I’ve been using the so-called “standard system” (1-ee-and-ah, 2-ee-and-ah) to help intermediate and advanced students with rhythms for as long as I’ve been teaching.
But recently I had several students in a row — quick, hard-working students, one of whom has a piano background! — absolutely face-plant on rhythmic exercises that should have been relatively simple.
They spent MONTHS — including hours of lesson time — on exercises that should have taken weeks.
By chance, around the same time, I stumbled upon a provocative article on Music Learning Theory, a body of theory and practice pioneered by researcher Edwin Gordon oriented primarily toward general music teachers.
The principles shared in the article inspired me to pore over a sheet of scratch paper for many hours over several days, determined to create a set of syllables that would serve my purposes.
I finally achieved a set of syllables that felt easy, satisfying, and clear. The next day I tentatively introduced them to the struggling students.
And … POW. After a short couple of minutes learning the syllables, they FLEW through the exercises.
Excitedly. Confidently. Without help, and without hand-holding.
Instead of asking me, “Did I get it right that time?” the students said things like, “Oh, I get it!!” and, “I can tell when I made a mistake because it felt wrong.”
In fact, before long they stopped looking at me at all. Instead, they were riveted by the problem-solving process and motivated to master it.
In the video below, I share the syllables that transformed rhythm learning for my intermediate students — as well as additional resources for setting up your intermediate students to be excellent sight-readers.
If you prefer to view the content in written form, you can access the transcript below the video; and printable handout of the rhythm syllables PDF can be found here.
CONVERSATION TRANSCRIPT:
Elise Winters:
Today is about teaching rhythm to intermediate players.
And there’s plenty that we could say about teaching rhythm at the earliest levels, but we’ll kind of mostly jump in on the more advanced level.
So, as I was sharing earlier over email, I have some students that really reached a bottleneck in going through the rhythm book that I use for all of my students.
And I have used the 1-ee-and-ah, 2-ee-and-ah system and that’s worked fine over the years.
I’ve had to do some filling in for students that had sensory integration issues or just kind of like process things a little slower, but that was okay. This was the first year that I’ve really had a major challenge with students that I didn’t expect to have a challenge with.
I was going through, I’ll show you the rhythm book that I use. Some of you may know this book. [Rhythmic Training by Robert Starer] Raise your hand if you know the book.
Okay, great. Most of us are using this or at least are aware of it.
01:32
So I go through, I starting in ideally about book four level, I start going through these exercises with students and what I find is without the benefit of this book, students really just don’t understand how rhythm and beat correlate even though they’ve you know maybe had some previous experiences of like you know Kodaly classroom kind of stuff. There’s weird things that they still don’t understand.
For example, like when there’s a rest on the downbeat, so for example, like an eighth note rest followed by an eighth note, they don’t understand that that beat is located on that eighth note. I’ve had students playing La Folia who were not clear about that. They didn’t understand how ties overlap the beat. It just didn’t compute.
And what we find is that rhythm is actually understood through the body. To comprehend rhythm, we kind of have to put that rhythm in our body in the context of a beat.
And so the way that I use that exercise is, I’ll do a left hand beat and then a right hand rhythm.
So if you guys want to get started with me, especially if you haven’t done it before, just get a steady beat going in your left hand and then get some eighth notes going in your right hand.
01:32
So I go through, I starting in ideally about book four level, I start going through these exercises with students and what I find is without the benefit of this book, students really just don’t understand how rhythm and beat correlate; even though they’ve you know maybe had some previous experiences of Kodaly classroom kind of stuff. There’s weird things that they still don’t understand.
For example, like when there’s a rest on the downbeat, so for example, like an eighth note rest followed by an eighth note, they don’t understand that that beat is located on that eighth note. I’ve had students playing La Folia who were not clear about that. They didn’t understand how ties overlap the beat. It just didn’t compute.
And what we find is that rhythm is actually understood through the body. To comprehend rhythm, we kind of have to put that rhythm in our body in the context of a beat.
And so the way that I use that exercise is, I’ll do a left hand beat and then a right hand rhythm.
So if you guys want to get started with me, especially if you haven’t done it before, just get a steady beat going in your left hand and then get some eighth notes going in your right hand.
[Practices this skill for 10 seconds or so]
02:51
And even just the coordination of that is actually a bit challenging for plenty of students. So that’s the first exercise that we would do relative to the rhythm book. So we want to get to the level to where they can do a piece like this and be able to calculate all of these note values, right?
[Slide: Adagio from the Bach G Minor Sonata]
So what are we seeing here? We’ve got ties, dotted rhythms on varying note values. We’ve got a variety of micro divisions of the beat. And meaningfully, we’re going from like huge long beats, like quarter notes, all the way like immediately down to 32nd notes or 64th notes. So the amount that they have to have fully internalized to read this is a lot.
[Slide: Jurassic Park Lost World]
I played this yesterday. Lots of offbeat stuff. Obviously, this is going at a really fast tempo. Triplets and 16th notes, meter changes, and then alternating between duple and triple meter.
So the task of rhythm and beat is really starting with understanding beat as a container for rhythm and not only understanding it, but feeling it in the body. They have to be able to maintain that awareness of beat even when it’s not in the music per se.
They have to know the fractions, that’s an intellectual understanding, but they also have to be able to anchor both the beat and the division of the beat. In other words, the running eighth note or if it’s in triple meter, the triple eighth notes. They have to have an auditory and kinesthetic anchor for that in their body, and that has to underlie all of those more complex rhythms.
What else do they have to do? They have to be able to anchor the meter in the body. They have to know when they’re in one, two, three, four, they have to have like a sense of I’m due for a downbeat right now. And if they accidentally added the beat, they need to be able to like jump backwards or sorry, jump forward rather to that next downbeat and make up for that additional beat that wasn’t supposed to be there.
05:09
So they have to be able to recover from any correct rhythms that they did. And part of that is just by having that one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, anchored as a container for everything that goes inside of it. And the way that all of this is prepared is by working it through the body. And that’s where the rhythmic training really comes into play. Now, the other thing that we’re going to bring in with the rhythmic training is some rhythm syllables.
05:40
The value of the rhythm syllables at the beginning level, it’s just to make the rhythms kind of memorable. However, the value of the rhythm syllables at these more advanced, like intermediate and advanced levels, is to really help locate things inside of beats and to help students to provide a mnemonic for rhythms at that more advanced level.
So in other words, to be able to anchor on it’s it serves a similar function to solfege right solfege at its best helps us to to immediately do like to find that rising sixth or to find a falling third or to hear or to hear a triad and if students can call up the solfege syllables then a lot of times the sound kind of like comes along with the syllables, right?
That’s why choirs use solfege syllables is because the syllables reminds the student of the sound. We want the same thing to happen with rhythm. So when they are speaking the correct syllables for that rhythm, they know whether or not they’ve gotten the rhythm. We hope that’s what happens.
8:45
Value-based rhythmic systems are less common, but actually the system that was originally used in Kodaly, which is ta, ti, ti, tiri, tiri, ta, is mostly a value-based system, right? If it were beat-based, then ti-ti would be ta-ti, right? Because we would be using the same syllable to mark every beat one and beat two and beat three and beat four, regardless of whether it was a quarter note beat or eighth notes.
But if we’re saying ta-ti-ti, that is now a value-based system. Is there anyone for whom that does not already make sense?
And so the challenge with the value-based system is, basically the same as the challenge with the pattern-based systems, which is that you can’t recombine things easily. Like how are you going to handle a syncopation that’s partly 16th notes and partly eighth notes? Well, the answer is there’s no built-in way to do that. So they add a new set of syllables for syncopation, which is, “syn-CO-pah.”
09:57
But then we’re going to have to come up with new words every time we have a new rhythm, which gets overly complicated and requires more memorization, which defeats the value of the system.
So for advancing students, really the best choice is going to be a beat-based system.
10:18
And our choices of beat-based systems are going to be the standard system that many of us probably grew up with, 1e and a 2e and a 3 and 4.
Or 1-la-li, 2-2la-li, 1talatalita, 2talatalita, et cetera.
The 1-la-li, 2-2la-li is that going to be the triple meter one and two and for duple um the eastman system is pretty similar to that.
And then we have the takadimi system which is I think probably used a little more now in Kodaly circles again because it provides the benefit of a beat based system which is a little bit more than that Tata Tiri Tiri system. The Takademi system is beat based and it gets you a little further in terms of advancement.
11:17
So if we’ve got all of these systems available to us, the question is, where are we running into problems with students?
Let’s just get a little bit of sharing going. Who is using some of these systems and what problems are you running into?
Sage: I mostly use the standard, the professional ones at this point. I am familiar with those other ones, but I’m not deeply comfortable with them. So I haven’t really used them in my teaching.
And the standard one totally misses for the, like I had this book for a student who does not have a beat in her body. I’ve kind of never seen anything like it. So she’s incredibly smart and the numbers just get, it becomes completely mathematical for her and the beat is out the window. So she’s like, I did count. It was like one E and a two E, three E and like, oh my God.
So it’s just not been helping. And then I’ll have to be like, okay, don’t count. We need to just feel it. Let’s walk, let’s jump. And that’s where I’m getting stuck.
Elise: Yeah. Got it. Yes. Very familiar.
Virginia: I use probably several of those from the Blue Jello, Kodaly, Standard. And I still, with all of them, do pretty well up through, say, a book three or four. And then especially like Sage said, when you get a student that just doesn’t feel it or understand with their body, it’s just really hard.
And like you also said, all those other things where you can’t recombine words or do syncopations or, you know, I try to explain it like it’s math, making sure they understand the math. But yeah, I still run into the same problems you’ve described.
Brandie: In language, like kids learn to read and they learn to talk. They learn to chunk letter sounds together so they can make bigger words and bigger development. There’s a huge intermediate rhythm section missing from after those beginning levels to what you were showing, those Bach partitas. It was just, it’s just a huge leap. It’s a huge jump once we get to the more advanced repertoire, it just kind of goes out the window.
And what I find is that the more advanced students will just listen and play what they hear.
13:52
Elise: Yeah, and that happens a lot in orchestra too. Like if they don’t understand the rhythm, there’s a host of other students, or at least if there’s a few other students even who do get the rhythm, then the whole other section just knows who to watch, right?
And then those students are okay as long as there’s someone else to lean on, but they’re really just copying. They don’t necessarily understand it, and that’s going to come back and bite them eventually.
14:17
So yeah, so what I’ve discovered– and I happened to this past year, I’ve been working very closely with a composer and pianist and educator who has a non-traditional background. Her name is Hollie Thomas. And I had the great privilege of having her teach our theory classes this year for my studio.
And she grew up self-taught on piano. She begged for lessons from age six through middle school and finally, finally, finally at the age of like 14 was able to get lessons from a teacher who lived like an hour and a half from them. They lived in rural Texas. She got all of the classical training that allowed her to get into college and have a very successful college experience and become a professional musician.
And the reason that she was able to advance so quickly when she finally did get lessons is that she actually had figured out the building blocks of music by playing around on the piano for the previous 10 years. But she basically has a completely different approach to teaching music, which is she gets students’ hands on the raw material first.
15:46
And then she introduces notation, which is kind of the idea behind Suzuki and Kodaly. But implementing that is going against the training that most of us received. And so it’s really hard to figure out how do we provide that bottom-up experience.
But Hollie had found some different materials. And one of those materials that she introduced me to was Music Learning Theory by Edwin Gordon. Raise your hand if you are familiar with Music Learning Theory, more than just the name of it, if you actually know something about it.
OK, that’s zero people in the room. And I knew nothing about it also. And it’s pretty heady stuff.
He’s a super nerd. It’s not the easiest reading if you read him directly. The book that Holly gave me was Teaching Music to Children, by Eric Bluestine.
And so I was reading this book and he just happened to mention the challenge with rhythm syllables and that the Gordon syllables kind of got around some of the problems of the standard system.
17:08
And one of the problems is that with the standard system, 1e and a 2e, you have to figure out what to do if there’s a rest on the beat or if there’s a tie on the beat. Because if there’s a tie that crosses over the beat, suddenly you’re skipping numbers.
17:41
Which in a two-beat measure isn’t necessarily such a big deal, but in a four-beat measure, when you have to get back to your original count, you skipped over two, and now you’re jumping back in on three, and suddenly the students are having to track something completely extra besides simply executing the rhythm.
Ties are that way. Dotted rhythms are going to have the same problem, because dotted rhythms are essentially ties. And rests that are on the beat are also a problem.
18:20
The other challenge with the standard rhythm system is the E and the uh.
Which it makes sense to name the second sixteenth note differently from the fourth sixteenth note. And those of us who have practiced it can now do that. But it turns out that that tiny little additional complexity of having one E and a is enough to really just tank students’ brains.
18:45
I found the same problem with takadimi, which I really love the takadimi system for kind of that early intermediate group of students. I use it a lot in group class.
But then when you get into the triple meter, tava, ki, ti, da, ma, and subdivisions of like different iterations of tava, ki, ti, da, ma, I can’t do it.
In fact, if I haven’t practiced the syllables within the past couple of weeks and then I come back to it, it is as though I had never learned it.
The advantage of one ta la ta li ta is that it’s the same syllable in between each of those eighth note beats. So there’s less to remember. It’s ta ta ta, right?
19:50
And so that’s actually what the Gordon system does for all of the micro divisions is it uses the same syllables. For the largest divisions of division of the beat, we’ve got du de, du de.
In cut time, it’s still the same, right? Du de, du de. It looks like quarter notes, but it’s really the micro beat. It’s not the macro beat if you’re in cut time.
So that’s one of the strengths of the Gordon system is that it’s basing off of the experience, the aural experience and the kinesthetic experience of the music, not the actual physical notation.
20:20
“dutadeta, dutadeta” again the second and fourth sixteenth note are the same syllable that’s actually a game changer “duta-data-deta, duta-data-deta” same thing for the triple meter.
Now, the reason that I’m not that I never really grabbed on to the Gordon system is because the macro beat is do. And if you have two macro beats in a row, it’s du-du.
And I just couldn’t do it. I could not wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and consider myself a serious person if I was saying du-du in all of my violin lessons and group classes.
And so it was just a total non-starter for me.
21:05
I’m curious, actually, have any of you run into the Gordon syllables and considered using them? [There are no raised hands in the room of 20 participants.]
Yeah, I’ve been wondering, why do people not use these things? And it was either the doo-doo problem, or it was that people don’t know them, and maybe some combination of the two.
So I just threw it out without even trying it.
21:56
Well, after reading this book, I was like, okay, looks like there’s something there. What I’m doing is not working. I’ve had these students that have been on the Eastman syllables for months. It was taking them multiple weeks to get through a single pretty trivial syncopation exercise. It’s like, this is not sustainable. They’re going to be seniors by the time they graduate chapter three of this book.
22:25
So I decided to try to do my own take on the Gordon syllables.
And so I knew that I didn’t want to do the macro beat as “du,” and I really like having the macro beat as “ta.”
So here’s my modification of the Gordon system. [SLIDE]
So “ta, ta, ta-te, ta, taka-teka, taka-teka, ta-te, ta.”
Play around with that for a moment. Kind of freely improvise some syllables.
23:12
And let’s go back a couple of slides to where we have some syncopations here. And let’s go ahead and do it together. So go ahead and get your left hand beat and your right hand rhythm going.
And we’ll start from number 16, slow tempo.
[Performs Exercise 16]
23:42
And for number 17, since we’re playing percussion instruments, aka our laps, I don’t differentiate between an eighth note followed by an eighth rest versus a quarter note. Because if you’re playing a percussion instrument, there’s no sustain and those are equivalent. Sometimes students choose to lift their hand for the rest, but I don’t emphasize that. I give them a choice and I have them do whatever one they prefer.
[Performs #17]
And then for the quarter beat rest, I go down with my left and simultaneously up with my right. So the hands are going opposite directions. So we want to make that full beat rest really, really obvious to students.
[Perfroms #18, which has ties]
[Participant sharing omitted]
26:07
So we had done a poll at the beginning of the hour to say how many folks were familiar with this Robert Starer book, and it was actually most everyone. What I should have asked and didn’t is how many of you use it in your lessons, first of all? For how many of you is it a standard tool that you use with most students? Show of hands.
26:29
Oh, got that. Almost no one. Yeah. I’ve used it with students a little bit, but I have had difficulty implementing it on a regular basis with students. There’s something about it that is so dry that I personally think it’s super fun, but I think many students do not do it that way. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but it just hasn’t taken off.
26:57
Vivian: I was wondering about doing it with both hands because I was introduced to it in a college class that I was taking and I learned it like clapping the beat and then just saying the syllables. So I was only using my mouth and like one hand movement instead of two.
And I wondered if you like what led you to have your students do like two simultaneous hand movements plus the syllables because that also feels like a lot of layers for me.
Elise: That’s interesting. I grew up using it that way. I grew up in the studio of Rhonda Cole and that was how she did it. I have tried different things. I’ve tried doing like a marching beat. That hasn’t really taken off. I’m trying to remember the specific feedback that I got from students.
27:53
So one time, it has been useful sometimes to have the two hands have a different sound. So for example, I’ve had a student put the steady beat on a desk in front of them or the lid of my piano. And then the other beat, the right hand rhythm was a higher pitch and the other was a lower pitch. And that was helpful to kind of hear those two things.
28:23
I will say I don’t think it’s much harder to do the both hands because really this hand is not changing. I mean, you turn on the beat and it just stays on. And if you’re losing that, then there actually is a problem, right? You should be able to keep a beat at all times and do a lot of other things with your other hand. So I would tend to stand behind that that’s a reasonable expectation. Yeah, Julianne.
28:55
Julianne: I play in a group where rhythm is core. The band leader is a percussionist and he specializes in West African music. So the violin section, I just feel lucky to be there and I just kind of hang on for dear life. But he requires us to march and clap and do two against three with our two hands and then we do five against three and two beat loops and stuff like that. And I just want to validate both statements there. It’s not immediately easy for a lot of people, especially string players to do this with two hands. And I do think it’s core and essential and valuable, but I think it’s not an easy lift for anyone who’s not grown up doing it. I think it’s like a very good layer to add.
And it’s well worth it. So that’s all.
29:46
Elise:
Doing the eighth notes is not hard. It only becomes hard to kind of multitask the hands when it gets into syncopation. And I think that is the fundamental problem of syncopation. And so I don’t think it’s so much that we’re creating a problem as rather that we’re revealing a problem.
And when they handle that problem physically in their body, then that problem is at least 90% handled in their actual execution on the instrument. I also will say that I have taken sort of a sidebar away from the rhythmic exercises, reading through the exercises, to just simply practice the cross-body skill of the syncopation. So for example, one– I’m sorry– ta, te, te.
30:44
And had a student– we’ll call her Sarah. Her assignment was to go home and be able to do 20 syncopations in a row.
And she could make it to like eight or nine, and then one of them would blow up. And then she made it to 12, and one of them would blow up. And she took it home, and she was able, I think, to get to 16. And then I think she had enough of that skill at that point that we moved on. But I think that just simply training the physicality of it is part of it.
And yeah, and the syllables certainly help because there’s a sustain in the syllables, which is missing in the percussive aspect of the hands. So having both items represented, I think is great.
32:00
Valerie: One of the best things I discovered is you can go on Amazon and for $30 or less, if you Google metronome wind up clear, you can have a big wind-up metronome that has a clear plastic case so they can see the gears.
And I found that with my students, if they just get a metronome on their mom’s phone or something, it’s useless. But having the actual pendulum in front of them is like when I have someone who just feels like they don’t connect to a beat, that that’s been one of the only things I can way I can get through to them.
And so, you know, just — and they like that it’s old school, you know, no batteries, no charging. And they usually have a little lever so you can have it do a bell on every other or every three. And so I’ve found that my studio just really likes that.
32:42
And anyway, when those go home, it can help a lot. But I love those metronomes and they used to be the wooden ones, you know, would be hundreds of dollars. But these plastic ones with the gears exposed, the kids love them. They don’t have wind up toys.
So that’s not something there that that’s that’s been a saving thing for me with with some of my students.
33:08
Elise: Would it provide value to go back and do those same exercises one more time? Raise your hand if you would like to go through them. Okay, that’s most everyone.
[Performs the exercises again]
34:43
Let me go back and just show you, here’s the amount of practice that they actually get on each of these skills. So number 16 is actually four lines of music. 17 is four lines of music. We’re going through like one or two lines for each exercise. Students are getting way more than that.
So — just to reassure you that we’re on the we’re on the fast track. I wouldn’t expect any student to be able to do what you all just did. How did it go that time? Yeah, Julianne.
Julianne: I guess I have a question is what is the value of saying Ta-te instead of just like [executes a rhythm on a single syllable]?
35:39
Elise: I think there’s a balance that we have to strike between having too many syllables and having too few syllables. And all of the systems are trying to strike that balance, right? And they either succeed to some extent and fail to some extent.
So we’re looking for that sweet spot where the rhythm syllables are clarifying where stuff is located without providing too much mental overhead.
And so if you were to go back to that Bach Adagio that I showed on the screen, it is a legitimate gigantic challenge to know where the half beat is.
36:24
Now that’s kind of an extreme example, and we’re not going to do rhythm syllables for that particular thing. But we would probably be marking the half beats, right?
When I’ve taught that to students, I’ve had them mark a long slash on the beats and a short slash on the half beats because we have to know where those half beats are. So it’s sort of the verbal equivalent of putting a short slash on the half beats.
36:52
It’s telling me, the teacher, among other things, whether they have correctly located in their intellectual understanding of a rhythm, whether they’ve correctly located the half beat or the third of the beat. If they say a ta instead of a te, then they miscalculated those component rhythms. Their math was wrong.
37:24
Julianne: Well, just to push back just a little, I think as a teacher, you might need to wonder if they didn’t correctly place the beat in their mind because it might have been that they simply used the wrong syllable. It’s not necessarily that they didn’t understand it because they might have expressed it exactly correctly rhythmically.
Elise: That’s totally right.
Julianne: But verbally they might have made the mistake. So just to differentiate.
Elise: If they do have the wrong rhythm, it helps me understand in what way they’re conceiving it incorrectly. Yeah.
And it also, importantly, probably more importantly, it tells them the same thing.
Like Sarah immediately was able to do syncopations when we added in those syllables because the syncopations rhymed with each other. The te, te, te, te, te, te, et cetera.
And before that, there was just, it was all goo.
That’s what the syllables do is they transform rhythms from being this sort of like, an infinitely malleable goo that there’s like every answer is right and no answer is right to something that actually has a correct answer and has structure that they can perceive and they have some kind of little Lego blocks to put the rhythms into.
38:52
And you know, if the student doesn’t need the rhythm syllables, great then they don’t need them. But for the students that do need something it gives you that something.
And what I’ve discovered over the past year or so um nine months is that there are some objective differences in the ability of those rhythm systems to help students attain that level of fluency.
39:24
And the standard system is better than nothing; but switching to the Gordon system, it was like instant fix. It was like the quickest fix that I’ve ever found in teaching. Removing the numbers and allowing the rests to actually be rests instead of, you know —
What I had done before is have them speak the number on the rest.
Well, that’s not a rest.
So allowing them to actually be able to hear the rest, hear the tie instead of speaking a number on the tie, same thing.
And then having that rhyming quality, suddenly they were able to decode all of those rhythms and execute them very well.
So it was worth it to me to learn a new system for the huge benefit that I saw it give to those students.
40:12
Of course, as we know, those outlier students that have a particularly strong struggle with something, they’re the ones that require us to be most creative as teachers. But then when we figure out some solution that helps those students, that solution also benefits the learners that learn more easily as well.
40:33
I got brave finally in my group classes with my six-year-olds and tried out these same rhythm syllables in that group class, and they were great. I had been using the Takadimi system. They made the switch no problem. They weren’t attached to the previous syllables.
And it was honestly good practice for me in that little class doing only eighth note and sixteenth note rhythms to practice that new system.
The word-based rhythms are great, and I still use those for my, you know, twinkle rhythms. But the the beat-based system is also applicable to that beginning level. And it’s great to have a system that they can learn at the age of six that follows them to the age of 18 and is able to add complexity as they become more proficient as players and need that tool to advance with them.
41:36
Emma: One last comment, which is actually in the introduction of talking about how to do the rhythms in your backyard or not. Starer actually says you should vary it up so it doesn’t become a habit one way or the other.
Elise: Oh, cool. Read the manual. Gets you every time.
So I wanted to, before we close, I just wanted to invite all of you. We have a community on Heartbeat, away from Facebook, where you can have conversations with other teachers.
And I also wanted to let you know the Book 1 teacher training for Kaleidoscopes is starting this week. And I’m glad to talk to anyone who would like to have more information about that. If you are looking to up your game in terms of teaching beginning students, that is my jam. That’s my happy place.
42:58
So thank you all for coming, and I will hang out and talk to anyone who wants to stick around.
END OF TRANSCRIPT