Strategies to Develop Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Singing Accuracy of Pitch

Acquisition of Singing Independence

Students initially learn to sing by imitating what they hear. In preschool and kindergarten, students often lack independence in performance and generally begin to participate most easily by “chiming in” as they are able with the teacher. While the teacher might be doing most of the singing at this stage, students are benefitting from opportunities to hear different pitch patterns, and they can produce guided responses if the musical demands of the selected song material are appropriate. As the amount of student singing increases over time, the teacher’s decision on whether or not to continue singing along with the students can be made based on the level of support needed to allow accurate continuation of the song. When the students gain the ability to sing independently, the teacher should stop singing along with the students and consciously begin to make a distinction between instances when the teacher sings and those when the students sing. It is essential that the students sing independently when they are able, rather than along with the teacher, so that their singing accuracy can be assessed. This assessment occurs not only from the teacher’s perspective but also from the students’ perspective, as they naturally compare their singing to what they heard the teacher sing. While allowing the students to sing without the teacher facilitates assessment, it may also help improve singing accuracy. Smale (1987) found that preschoolers’ singing was significantly more accurate when singing a familiar song phrase alone than when singing along with an adult female voice. With practice, students progress from singing fragments of songs, to singing entire phrases, to singing entire songs of increasing length, without the teacher’s help.

Call-and-Response Singing

Once students have developed the ability to sing even a short phrase independently, echo-singing strategies may be employed. Echo singing consists of a sung presentation by the teacher followed by a sung response from the students. If children have not yet developed the cognitive and singing skills for this type of activity, they will not be able to produce the independent response. Although any type of simple song can be used to create echo-singing activities, call-and-response songs are a type of song specifically composed in a way that involves a presentation and a response. The easiest call-and-response songs can more specifically be called echo songs because the student’s response is identical to the teacher’s presentation. Songs such as “No More Pie” (recorded by Ella Jenkins, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, SFW45018_202; in Feierabend, Music for Little People) and “Charlie Over the Ocean” (in Erdei and Komlos, 150 American Folk Songs to Sing, Read, and Play) are examples of echo songs that young children enjoy. Echo singing short phrases is not a cognitively demanding task because a student can echo the words and the melody of the short phrases without the need to store or retrieve information from long-term memory.

In many call-and-response songs, the response differs from the call, as can be seen with “Skin and Bones” (in Locke, Sail Away: 155 American Folk Songs to Sing, Read, and Play) and “Old House” (in Eisen and Robertson, An American Methodology). These types of songs are slightly more challenging, because not only do the students need to have the skills to produce an independent response, but they must also be able to produce a response that differs from what was just heard. The response, however, is usually repetitive, making it less difficult, particularly with practice. “Old House” presents a unique challenge in that the responses consist of two different melodic configurations that use the same text (see Figure 1). The students need to be able to hear and sing the two different phrases and to produce the appropriate phrase at each point in the song. One of the advantages to using call-and-response songs is that they allow students to participate in the singing of longer songs that have more words than can easily be recalled at the rote-learning stage.

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Figure 1.

Part of “Old House” illustrating different response phrases

Nurturing Singing Performance Accuracy

Novel song texts such as those mentioned previously can pique students’ interest and help motivate their participation. Echo-singing tasks can also be performed using a neutral syllable such as loo or bah. In some songs, such as “Skin and Bones”, the response naturally uses a neutral syllable. The words to any familiar song can be replaced with a neutral syllable during presentation and response to remove the distraction of words and perhaps put greater focus on the pitches. In addition to using phrases from familiar songs when trying to help students focus attention on pitches, the teacher can create short phrases or melodic patterns to allow students to practice singing a targeted set of pitches in various melodic configurations.

Though it may intuitively seem that some students would sing pitches more accurately when using a neutral syllable, the research examining whether students echo sing more accurately with words or with a neutral syllable is inconclusive. Smale (1987) found no difference in singing accuracy with 4- and 5-year-olds based on using words versus a neutral syllable, and Levinowitz (1987) found no differences with children in kindergarten and first grade. Conversely, Goetze (1985) found greater pitch accuracy with kindergarteners using loo rather than with text, and Jacobi-Karna (1996) found greater pitch accuracy with 4-year-olds using text rather than loo.

An important step in ensuring that students develop accuracy in pitch production involves assessing each students’ individual pitch-matching ability. A teacher can accurately assess a student’s independent pitch-matching ability only when that student is singing alone, rather than with other students. Students should first participate in echo singing as a group to become familiar with the task and develop confidence in responding, but eventually each student should be given the opportunity to respond individually. Students might also be given opportunities to sing in small groups in addition to singing with the entire class as a way to help prepare them for individual singing. Students generally enjoy songs like “Down Came Johnny” (in Choksy, The Kodály Method I) and readily participate in solo singing without appearing to become self-conscious or timid. Mizener (2008) has provided additional song suggestions for use with individual singing activities in lower and upper grades.

The effectiveness of including individual singing opportunities is supported by research. Rutkowski (1996) found that after 9 months of instruction, kindergarten children from a class where individual singing opportunities were provided gained significantly better use of their singing voices on average than their peers from a class where such opportunities were not given. The research examining whether children sing more accurately when singing alone versus when singing with peers, however, is inconclusive. Goetze (1985) found that students in kindergarten and first grade sang more accurately when singing alone, while there was no difference in accuracy between the two singing conditions for third graders. Conversely, Green (1994) found that students in Grades 1, 2, 3, and 5 sang more accurately when singing along with peers than when singing individually, with greater differences between the two conditions occurring in Grade 5. Cooper (1992), on the other hand, found no significant difference in the singing accuracy of students in Grades 1 through 5 between when they were singing alone and when they were singing with a recording of a peer.

Other factors that likely affect accuracy, in addition to whether a student is singing alone or within a group, should be considered. The advantage of one singing condition over the other would likely be affected by things such as the individual’s singing ability level, familiarity with the song material, the difficulty of the singing task, and the quality of the singing of the others. For example, with second graders, Clayton (1986) found that students were more accurate if singing alone when singing higher pitches but no difference in accuracy occurred between the two singing conditions when singing lower pitches. Nevertheless, individual singing opportunities should be an essential part of the lesson because they allow for accurate assessment and identification of students needing remediation.

Nurturing Conceptual Understanding

While imitative singing is an effective way to work on the development of singing accuracy and singing independence, additional instructional strategies to facilitate conceptual understanding of pitch can be included, even at this stage of skill development. Students should develop the ability to analyze musical sounds in order to begin to think about melodic and harmonic relationships. This will provide them with a richer foundation for future learning and achievement with the ultimate goal of pitch accuracy on other types of tasks, including those that involve playing an instrument or using more advanced singing skills. In instances when the goal of the activity is to have the students focus attention more directly on pitches and start to think about the relationship of pitches to one another, singing with words should be followed by hearing and singing pitch patterns or phrases using a neutral syllable as described earlier. Words may become a distraction when guiding the students to focus on pitches, because for many students, the words are much more salient than the pitches.

As an example of ways of guiding students in discovering pitch relationships, students can be encouraged to identify melodic direction, deciding if a subsequent pitch is higher or lower, or they can compare certain pitches to a “home tone.” Using the song “Old House”, the teacher would sing the first response with words, then immediately sing it again with a neutral syllable. The students would be asked if the pitches all sounded the same. Then they would be asked if the notes went higher or lower at the end. The terms up and down should be avoided, or at least paired with higher and lower, because many people confuse these terms with descriptors of dynamics rather than pitch. When comparing one set of pitches to another, students can begin to discover phrases that are identical or pitches that are present in one tonal pattern but not another. This process of aurally analyzing melodic direction and comparing phrases would be used to discover that the second response phrase in “Old House” is different from the first phrase. If the two different melodic phrases were sung by the teacher using words only to make this comparison, many students might find it difficult to identify that the phrases are different because the words are the same.

When trying to foster conceptual understanding of pitch, it is important that the teacher phrase questions and provide information in such a way that the students are led to discovery. Directly telling the students answers such as “notice how the notes go higher” is not as effective in helping students learn. The teacher’s goal is to guide the students in a way that compels them to focus their attention on pitch and to mentally process what they are hearing and singing rather than responding or imitating with little thought. Effective questions also provide a means by which the teacher can assess the students’ level of perception and comprehension. These instances of questioning need to be brief and inserted during activities in ways that avoid a slowing of the pacing, which may cause the activity to become tedious.

Additional Instructional Techniques

To facilitate discovery and reinforcement of pitch concepts in more concrete ways, aural, visual, and physical/ kinesthetic components can be added to the learning experience. Aural, visual, and kinesthetic modalities are channels through which perception occurs during the learning process. Barbe and Milone (1981) concluded that the strength of each modality in helping a student process and retain information varies among students and shifts with maturation. Learning is most efficient when a student can use the modality that is his or her greatest perceptual strength and can reinforce learning through the second and third perceptual modalities. While Barbe, Swassing, and Milone (1979) describe ways of assessing students’ modality strengths, instruction may best meet the range of students’ needs found in a general music class by providing opportunities for using all modalities when learning.

As an illustration of including these modalities, students can use the words high and low or going higher and going lower to include additional aural input while singing or listening. Visually, students can look at and point to higher and lower visual images, such as pictures or icons representing pitch levels, while singing or listening. The students can move pictures or icons higher and lower on a board to match the sounds they are hearing or singing, which can also serve as an assessment tool the teacher may use. Physically, with short phrases students can map the sound of the pitches by using their hands to show the relative pitch level. They can point to specific higher or lower places on their bodies or physically move higher and lower to match the sounds. Liao (2008) found that 5- and 6-year-olds who used physical gestures while echoing short tonal patterns sang with significantly greater accuracy than those who did not use gestures. With all of these techniques, musical examples need to be short and should present the pitch content being analyzed in a very clear manner.

Another way to provide concrete aural, visual, and kinesthetic reinforcement of pitch concepts is to use pitched classroom instruments. Barred instruments such as xylophones or resonator bells make abstract auditory concepts tangible. When students are led to work with a limited set of pitches on a barred instrument, they can begin to mentally formulate aural and visual pitch associations. After the students begin to associate the sound of certain notes to their corresponding position on the instrument by playing a melodic fragment or a response in a call-and-response song, they can discover how to play parts of other familiar songs, or even newly created pitch patterns that use the same pitch set. The use of appropriate vocal modeling and questioning by the teacher when working with an instrument can encourage students to think about the sounds and their relationships before playing rather than using trial and error in a thoughtless manner when attempting to play patterns. Pitched instruments are also helpful because they provide another means by which students can demonstrate their level of understanding of pitch concepts. A student’s current level of singing ability might not accurately reflect his or her current level of conceptual understanding. In addition to using instruments for pedagogical purposes, the teacher can capitalize on the fact that instruments are fun to play and can enhance the aural effect when performing songs. The majority of time in a music lesson for young children should be used for enjoyable and gratifying music-making experiences.

If the teacher has not already done so, the initial use of pitch letter names is generally most ideal during activities in which pitched instruments are being used. Though letter names are preferred in the area of instrumental music, the use of moveable solfège or numbers facilitates pitch identification based on relationships that can be heard in any key. Solfège and numbers can also be used effectively when referring to pitches on instruments, with or without the additional reference to letter names. Most teachers have a preferred syllable system, be it moveable or fixed solfège, numbers, or letter names. A consistently applied system gives the students a means by which they can precisely label the pitches that they recognize and can identify aurally. Sometime in the future, the label can serve as an intermediary that assists in the translation of a visual image (notation) into an auditory image (pitch) and vice versa, which can help foster skills in music reading (Dodson, 1983).

The use of Curwen hand signs provides another means of precise pitch identification and visually shows the relationship among pitches. The inclusion of hand signs during singing activities allows students to perceive and produce information about specific pitches in aural, visual, and kinesthetic modalities simultaneously. Though research studies have not shown that elementary students’ use of hand signs improves their pitch accuracy (Cousins & Persellin, 1999; Yarbrough, Green, Benson, & Bowers, 1991), hand signs can be very helpful during instruction because they are a readily available tool by which a teacher can communicate pitch information to students with or without singing. They also provide the students with another means, besides singing, through which they can indicate which pitches they think they are hearing. This allows the teacher to quickly and easily assess in a group setting the students’ ability to aurally identify pitches.

At all stages of development, students should be encouraged to formulate internal aural images of sounds that are no longer present, a process often referred to as inner hearing or audiation. Gordon (2003) makes a clear distinction between the process of inner hearing and the process of audiation. With audiation, the student is not only mentally retaining an auditory image but also mentally processing that image to understand its meaning in a musical context. This, however, may be the implied objective of music teachers regardless of which term is used. After hearing or singing a phrase or a song, students can be led in an exercise in which they “hear it inside.” For example, after singing a phrase while using hand signs, the students can be asked to sing it again, but silently with hand signs. The ability to mentally retain sound images after singing is similar to the process of mentally producing sound images before singing, which is an essential subskill used in more advanced musical tasks such as performing from notation prima vista (at first sight).

Prior to beginning to associate pitches with their specific letter name or solfège label, students should become very familiar with the sounds of pitches in various configurations through hearing and singing many melodies. Consider the fact that children become fluent with hearing and speaking the sounds of language before they begin to associate specific language sounds with letters. Similarly, children should be given the opportunity to develop fluency with hearing and producing musical sounds before they begin to associate pitch sounds with labels. Many children lack opportunities to actively engage in developmentally appropriate music activities prior to attending school; hence, they do not have the same readiness for symbolic learning in music as they have with language. Children need many initial experiences in which they can interact with music on just an aural and oral level.

When children are ready to learn pitch labels, a portion of the song material used within a lesson should be thoughtfully selected because it contains a particular pitch pattern that will be the focus in a future lesson. It should be noted, however, that song material used throughout a lesson should not be limited to only the musical material (pitches and rhythms) that will be addressed in pedagogical exercises, as this would result in monotony and would reduce the aural variety that would stimulate attentiveness. At the other extreme, a lesson that does not include some kind of song material with which to explicitly address targeted pitch skills may not lead to optimal levels of learning.

Experiences in general music class should not only be engaging and enjoyable, but they should also be thoughtfully presented and sequenced in ways that lead to the greatest opportunities for learning to occur within the lesson and that allows musical growth to occur over time. Carefully chosen song material is important in creating an atmosphere in which music making is experienced as a fun and natural activity, but it is also key in allowing students to engage with targeted pitch skills and concepts. Each song should have a text that children find appealing and have developmentally appropriate musical content, material students can successfully use to improve their music-making skills. When students develop basic performance skills with pitch and develop a conceptual understanding of pitch relationships in the early stages of music learning, they acquire a foundation on which advanced musical skills can be developed in the future.