CHILDREN’S
RECOGNITION OF PITCH AND/OR RHYTHMIC SEQUENCE PATTERNS
David
Sell
This
study arose from an observation that a large number of the Year
4 and Year 8 children participating in the 1996 NEMP music assessment
tasks ‘Sing Song’ and ‘Keyboard’
performed inaccurately yet were able to sing or play repeated
musical patterns (in this case, pitch and/or rhythm). It was therefore
decided to revisit these performances in order to examine these
patterns more closely. |
| For
the ‘Sing Song’ tasks, pitch pattern was deemed
present when one or more of these criteria were met: • the pitch of the melody was sung accurately; • the pitch was generally correct, but at the wrong tessitura; • some notes were wrong, but a recognisable contour was present. Rhythm pattern was deemed present when one of the following criteria was met: • the rhythm was sung accurately; • the rhythm was generally correct, but with some inaccuracy; • the rhythm was wrong, but there was a consistent pitch pattern. |
For
the ‘Keyboard’ tasks, pitch pattern was considered
present when one or more of these criteria were met: • the pitch of the melody was played accurately; • some notes were wrong, but a recognisable contour was present. Rhythm pattern was considered present when one of these criteria was met: • the rhythm was played accurately; • the rhythm was generally correct, but with some inaccuracy; • the rhythm was wrong, but there was a consistent pattern; • a rhythm pattern was improvised. |
| •
Children at both Years 4 and 8 had a strong sense of musical patterning,
especially rhythmic. • Children who could not sing a melody as written seldom sang random notes but latched on to a pattern—pitch and/or rhythmic—and repeated it, usually at different pitches. • Children performed poorly on the ‘Keyboard’ activities, mainly because few of them were familiar with music keyboards. • That pitch fared better than rhythm in the ‘Keyboard’ items was probably due to some consistency between ‘upness’ and ‘downness’ in pitch and visually higher and lower in music notation, and in lateral direction on a music keyboard. • When invited to make up or improvise a tune or rhythm, the children almost invariably caught on to an attractive pattern and repeated it with variations. |
• Year 8 children asked to play anything they liked (Year 4 students were not asked to do this ‘Keyboard’ activity) were more able to demonstrate some feel for musical pattern than when playing an unfamiliar piece in an unfamiliar notation.
|
The
‘teaching’ of pitch and rhythm has little meaning outside
the context of actual music. It is the shaped musical phrase that gives
meaning to music, and that phrase almost always carries some recognisable
musical pattern, whether pitch, rhythmic, or both. Teaching should therefore
always be in phrase units, and preferably with some form of repeated patterning.
A similar situation exists where the object of a lesson is to teach musical
notation. A crotchet has no meaning apart from the notes on either side
of it. The relation between a sound pattern and its visual equivalent
is therefore most quickly learned through repeated hearings.