The Development of Singing in Early Childhood
Content
ff
~J
When Is A Song a Song? The Development of Singing in Early Childhood
by Lyle Davidson and W. George Scarlett During the second year of life, babies actively play with sounds they produce. Their sound-play often has musical qualities such as pitch, rhythm, and melodic contour, but it is not the same as singing. Singing is a complex activity, one requiring skills that usually take the entire preschool years to develop. Singing Skills
What are these skills? The most obvious is motor skill that allows the mouth, tongue, vocal cords, diaphragm, etc. to move together to produce sounds with tonality, rhythm, and pitch. No doubt infants are more limited than older children in motor skill. Does motor skill or the tack of it, then, explain why two-year-olds usually sing only fragments of songs ;with melodies and rhythms only vaguely resembling standard versions? We think motor skill provides a partial, not a full explanation. More important perhaps than motor skill is the cognitive skill to recreate songs in thought alone, to "hear" songs while thinking about them. We believe this skill of hearing songs in thought explains how older children and adults are able to evaluate their singing as being on or offkey, too fast or too slow, having the right emphasis on particular notes, etc. It is this ability to evaluate one's own singing that leads to development of singing or (unfortunately) to giving up singing altogether. right melody. When asked which version sounded better or was "right," the older preschoolers responded as adults do: They said singing the right melody with the wrong lyrics was better or closer to the standard. The younger preschoolers made the other choice. For them, getting the lyrics right was more important. It seems for them a song's identity is mostly in its lyrics. The results of this experiment are consistent with our assumption that young children don't hear songs in their head. Without this mental hearing,
Simple Experiment
That very young children lack this skill at recreating songs in thought alone is suggested by a simple experiment we performed with a sample of over 70 children between 18 months and 5 years. We sang to them their favorite songs in two ways. We sang the right lyrics with the wrong melody, and we sang the wrong lyrics with the
Lyle Davidson is a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, MA. W. George Scarlett is a professor of child psychology at Assumption College, Worcester, MA. The research reported on in this article is based on work done at Project Zero, Harvard School of Education, Cambridge, MA.
The research reported here was part of a larger study of early symbolization carried out at Project Zero, Harvard School of Education, and funded by the Spencer and Carnegie foundations. The results of this larger study will appear in a forthcoming book, The Making of Meanings, edited by Dennie Wolf and Howard Gardner.
30
DAY CARE AND EARLY EDUCATION
lyrics become the focus, perhaps because the words of children's songs suggest familiar scenes and simple images (stars in the night, animals on a farm, etc.), making lyrics fairly easy to remember. This cognitive view of singing contrasts sharply with the common view that singing is a product of children's propensity to imitate. Expose young children to a particular song, and they'll try to imitate it. Reinforce their efforts at imitating, and eventually they'll get it right. But this view that imitation accounts for singing and its development does not explain why there are patterns to what young children imitate and what they fail to imitate. These patterns suggest that imitating a song requires understanding just how a song is organized, what is its structure, how do its parts fit together to form a particular whole. Put another way, imitation in singing is no mindless task but rather one that demands understanding something about what a song is. To get an inkling of young children's understanding of songs, we looked at the way they sang their favorite songs. We were particularly interested in when children could control a song's tempo and dynamics, when they gave it a definite beat, pulse, or rhythm, and when they reproduced its melody. We assumed that mastering tempo, dynamics, rhythm, and melody indicate understanding what a song is. Our findings suggest that children comprehend the different aspects of a song in a sequence rather than all at once. By two and one half years, after a beginning acquisition of lyrics and before mastering rhythms and melodies, the children in our sample showed mastery over tempo and dynamics. By three, most of the children showed their understanding of rhythm by giving songs a beat or pulse. They clapped their hands rhythmically, rocked, or simply emphasized certain, notes at regular intervals. Also by three, the children captured the melodic contour of song. That is, they made songs go "up" and "down" at the right times. But not until four did the children begin to show consistent mastery of exact intervals. Before then, their songs were not simply flat, sharp, or slightly off key.
Rather, they were filled with inaccurate intervals. Thirds appeared where there should have been fifths. Fifths appeared where there should have been thirds, and so forth. Why, we asked, was getting the exact intervals of a song's melody so difficult for the children younger than four? We think it has to do with having to understand and create relationships. After all, an interval is a particular relationship between tones of different pitch. Possibly, very young children center on one pitch at a time, or, at most, on whether one pitch is higher or lower than another. But organizing exact relationships between pitches such that pitches appear in a correct sequence demands much more.
Educational Implications
We have provided a way of looking at how singing develops in early childhood and at the cognitive skills fueling this development. What does this view of early singing suggest about how we go about educating children? One major suggestion has to do with our attitudes toward teaching and encouraging singing past the preschool years. Many teachers and parents of preschoolers delight in teaching new songs and in offering opportunities for preschoolers to practice singing. The same cannot be said for teachers and parents of older children. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and other activities thought to be more serious and valuable draw time and energies away from music as well as from the other arts. We cannot help thinking that this change in emphasis reflects a failure by many adults to note the intellectual development taking place within music. Few speak of talent with reference to reading and arithmetic skills, while many use this term whenever a child develops proficiency in music - - as if musical ability is inherited, not developed. What we have tried to show is that musical ability is very much a developed ability and one tied to intellectual (cognitive) development. Put another way, music in the early years (and throughout life) seems hardly art for its own sake. Rather, it is as much an expression and source of the most central of human capacities as any scientific of "pragmatic" activity can be. l~
SPRING 1987
3]
~J
When Is A Song a Song? The Development of Singing in Early Childhood
by Lyle Davidson and W. George Scarlett During the second year of life, babies actively play with sounds they produce. Their sound-play often has musical qualities such as pitch, rhythm, and melodic contour, but it is not the same as singing. Singing is a complex activity, one requiring skills that usually take the entire preschool years to develop. Singing Skills
What are these skills? The most obvious is motor skill that allows the mouth, tongue, vocal cords, diaphragm, etc. to move together to produce sounds with tonality, rhythm, and pitch. No doubt infants are more limited than older children in motor skill. Does motor skill or the tack of it, then, explain why two-year-olds usually sing only fragments of songs ;with melodies and rhythms only vaguely resembling standard versions? We think motor skill provides a partial, not a full explanation. More important perhaps than motor skill is the cognitive skill to recreate songs in thought alone, to "hear" songs while thinking about them. We believe this skill of hearing songs in thought explains how older children and adults are able to evaluate their singing as being on or offkey, too fast or too slow, having the right emphasis on particular notes, etc. It is this ability to evaluate one's own singing that leads to development of singing or (unfortunately) to giving up singing altogether. right melody. When asked which version sounded better or was "right," the older preschoolers responded as adults do: They said singing the right melody with the wrong lyrics was better or closer to the standard. The younger preschoolers made the other choice. For them, getting the lyrics right was more important. It seems for them a song's identity is mostly in its lyrics. The results of this experiment are consistent with our assumption that young children don't hear songs in their head. Without this mental hearing,
Simple Experiment
That very young children lack this skill at recreating songs in thought alone is suggested by a simple experiment we performed with a sample of over 70 children between 18 months and 5 years. We sang to them their favorite songs in two ways. We sang the right lyrics with the wrong melody, and we sang the wrong lyrics with the
Lyle Davidson is a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, MA. W. George Scarlett is a professor of child psychology at Assumption College, Worcester, MA. The research reported on in this article is based on work done at Project Zero, Harvard School of Education, Cambridge, MA.
The research reported here was part of a larger study of early symbolization carried out at Project Zero, Harvard School of Education, and funded by the Spencer and Carnegie foundations. The results of this larger study will appear in a forthcoming book, The Making of Meanings, edited by Dennie Wolf and Howard Gardner.
30
DAY CARE AND EARLY EDUCATION
lyrics become the focus, perhaps because the words of children's songs suggest familiar scenes and simple images (stars in the night, animals on a farm, etc.), making lyrics fairly easy to remember. This cognitive view of singing contrasts sharply with the common view that singing is a product of children's propensity to imitate. Expose young children to a particular song, and they'll try to imitate it. Reinforce their efforts at imitating, and eventually they'll get it right. But this view that imitation accounts for singing and its development does not explain why there are patterns to what young children imitate and what they fail to imitate. These patterns suggest that imitating a song requires understanding just how a song is organized, what is its structure, how do its parts fit together to form a particular whole. Put another way, imitation in singing is no mindless task but rather one that demands understanding something about what a song is. To get an inkling of young children's understanding of songs, we looked at the way they sang their favorite songs. We were particularly interested in when children could control a song's tempo and dynamics, when they gave it a definite beat, pulse, or rhythm, and when they reproduced its melody. We assumed that mastering tempo, dynamics, rhythm, and melody indicate understanding what a song is. Our findings suggest that children comprehend the different aspects of a song in a sequence rather than all at once. By two and one half years, after a beginning acquisition of lyrics and before mastering rhythms and melodies, the children in our sample showed mastery over tempo and dynamics. By three, most of the children showed their understanding of rhythm by giving songs a beat or pulse. They clapped their hands rhythmically, rocked, or simply emphasized certain, notes at regular intervals. Also by three, the children captured the melodic contour of song. That is, they made songs go "up" and "down" at the right times. But not until four did the children begin to show consistent mastery of exact intervals. Before then, their songs were not simply flat, sharp, or slightly off key.
Rather, they were filled with inaccurate intervals. Thirds appeared where there should have been fifths. Fifths appeared where there should have been thirds, and so forth. Why, we asked, was getting the exact intervals of a song's melody so difficult for the children younger than four? We think it has to do with having to understand and create relationships. After all, an interval is a particular relationship between tones of different pitch. Possibly, very young children center on one pitch at a time, or, at most, on whether one pitch is higher or lower than another. But organizing exact relationships between pitches such that pitches appear in a correct sequence demands much more.
Educational Implications
We have provided a way of looking at how singing develops in early childhood and at the cognitive skills fueling this development. What does this view of early singing suggest about how we go about educating children? One major suggestion has to do with our attitudes toward teaching and encouraging singing past the preschool years. Many teachers and parents of preschoolers delight in teaching new songs and in offering opportunities for preschoolers to practice singing. The same cannot be said for teachers and parents of older children. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and other activities thought to be more serious and valuable draw time and energies away from music as well as from the other arts. We cannot help thinking that this change in emphasis reflects a failure by many adults to note the intellectual development taking place within music. Few speak of talent with reference to reading and arithmetic skills, while many use this term whenever a child develops proficiency in music - - as if musical ability is inherited, not developed. What we have tried to show is that musical ability is very much a developed ability and one tied to intellectual (cognitive) development. Put another way, music in the early years (and throughout life) seems hardly art for its own sake. Rather, it is as much an expression and source of the most central of human capacities as any scientific of "pragmatic" activity can be. l~
SPRING 1987
3]
