolution.  And asking any students who have not studied vocal or instrumental music in-depth with a classically-trained teacher to decipher syncopated music notation will produce the most confusing and frustrating teaching and learning experiences imaginable: https://youtu.be/xxrVeM99cEY?si=xQYm2aUJCUBP5o2p

Why are RHYTHMOJIS™ a valuable solution?
With every passing day, kids are relying upon visual cues to learn.  They are spending more and more hours watching YouTube, where images in videos constantly accompany narration.  And with these images almost always being animated, these images are literally guiding their journey through learning and entertainment as their eyes fixate on the moving images and can’t let go.  Teachers are finding it harder and harder to keep students’ attention without providing visual stimulus at all times during lessons. So what did Food bEatz co-founder Jesse Mell do?  He created a teaching and learning resource set for music and band teachers called RHYTHMOJIS!  RHYTHMOJIS™ combine rhythm notation with emojis that prompt students to RAP the names of the emojis, teaching them the rhythm of the notation in the RHYTHMOJI™: