Simply Music is a music education organization licensing teachers at over 700 locations in twelve countries and serving an online self-study student community in 128 countries. Australian music educator Neil Moore founded it on the core belief that all humans are naturally musical. Simply Music offers programs for students from birth through old age, with the stated goal that "students acquire and retain music as a lifelong companion." Simply Music patterns its approach after primary language acquisition, where speaking comes first. In this it shares some philosophical ground with other developmental approaches like Kodály, Orff Schulwerk, and the Suzuki Method. History Neil Moore began constructing the Simply Music method in the late 20th century while teaching piano to a young blind boy. Since Moore was unsure how to apply traditional methods of reading music, he wondered if an approach, based on his own childhood relationship to music, might work. From about age 3 or 4, Moore would hear music and naturally visualize it as shapes and patterns. At age 7, when his piano teacher would play the songs he was to learn, Moore recognized those same shapes and patterns across the keyboard. Decades later, Moore described his approach to this blind student, giving the boy a way to feel the shapes and patterns on the instrument. Moore continued this process, and within a few months his new student was playing a range of blues, popular, and classical pieces. The boy began using the same approach to teach the songs to his four-year-old sister, who was also blind. This spurred Moore to begin testing his ideas more widely, and he found this approach natural and successful for students of all ages and abilities. Other piano teachers began learning from Moore. When he could no longer personally train them all, Moore founded the Simply Music organization and developed a remote certification program that is currently available to teachers in twelve countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Later, Simply Music expanded to support the development of early childhood music education, and also worked with Karen Nisenson to create Simply Music Gateway, an adaptive piano curriculum for children with special needs. Philosophy Simply Music's founding premise is similar to Shin'ichi Suzuki’s claim that any child can learn music. But Simply Music extends the concept, like researchers E. McPherson Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, who write that it is our