Mozi Music Theory was founded from the struggle to understand why many accomplished musicians—whether they played guitar, piano, saxophone, or flute—struggled with songwriting and setting music to lyrics. These musicians often owned high-quality instruments and had experience performing in school bands, orchestras, or as part of bands. Despite their performance skills, they lacked a solid grasp of music theory.

The founder of Mozi Music Theory, an engineer and educator with self-taught guitar and vocal skills, devoted a year to studying music theory because the explanations from musicians and music teachers were either unclear, incomplete or seemed improvised. The result is a collection of self-teaching posters, books, booklets, electronic devices that stem from extensive reading, engineering insights, creative ideas and years of teaching complex subjects such as biology, physics, ergonomics, strength training, sports psychology and human metabolism. Additionally, Mozi Music Theory recognizes the complicated social landscape surrounding nusic education for children, young adults and even adults. Public school programs, school of rock type formats, music teaching foundations, and private music tutors often assess success based on the student’s performance rather than a deep understanding of music. This system judges students, and their performance progress, usually via the next holiday concert or student show. The teacher’s expertise and teaching ability are accessed at those same student’s performance events and the assessment will fuel the decision-making as to whether further investment in musical instruction is justified. In the normal scenario, the student’s understanding, appreciation and visualization of their relationship with music takes a background stage.

Mozi Music Theory aims to shift the music learning approach which is available to eager music students. The shift is from the now extrinsic focused approach to learning, featuring students learning music by playing other people’s music, to an intrinsic focused approach to learning, featuring (1) the learning of “how” music works, (2) the delaying of music theory terminology until later in the conversation, (3) the visceral understanding of the music component relationships not the memorization of specific components, and (4) the encouragement of playing the instruments in satisfaction of curiosity and exploration.

Our posters are mostly as a self-teach medium that compliments the music instructor’s information, by organization and delving into the nuances and helpful historical contexts of music theory. This supplementary information helps prevent student discouragement and adds meaningful context to otherwise dry and seemingly random music theory concepts.