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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

Mitchell H. Evans

James Madison University

Authors Note

Mitchell Evans is a Junior Music Education Major at James Madison University

Contact: evansmh@dukes.jmu.edu
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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

At the JMU school of music you have all sorts of people who all come from different

places and were taught in different ways. Why is it that some people struggle with my aural skills

class, or my theory class? If we are all musicians who went through the public-school system,

then should we not all be equipped to take these classes? From my experience, the answer to that

question is no. Studies indicate that students who began their music education by ear develop a

different set of skills from those who started it from notation. In this paper I will analyze peer-

reviewed sources to determine the benefits of an aural vs notated approach and the science

behind it, as well as look into the methodology of bringing aural teaching styles into the

beginning classroom.

When we investigate scientific studies done on the development of musical skills, we get

some insight on the key ages of music learning. A study done on children ages 5-18 by Laurel

Trainor shows that the key period of music learning is from 6-12 years old (Trainor, 2005). This

age range seems to be the most commonly agreed upon range based on the other sources that I

have read. The study done by Trainor was testing relative pitch, sensory consonance, scale

knowledge, and harmonic knowledge. Why is this important? Well, most schools have a

beginning general music curriculum but no instrumental options until about 3rd or 4th grade. At

this point the child would be between 9-11, which is towards the end of the critical music-

learning period. By the time the student reaches their middle school instrumental program, all

their basic music skills should have been learned. In most scenarios this does not happen, and

those students will learn things like relative pitch, sensory consonance, scale knowledge, and

harmonic knowledge at a much slower rate then those students who developed those skills during

the critical period. As I was analyzing this study, I realized it very closely related to another

study that was done about language and music learning.

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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

You have probably heard that music and language “activate” the same part of the brain.

In 2004, there was a study done on the specific brain signatures of processing music and

language. This experiment is very dense in scientific language that is not music related, so I will

very quickly summarize this study. Basically, Stefan Koelsch and his colleagues hooked up

many non-trained musicians to an electroencephalography machine (EEG), which measures and

tracks brain activity. The findings were exactly what they thought: that language and music

activate the same part of the brain (Koelsch, et al., 1999). This is relevant because of the

comparison that can be made with early music learning and language learning. Another study

done on foreign language learners shows the exact same thing as I discussed in the Laurel

Trainor study (Trainor, 2005). That early range of 6-12 is the prime time for language learning as

well as music learning. So far all I have discussed is the critical age period, and the relation to

music and language. Because these younger kids, who fall in the elementary school range, have

the capacity to learn more, it is even more important to bring the right teaching methods into the

beginning music classroom. So, is notation or by ear a better strategy?

The answer is not that simple. There are benefits to both methods, but recent research has

shown a strong argument for initially learning by the aural approach. Lucy Green, an expert in

the field of informal music learning, wrote an article in 2005 giving some real-world context to

this confusing argument. Green outlines an activity where students bring in their own music and

are provided with a set of instruments and are told to copy the song they brought in. The students

were able to copy the song in a very short time and gave a performance to the rest of the class.

Not only was the song better prepared than any other music they had worked on, the rest of the

students were listening more closely then they had in the past (Green, 2005). There was

absolutely no notation involved in this activity. The students had access to a drum set, a guitar,
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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

and a piano. I am guessing one of the students could play the guitar, but it seemed the other two

just learned the piano and drum set the best they could to imitate the song. How will this help

them in a formal ensemble later? Well, notation is something that can be taught after the critical

learning period that was mentioned earlier. Being able to match pitch, hear harmonies, and

imitate melody are all skills that are extremely difficult to learn. Students who learn informally

like this, or at home experimenting with instruments, can develop the helpful musicianship skills

that notation-based learning can not provide.

How do we move away from learning out of method books into this new realm of

learning by ear? One way is to do what Lucy Green does and incorporate informal learning into

your classroom. A less extreme way is to wait to introduce music for a while and focus on some

of the basic skills that students need to succeed. Without music, an educator needs to be prepared

to run class in a much more interactive way. Peggy Bennet suggests that we use sol-feg, folk

songs, and familiar intervals to set students up for success. Bennet suggests that teaching folk

songs and breaking them down will allow students to apply their knowledge to music later. For

example, students who were to sing “three blind mice” might make the connection that the

pattern is the same as “EIEIO” from “Old McDonald had a Farm”. From there, we can label that

pattern as Mi Re Do. Students learning these things early on can just pick up these tools and put

them away for later without forgetting them. As we said earlier, I may not have much use for this

and forget that Mi Re Do pattern, but a student in the critical learning period is much more likely

to remember and retain this tool later. The next step after getting all these tools will be to teach

other melodies. Bennet suggests four ways to do this: by scale, by interval, the musical-word

approach, and the melodic-figure approach. The scale approach is notation based, but it doesn’t

use music. Instead, it uses a scale note names and highlights the intervals needed for the new
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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

melody. It provides a scaffold for the individual pitches and how they are sequenced in the

melody. The interval approach uses those patterns from the folk songs and relates them back to

the melody. Since there is a limited number of intervals, the students do not have to remember

too many different things. The musical-word approach involves call and response with certain

words of the song. For example, the teacher might sing “EIEIO” and the students will repeat

back before the teacher tells them that is what Mi Re Do sounds like. This is a better strategy for

students who did not quite pick up on all the different sol-feg patterns that were mentioned

earlier. The melodic-figure approach basically just compares melody chunks in one song to

another melody chunk in another song (Bennet, 2005). When we are finished teaching the

melody, we can move into some activities outlined by Kathy Liperote in the Music Educators

Journal (Liperote, 2006).

Liperote has a very detailed plan of how to teach a bass line and a song by ear. She takes

you step by step and identifies potential problems the students might have with this. She also

references the sol-feg and interval training that Bennet describes in her article. Liperote lays out

a system for hearing rhythmic patterns and assigns certain syllables to certain note values. This

seems like the familiar Ta-Ka-Di-Mi method, but with syllables like “Du, De, Da, and Di”. She

bases most of her methods off the teachings of Kodály, who is a Hungarian Music Educator and

was one of the first to develop some of these methods (Liperote, 2006). In James Bowyer’s

article “More than Solfege and Hand Signs”, he overviews the teachings of Zoltan Kodály and

talks about what our students can learn from his methods. Kodály’s vision was that all children

should be musically literate, reach their own potential, have a full working knowledge of their

musical heritage, and that they should analyze musical masterworks so that they will love and

appreciate music. That is quite a high expectation for young students, in my opinion. However,
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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

Kodály never gave up on his vision and developed his own methods to get students to where he

wanted them to be. He was the one that came up with the first pattern for hearing rhythms that I

mentioned earlier. He was also the one that utilized folk songs and sol-feg in almost everything

that he did (Bowyer, 2015). The work done by Liperote and Bennet are not new concepts. They

are Kodály’s methods that are adopted for the modern-day classroom, which is exciting! Kodály

is seen as one of the greatest and most influential Music Educators, so why not bring back the

work that he has done?

These modern teaching methods and their results are really all that we need to witness to

see the difference in the aural approach and the notation approach. With notation, students who

just picked up an instrument will not be copying their favorite songs and will not be able to

improvise nearly as quickly as the students who learned by ear. Some of the methods that we saw

from Bennet and Liperote are extremely relevant and can be applied directly to the beginning

music classroom to set students up for a lifetime of musical success. Going back to the older

methods of Kodály and re-vamping them could be the solution for getting students prepared and

keeping them engaged. Further studies into this field might include when notation should be

introduced, and how older students are affected by their initial learning methods. Based on all the

studies and research that I have analyzed, I think that learning by ear is completely effective and

should be a large part of the beginning music classroom.

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The Methodology and Effectiveness of Learning by Ear in the Beginning Music Classroom

References

Bennett, P. D. (2005). So, Why Sol-Mi? Music Educators Journal,91(3), 43-49.

doi:10.2307/3400075

Bowyer, J. (2015). More than Solfège and Hand Signs. Music Educators Journal,102(2), 69-76.

Green, L. (2005). The Music Curriculum as Lived Experience: Childrens “Natural” Music-Learning

Processes. Music Educators Journal,91(4), 27-32.

Koelsch, S., Schröger, E., & Tervaniemi, M. (1999). Superior pre-attentive auditory processing in

musicians. NeuroReport,10(6), 1309-1313.

Kraus, N., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2010). Music training for the development of auditory

skills. Nature Reviews Neuroscience,11(8), 599-605.

Liperote, K. A. (2006). Audiation for Beginning Instrumentalists: Listen, Speak, Read, Write. Music

Educators Journal,93(1), 46.

Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational Constraints on Language Learning. Cognitive Science,14(1),

11-28.

Strait, D. L., Kraus, N., Parbery-Clark, A., & Ashley, R. (2010). Musical experience shapes top-

down auditory mechanisms: Evidence from masking and auditory attention

performance. Hearing Research,261(1-2), 22-29.

Trainor, L. J. (2005). Are there critical periods for musical development? Developmental

Psychobiology,46(3), 262-278.

Wright, R., & Kanellopoulos, P. (2010). Informal music learning, improvisation and teacher

education. British Journal of Music Education,27(01), 71.