Teaching Melodic Dictation in Advanced Placement Music Theory

Building a Musical Vocabulary

Ten participants described how rehearsing common rhythmic and pitch patterns played an integral role in their AP curriculum. They referred to these as “predictive patterns,” “tendency tones,” “cliché musical figures,” or simply “musical vocabulary.” They taught students to recognize what they heard:

If you can give them a vocabulary to relate to, they might be able to pick up on the patterns. . . . If they have heard the melodies, and can sing them a cappella, if they can look at them and then sing them again, they own that pattern.

Another said, “You have to learn as many of these patterns as you can, and then just hook them together.”

Knowing that cadential patterns exhibit common tendencies can help students eliminate options in taking dictation:

There’s only so many ways you can leave the tonic pitch. Can you recognize a scale pattern or a neighbor pattern or an arpeggiated pattern? There are only so many ways to end, especially if it’s a perfect authentic cadence.

Participants challenged the practice of using songs to learn isolated intervals:

My teachers taught me that do–la was ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean,’ but the fact of the matter is, it ain’t. It’s sol–mi–re–do [in moveable-do solfège]. To teach out of context [is] very dangerous. . . . If you think about [perfect fourths] do–fa, re–sol, mi–la, those all sound different because they’re in a different context.

Pattern recognition can also make decoding compound meter music less complicated. “There are about six patterns [in compound meter] that are [used] over and over and over: quarter eighth, dotted eighth/sixteenth eighth, you know. I think it’s strategies that we need to work with people on; that’s part of music literacy.” Participants wanted their students to hear a melody in compound meter and immediately recognize patterns practiced in class. Melodies that included unknown patterns could be compared to the learned patterns for greater understanding. According to one teacher,

Sometimes I think what separates a really good dictation student from an average student is, a good one’s going to say, “I recognize the dotted-eighth sixteenth-eighth.” The weaker one’s going to look and say, “Which one did I just hear?” It just takes a little more time, [more] fluency with notation.

Connecting Aural and Written Theory

Eight participants encouraged students to use written theory knowledge. Before listening, students could already make some decisions about a dictation melody:

My students are trained to look at their staff and make musical decisions: What key? Where’s the tonic triad? What’s the starting [solfège] syllable? What’s the opening interval? If minor, what pitches may I expect with raised sixth and seventh scale degrees?

Participants believed that students who took advantage of this information could better make sense of dictation melodies.

Some participants taught students to predict which pitches would occur in a melody:

We talk about prediction a lot. I mean, melodies, what are they going to end on? Well, they’re going to end on do a lot of the time. . . . So go over there and write a do for yourself, and then prove yourself right or wrong.

Helping students develop these musical expectations takes time. One participant described a process he used at the beginning of the year:

So I’ll sing do and they’ll sing back do. I’ll sing something like do–re and they’ll sing it back. Do–re–mi and they’ll sing it back. Then I ask, “OK, well, what do you expect to happen next?” . . . “I think fa.” We’re going up the scale, that makes sense. Do–re–mi–fa. “OK, what do you expect to happen next?” “Go up the scale.” “Okay, sol is more of an open note, we can really go anywhere, so it’s not as easy to predict. But where might it go?” . . . Even though they know there are seven notes in the diatonic scale [and] it could go to any of them, they start understanding that there are better choices for certain ones in certain contexts.

Another participant described leaving out the last note of a dictation and asking students to “sing what the last note will be based on what everything else is.” Giving students tools to apply their theory knowledge may facilitate their understanding and notation of dictation melodies.

Sight-Singing and Dictation

Seven teachers described a complementary relationship between sight-singing and dictation:

It’s important to mirror what I’m doing with sight-singing and melodic dictation. I try to keep those on a parallel path, [to get students] to realize that it’s essentially the reverse of the process. They are effectively the same thing.

Several saw sight-singing and dictation as part of a holistic approach to building musicianship. One stated, “I think of it as a full aural training program . . . in several segments: echo singing, responsive singing, sight-singing, melodic dictation practice on a graded system, and melodic dictation quizzes—a five-step approach.” When asked about how much of the course was dedicated to melodic dictation instruction, 1 participant responded, “I don’t know, because it’s every day. Sight-singing influences [melodic dictation] directly and melodic dictation influences sight-singing directly. It’s a consistent piece to the development of music literacy.” Several agreed that good sight-singers were good dictation takers: “If you can’t sing it, you sure can’t hear it.”

Some participants used the same sequence and instructional material to teach both sight-singing and dictation. They used sight-singing as a tool to build melodic dictation skills and even used melodies from sight-singing for dictation practice. “As our sight-singing skills increase, so do our dictation skills. . . . I’m a firm believer that whatever you sing is what you write. So if we are only singing two pitches, we are only writing two pitches.” Another participant wanted his students “to be able to go both directions . . . the seeing ear and the hearing eye—that’s what I’m after.”

Grasping the Big Picture

Nine participants emphasized the importance of grasping the big picture, helping students to direct their attention to broad melodic characteristics and overarching melodic organization, rather than specific bits of isolated information. They used terms like “parameters of the melody,” “lay of the land,” and “global” to encourage this approach to dictation, especially during the initial listening.

The teachers encouraged recognition of what one of them referred to as “major posts” in a melody: the starting note, ending note, and any additional cadential points. They described how pivotal points in the melody can help listeners break the target into smaller pieces and recognize parallel material. They also highlighted parallelism purposefully during instruction, guiding students gradually from two-measure melodies, to four-measure melodies with parallel subphrases, to four-measure melodies with little or no repetition.

Participants taught students to recognize general pitch contour, to analyze how “major posts” were approached, and to relate all pitches to the tonic. They preferred broader understanding to specific decoding. As one teacher described this,

I mean, I’m not interested in whether you got every note right, but did you hear that that thing moved up to the dominant and it kind of doodled around and then it ended on the tonic? I mean, what are you hearing?

They encouraged students to describe the general character of a passage, ultimately enabling efficient but lasting skill transfer:

I’ll ask them to describe measure one, so it’s the entire measure. Some will say “It’s do–re–mi–fa–sol.” “Yeah, but what is it? Describe it.” “Well, it’s an ascending scale pattern; it’s a descending arpeggio.” Whatever the measure is to them, that way they are grouping information together and trying to get multiple notes as a cliché or a common musical figure.

Participants encouraged students to note the general range of the melody, place the melody metrically according to downbeats, and compare subphrases for memory and understanding. One teacher described preparatory consideration of the typical role of each measure in a four-measure melody before listening: “Measure 1 sets you up. Measure 4 is a ‘gimme.’ Measure 2 takes you somewhere. Measure 3 is the hard one.” These examples demonstrate ways that grasping the big picture can stimulate efficient and accurate dictation completion.

Applying Scale Degree Function

Seven participants described how listening for scale degree function boosts understanding of melodies by triggering prior theory knowledge. They discussed the role of context in processing dictation content and transferring it to notation.

One of them taught scale degree function with numbers; the others all used the movable-do solfège system. In both cases, they consistently prompted students to relate pitches to the tonic: “What scale degree am I on?” and “Where am I relative to tonic?” One participant described how this awareness contributed to understanding the overall context of a target melody: “If they hear an interval, to know it’s a minor third is not as important to know that it’s sol–mi.” Another noted the necessity of guiding students in building the foundations of such a context, “teaching them where the pitches exist within the key, the distance between the pitches, and really what the pitches do, what their job is within the key.”

Participants reported that attention to scale degree function helped students identify major guideposts, understand cadential patterns, decipher harmonic functions, and track melodic contours more accurately. They also noted that teaching out of context (e.g., extensive focus on isolated intervals) can be problematic:

If they’re trying to listen for a specific skip, and it’s a skip of a fifth and they wrote a fourth, they can write the whole melody off by a step and end on the leading tone, never check their work, and [never] understand, “I know this melody ends on tonic.”

The participant who taught scale degree numbers cited the use of numbers in other applications of written music theory (e.g., “4-3” suspensions) to support that approach. No matter the specific system employed, participants emphasized recognizing functional relationships among notes and patterns, and placing them into known theoretical contexts. According to the teachers interviewed in this study, attention to scale degree function provides multifaceted benefits to dictation students.

Targeting Melodic “Bookends.”

Eight participants outlined the “bookends” approach, in which students work from both the beginning and the end toward the middle of a melody. They noted students’ inability to remember the entire melody during dictation, and suggested several reasons that the bookends approach is a viable strategy. The main thrust of the approach is to;

Try to capture the first two, three, or four notes as they are occurring, then listen for the contour of the rest of the phrase, and then capture the last two, three, or four notes, so that in the first listening you have the bookends. I also try to get them to hear the last note they hear in relation to the first note in the next playing, so that they can define whether or not it ends on the same note that it starts on.

The benefits to this approach seem to include both laying a foundation on which the middle measures can later be completed, and relating the beginning and end of the melody to each other, to prepare for the start of the next listening. Participants noted both the ease and importance of recognizing the end of a melody as cadential material. Listeners can draw on common cadential patterns and can better understand the whole melody based on recognition of them.

Catching these pivotal points in the melody is dependent on students’ understanding of typical tonal melody construction. As 1 participant stated,

We always know, unless something really throws you for a loop, you are going to be in the tonic at the beginning, a dominant and tonic at the end, and somewhere in the middle there is a good chance you are going to hear a dominant. So you listen to those areas, get those down, and then from that point in the subsequent playings you can just fill in the gaps.

This suggests that the bookends approach incorporates a focus on guideposts, as described earlier in this section, but also involves considering how to approach and leave them. One participant specifically asked the following series of questions in class: “Where does the melody begin? How do you leave that pitch? Where does the melody end? How do you approach that pitch?” Participants also reported actively cultivating the bookends approach in class, instructing students to write the first and last measures before working toward the middle.

Notation Challenges

Six participants reported students’ difficulty transferring aural rhythms to written rhythms, noting that students missed pitches because they lacked a rhythmic framework on which to write them:

Sometimes the biggest challenge toward the accurate transcription of what [students] are listening to is not pitch. It is that they don’t know how to space the notes rhythmically, and they get flustered, and it ends up causing them to mess up some of the pitch parts, because they are not sure how to put it down.

Several mentioned the difficulty of notating melodies in compound meter. One addressed this by isolating specific patterns: “They seem to have more trouble with the compound rhythms, so I encourage them to write down just four common rhythmic patterns they’re likely to hear in most melodies: the dotted quarter, the quarter eighth, three eighths, and dotted-eighth sixteenth-eighth.”

Another addressed the notation problem by giving a prewriting task:

I’ll have them sketch out the first subdivision. So, if we are in common time, I’ll have them write out some eighth notes. So, when they are listening to the rhythm the first time, they just tie it over if it’s a quarter note.

Some had students take dictation of rhythms only: “I think spending time early in the year with just purely rhythmic dictation is very valuable because I think that’s the thing that tends to throw them.”

Counting System Indecision

Four of the 6 participants who mentioned students’ struggles with rhythms—and 7 overall—indicated a lack of commitment to a specific counting system. They did not seem convinced about the value of any specific system.

With rhythm patterns I’ve done a couple things, [but now I do] what we call the “Dadada” method, where you just go, “Da duh dada.” For rhythm, I really had to think about it, but I’m almost a neutral syllable person for rhythm, so you can just do the relationships.

One participant noted the disparity in approaches for teaching rhythm:

As you talk to people, you’re going to find a wider variety of opinion on what’s the best way to do this. And not only that, but maybe some pretty militant feelings about it. Maybe it’s because we’ve gone our own way with this and we like our way. We don’t seem to [worry] much about how to put a chord in four voices. . . . There’s a good method to teach that. But here, this is very open-ended.

Although we heard several approaches to teaching rhythm—the traditional counting system (1 2-& 3-e-&-a), the Eastman counting system (1 2-tay 3-ta-tay-ta), the Gordon system (du du-de du-ta-de-ta), and the Galin-Paris-Chevé system (ta ti-ti ti-ri-ti-ri,)—few participants were committed even to their current approach. Some taught several approaches concurrently, while others mentioned that they were still experimenting themselves. Several allowed students to choose their own counting system, if any, rather than prescribing a single approach.

Teaching to the AP Exam

All participants described the influence of the AP exam on their courses, both in terms of curriculum development and scoring of classroom assignments and exams. They used AP Central’s posted prior exams and online materials as practice exams and exercises, and found them helpful to students.

Participants based curricula contents and how they sequenced material on what was included in the exam. For example, one mentioned delaying triplets until very late in the year “because in the AP they don’t do a triplet pattern in dictation—I haven’t seen that.” Another designed specific exercises according to AP dictations: “I’ve mined the melodic dictations on the AP Theory exam, and so many of them have a midpoint on V [the dominant triad].” This teacher also spent considerably more time on melodic minor than harmonic minor because the AP exam rarely contained the latter.

Several participants studied practice exams and the AP scoring rubric to offer students specific testing strategies. According to 1 participant,

The primary method [for scoring] is that you get a point for every half measure of the dictation you get correct. We also know that every AP melodic dictation ends on tonic, and it’s usually some sort of sustained pitch. So, get the last measure, get the first measure, and then you get your bonus point for anything else you might get right, and then you’ve got 5 of the 9 points that are available to you on the exam. Five out of nine, when you look at the national average, is actually not that bad of a score to begin with. So, I tell especially my weaker students not to kill themselves on measures 2 and 3—get what you can of that—but you have to get all of measures 1 and 4, so really focus on that.

Others participants graded dictations in class according to the AP rubric so that students could see firsthand how the process works.

Although most seemed grateful for the online exam materials provided by the College Board, one mentioned the possible pitfalls of focusing a curriculum on a test. He stated, “We live in a testing world and it’s sad because it thwarts creativity. I think everyone is interested in, ‘I want the answer; I’ve got to get the answer.’” Although “teaching to the test” has a reputation for limiting creativity in the classroom and focusing exclusively on practical concerns, most teachers in this study reported that the AP exam reliably measured students’ ability to hear and write music and that the AP-provided materials strengthened their curricula.

Sequencing Instruction

Eleven participants described progressing methodically from simple to complex in classroom instruction. They applied this pedagogical approach to both the presentation of skills and concepts and the gradual increase in length of practice dictations.

At the very beginning of instruction, some participants led students through very simple pitch patterns, gradually introducing rhythms later; others did the opposite. In all cases, simplicity at the beginning was crucial—“bulletproof” examples, as one teacher described it. Another described his overall progression through dictation instruction:

I always start at the very, very beginning, where we do stepwise motion with no rhythms. We might do just six notes. . . . “Does it go up; does it go down?” It’s all stepwise. . . . Then we go to skips within the tonic chord or dominant chord. Once they master that, we go to the larger leaps, a little more complicated rhythm. Down the road, it will be compound rhythms. But it’s tiny little steps . . .

Another teacher, strongly dedicated to Kodály-based instruction, guided her students through the same sequence of concepts as she would use in elementary school, with a more mature approach. In her words, “My students do not sing fa and ti for literally half a semester.”

The teachers we interviewed also discussed the importance of gradually building the length of dictation examples used in class. They described, for example, working from simple, unmeasured groups of notes, to basic metric organization, to one-, two-, three-, and four-measure melodies. One noted an important intermediate step: four-measure melodies in which the first and third measures are identical.

Psychological Influence

Eight participants described the importance of attending to unique psychological needs of high school students as they learn to take dictation and prepare themselves for exam situations. They noted a common student complaint of “I can’t” and described ways of overcoming it in their course design.

The teachers reported that students’ defeatist attitudes, such as “I can never do this; I can’t do this” and “This is the hardest part of theory,” influenced their decision making. They described some students’ lack of emotional fortitude and self-confidence, leading to fear and the inability to function fully:

I think [the] emotional-psychological aspect of the adolescent mind really has to be taken into consideration in this. We, as older professionals, take that for granted, and when we think back to our own experiences in college, maybe we were a little more mature emotionally to be able to deal with those things. Some of them are not. Some of them are at that point where when they don’t get something, they just shut down, and you have to work with those kids.

Participants explained that sometimes students cease to perceive new information accurately, due to overwhelming mental focus on a melodic detail about which they are unsure. This “shutdown” can affect student performance both during regular classroom dictation activities and on assessments, including the AP exam.

Participants recommended designing the course to foster small successes in class early on, to help students build confidence and avoid “can’t do” attitudes in the first place. They told us that laying out specific sequenced steps can help students realize that dictation is not as daunting as it may seem. One stated, “Good dictation takers accept that they are going to have some mistakes . . . and they are okay with it.” Another described how to encourage a process of elimination during dictation, to build confidence and make large tasks more feasible:

If you’re going to teach a kid about compound meter, to do what my teachers did to me as a freshman in college and to just go to the keyboard and [sings a compound meter melody], “Write that down.” . . . . If [instead] they had said, “Well, there’s going to be quarter eighth, dotted-eighth sixteenth-eighth, quarter two sixteenths, three eighth notes, a dotted quarter note somewhere,” and had given me those choices, I think I might have been able to learn how to do that.

Using Familiar Melodies

Seven teachers incorporated familiar melodies in their curriculum, drawing on students’ internal repertoire of tunes to reinforce their dictation development. Participants generated concepts in class from familiar tunes and encouraged students to practice those concepts with other favorites outside of class. One described the central role that “dictation journals” played in her course:

At least 3 days a week, I start class by giving the name of a familiar tune. I have them grouped into meters. . . . We start with the simple 4/4 stuff, “Three Blind Mice.” Then I have them write it down; I put it in a key. I have developed a long list of familiar tunes, and ask them to write down stuff they already know. They grapple, and fight, and swear, and pull out their smartphones, and tap on the little keyboards. That’s strategy number one, the dictation journal.

This approach draws on students’ prior knowledge and internal repertoire and treats it in a sequential, systematic way.

The reciprocal benefit of incorporating familiar tunes is that students may carry what they learn in class back to their routine listening. Participants expressed hope that their students would gain the ability to understand what they hear on the radio, notate parts of favorite songs, and arrange tunes for their own groups outside of school. One elaborated on how this provides relevance to the musical lives of students with diverse musical backgrounds, explaining,

Interestingly enough, a lot of the kids that take the class don’t have a really strong background. They are not the kids who have been taking piano lessons their whole life. They are [garage] band members who want to know more about the structure of chords and don’t always have a really great foundation to build on. I want to give them the skills to write down that “hook” for the song they are trying to cover.