As a little girl, my first musical memory was singing “I’m a Little Teapot” for my family. A lot. I either sang it really well, or was just incredibly cute doing it- I prefer to think I was both.
Can’t you just hear that song in your head right now? I also remember sitting next to our stereo speaker, asking my dad over and over to replay “The Chipmunk Song” (Christmas Don’t Be Late). Now, if you were a kid in America in 1958, (see picture of my older brother and me), the previous sentence should immediately trigger your memory to play that silly melody.
What song does this snowy picture immediately remind you of? Yes, “Frosty the Snowman!” Did you brain “play” it for you when you thought of it?
This silent, “inner hearing”, or audiation, is the ability to “hear” music when no musical sound is present. When you audiate, you have internalized and are “thinking” music. For example, have you ever found yourself with a song “going through your head?” You’re audiating! Being able to hear music in this way is an important part of musical literacy, just as being able to think thoughts without speaking them aloud is an important in language and thought development.
Dr. Edwin Gordon defined audiation as “the hearing and comprehending of sound that is not physically present.” According to Gordon, “audiation is to music as thinking is to language.” Just as children babble before speaking and thinking in language, they also progress through steps in music before they fluently speak and think in music.
Tips for parents: This is a fun game to play with in the car, in the kitchen, or while cuddling on a lazy Saturday morning when the children pile in bed with you. Start singing a favorite song, and then stop before you sing the last note of a phrase or the end of the song. Wait and see if your child sings it for you. If he does, he is successfully “thinking music,” or hearing it in his head. – Theresa Case
What I think is really cool, (being a music geek), is all the ways we can use this “inner hearing” in our everyday lives. When someone asks you, “what is the 10th letter of the alphabet?” your mind automatically plays the ABC song to help you find the letter “J.” When faced with a word we do not recognize, we “sound out” the syllables in our heads to try to figure it out. (Like the word, “audiation”)! We use familiar melodies to help children with everyday tasks when we sing, “toys away, toys away,” or “this is the way we brush our teeth.”
In Kindermusik classes, we practice “hearing the music inside” in many different ways: Asking children what a bear or a train sounds like before playing the sound clip for them, leaving out successive words in “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” or the letters B-I-N-G-O in you-know-what song. We take familiar melodies and change the words to suit the situation, as in “Got a Rock in my Pocket.” We then use this song as a humming activity. Humming is another way of “hearing the music inside,” as we usually think of the words of a song while making humming the notes. We expose children to many types of music to provide them with a broad and varied musical vocabulary on which to build their future musical experiences.
And remember, when we share all these musical experiences together in class, whether playing drums to “African Noel,” dancing to “The Sugar Plum Fairy,” or rocking to Greensleeves, we are sharing all of our collected memories and feelings about that music with all the other children and grownups in class. We all bring to each activity our own life experiences and are allowed to share in the joy of the moment with others, in addition to creating new ones for our children.
One more picture for you, so I’ll know what classic song is playing as your part of “listening to the music inside.”
-posted by Miss Judy, who constantly gets music “stuck” inside of her head, and loves it!
Do you know someone who would love and benefit from Kindermusik, but does not have the financial resources to pay for a class?
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