Audiation, Musical Contrasts

Hello everyone,

I hope everyone is staying warm! It's winter for sure!

I hope you're all enjoying your Bells CDs. Does your child have a favorite song or two yet? Get ready to hear it a million times! This can be tiring for adults but is great fun and very educationally valuable for your child. Save your stories about your child's musical moments this week to share with us in class next week. There are some blank pages in the back of your songbook where you can note the meaningful musical moments you share (a beautiful quiet lullaby experience), as well as the silly and ridiculously cute things your child does with music. One parent just wrote to share with me that her daughter got extremely excited when "Trot, Old Joe" started playing. Apparently, the little girl shouted, "It's 'Taco Joe!'" and sang it that way for the whole song.

AUDIATION IS SWEEPIN' THE NATION
A subject that I will be bringing up more and more in the next few weeks is "audiation." Very simply put, audiation is the process of hearing music in your head. To expand a bit, thinking is to speech as audiation is to singing. Right before you sing a note, chances are you are hearing the note "in your head." Accurate audiation (hearing the correct tone/rhythm) in one's head is absolutely necessary to being able to make music accurately.

Audiation is a learned process that is easiest to learn when the brain is in its most malleable state: early childhood. Children tend to learn audiation through exploration and experimentation when they are placed in a consistently rich musical environment. Children often start with audiating the last notes of songs rather than the first. And it takes their inexperienced brains time to take in, process, and then manifest that final tone (also usually called the resting tone) in some way--often 5 seconds or longer after the external sound stops! That is why we do lots of resting tone play at the ends of songs and another reason why (you guessed it) I ask parents not to use their speaking voices in class, particularly in the fragile spaces at the ends of songs. Instead of cheering or talking, please participate in the resting tone play with me, sing goodbye to the instruments, or sometimes...we'll just be silent. And listen. Listen to the sounds your child makes--I heard many little voices singing and speaking and cooing on tones near or right on the resting tones on Monday. If you're talking, you might miss these precious first attempts at singing the resting tone!

Support your child's audiation at home by listening to the tones he/she is cooing or singing, and sing them back to him/her. Make a game of it! After singing a song or listening to one on your CD, give your child the gift of a few seconds of silence so that his/her brain can process what it has heard.

MUSICAL CONTRASTS
To review a couple of things that we did and talked about this past week...most of our "work/play" can be characterized as a study in contrasts. From extremely high to extremely low pitches (in the vocal warm-up) to short vs. long sounds (Hopping and Sliding) to sound vs. silence (Foolin' Around), children ADORE contrasts! They're fascinated by abrupt changes, and they will learn to anticipate them quickly, though the thrill doesn't seem to lessen--rather it increases as they start to figure out how it works!

At the age of 2.5, my son shocked the socks off of me by singing through the entire Alphabet Song alternating loud and soft singing on each phrase. He'd always giggled when I sang it that way for him, cackling when I surprised him on the loud parts. I never guessed he would do it on his own at such a young age! He's not a genius (well, maybe he is...ha!)--just about any child can learn to do this before age 3 or 4. My son has simply had enough live music-making in his life that he is not musically delayed!

Up and Down Pitches
Remember the vocal warm-up? Voices are high when hands are high, voices are low when hands go down, etc.? Try moving your voice up and down to accompany your child's activities, whether it be climbing the stairs, riding the escalator, zipping a zipper, sliding down the slide, or just singing and moving. For those of you with very small children, it's very effective to raise and lower the pitch of your voice while lifting them high and swinging them down. The perception and understanding of pitch direction must occur before children are able to follow a melody line accurately with their voices.

Short and Long Sounds
Putting physical movement to these concepts makes the learning come very naturally and joyfully to our visual and kinesthetic learners. They don't need to know the musical terms "staccato" (short and separated) or "legato" (smoothly connected) to get the idea. Hopping and Sliding was a perfect way to play with these concepts.

Sound and Silence
What is more fascinating that listening to a groovin' little track on a CD and suddenly having it drop away for 7 or 8 beats? I would argue that watching the face of a little one who has never experienced this phenomenon is possibly more fascinating! One little boy in class said "Uh oh!" every time the music stopped during Foolin' Around. It won't be long before he and all the children are rejoicing in those stops and then starting to anticipate when they happen--and even more amazing--knowing when to start playing again!