Melodic learning

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Melodic Learning is a multimodal learning method that uses the defining elements of singing (pitch, rhythm and rhyme) to facilitate the capture, storage and retrieval of information. Widely recognized examples of Melodic Learning include using the alphabet song to learn the alphabet and This Old Man to learn counting.

Contents

Overview

In 2004, Dr. Susan Homan, Dr. Robert Dedrick and then doctoral student, Marie C. Biggs of the University of South Florida's College of Education began researching the use of a non-standard approach to reading remediation that used repeated singing of grade leveled songs with struggling, middle school readers. When the results of their pilot study as well as further research over the following five years consistently showed significant gains, Dr. Homan, et al. began searching the literature for an explanation as to why this non-traditional approach was effective.

After reviewing recent findings in the fields of literacy, neuroscience and anthropology, Dr. Homan, in collaboration with Dr. Eliot Levinson, identified this use of repeated singing to accelerate learning as a form of, "Melodic Learning". Dr. Homan posits that other forms of Melodic Learning include the singing of hymns in organized religions and the use of oral tradition to pass on important information from generation to generation in pre-literate societies [1]

Multi-media Learning Theory

Melodic learning combines melody with visual imagery to enhance learning. Melodic learning is an extension of Multimedia Learning Theory because it focuses specifically on the addition of music to learning. Research indicates that multiple types of media have positive effects on a learner however, multimedia learning can encompass as few as two senses whereas melodic learning explores how music embeds learning deeper into the human brain.

The neuroscience about how music affects learning is a relatively new area of research. Music is a part of every known culture including in the very distant past. [2] Dr. Patel's research links music to linguistics, to early learning, to language learning, and to literacy learning.

Music engages all of the following brain functions: [3]

Multiple Modalities

Learning with Sesame Street on the television is an example of melodic learning. Through Sesame Street, young children experience and advance emergent literacy processes through poems, jingles, chants, word games and singing songs. Several of the principles of literacy learning interact. Rhyming and singing are high-level multi-modal interactions of visual, auditory/aural, and kinesthetic modalities. [4] Rhythmic and tonal processing also contribute to the success of this learning process.

Jumping rope is an example of melodic learning. Tonal, rhythmic, aural and visual elements interplay as children sing and rhyme. The rope's motion supplies the kinesthetic element to enhance the process. [5] This may explain why many children learn jump rope rhymes faster and retain them longer than they do for many of their classroom lessons.

A combination of five specific modalities or Learning styles affect how a child learns while playing or while watching Sesame Street or jumping rope:

The integration of these modalities creates more powerful and permanent measurable learning outcomes and can accelerate learning, especially struggling learners.

Neuroscience evidence

Melodic learning appears to derive its effectiveness from the special nature of music and singing's activity pattern in the human brain. A series of books published in the 2000s by noted neuroscientists document the unique relationship between music and our brains, including Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin, and Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel.

History

An earworm is a portion of a song that repeats itself inside one's head. As recently as 2005, researchers discovered that the earworm is engraved in the auditory cortex and instantly retrieved. [6] Industrial psychologists have made good use of this link between music and learning by creating catchy jingles to sell products. More recently earworms are being used in training products. [7]

Nearly every civilization uses music to share information. Australia's aboriginal tribesmen used songs to detail complex routes to important places. Although this was not a feat of memory alone and that rock art serve as tangible manuscripts for these musicians. In Africa, drums were used to communicate. Throughout Europe roving minstrels and troubadours sang ballads retelling the news and politics of the day. In churches, temples and mosques, chanted prayers etch religious words into memory. The connection between music and learning runs deep inside the brain. The patterns reinforce each other resulting in a greater learning effect. [8]

Adults and children can recognize a wrong note in a simple melody. If one note of the simple five-note opening to The Star-Spangled Banner is played incorrectly, those who've heard the song before can instantly recognize that it is wrong. Westerners recognize standard chord progressions that are "wrong" even though they have never heard them before. Researchers link the phenomena of identifying the wrong note and identifying the wrong word (syntactically) to the same part of the brain, thereby demonstrating how music and words are intertwined. [9]

See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agnosia</span> Inability to process sensory information

Agnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by an inability to process sensory information. Often there is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Agnosia only affects a single modality, such as vision or hearing. More recently, a top-down interruption is considered to cause the disturbance of handling perceptual information.

An earworm or brainworm, also described as sticky music or stuck song syndrome, is a catchy or memorable piece of music or saying that continuously occupies a person's mind even after it is no longer being played or spoken about. Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) is most common after earworms, but INMI as a label is not solely restricted to earworms; musical hallucinations also fall into this category, although they are not the same thing. Earworms are considered to be a common type of involuntary cognition. Some of the phrases often used to describe earworms include "musical imagery repetition" and "involuntary musical imagery".

Learning styles refer to a range of theories that aim to account for differences in individuals' learning. Although there is ample evidence that individuals express personal preferences on how they prefer to receive information, few studies have found validity in using learning styles in education. Many theories share the proposition that humans can be classified according to their "style" of learning, but differ on how the proposed styles should be defined, categorized and assessed. A common concept is that individuals differ in how they learn.

Kinesthetic learning, kinaesthetic learning, or tactile learning is learning that involves physical activity. As cited by Favre (2009), Dunn and Dunn define kinesthetic learners as students who prefer whole-body movement to process new and difficult information. However, scientific studies do not support the claim that using kinesthetic modality improves learning in students identified as kinesthetic learning as their preferred learning style.

Auditory imagery is a form of mental imagery that is used to organize and analyze sounds when there is no external auditory stimulus present. This form of imagery is broken up into a couple of auditory modalities such as verbal imagery or musical imagery. This modality of mental imagery differs from other sensory images such as motor imagery or visual imagery. The vividness and detail of auditory imagery can vary from person to person depending on their background and condition of their brain. Through all of the research developed to understand auditory imagery behavioral neuroscientists have found that the auditory images developed in subjects' minds are generated in real time and consist of fairly precise information about quantifiable auditory properties as well as melodic and harmonic relationships. These studies have been able to recently gain confirmation and recognition due to the arrival of Positron emission tomography and fMRI scans that can confirm a physiological and psychological correlation.

Sensory substitution is a change of the characteristics of one sensory modality into stimuli of another sensory modality.

Visual learning is a learning style among the learning styles of Neil Fleming's VARK model in which information is presented to a learner in a visual format. Visual learners can utilize graphs, charts, maps, diagrams, and other forms of visual stimulation to effectively interpret information. The Fleming VARK model also includes Kinesthetic Learning and Auditory learning. There is no evidence that providing visual materials to students identified as having a visual style improves learning.

Representational systems is a postulated model from neuro-linguistic programming, a collection of models and methods regarding how the human mind processes and stores information. The central idea of this model is that experience is represented in the mind in sensorial terms, i.e. in terms of the putative five senses, qualia.

Auditory learning or Auditory modality is one of three learning modalities originally proposed by Walter Burke Barbe and colleagues that characterizes a learner as depending on listening and speaking as a main way of processing and/or retaining information.

Auditory processing disorder (APD), rarely known as King-Kopetzky syndrome or auditory disability with normal hearing (ADN), is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting the way the brain processes sounds. Individuals with APD usually have normal structure and function of the ear, but cannot process the information they hear in the same way as others do, which leads to difficulties in recognizing and interpreting sounds, especially the sounds composing speech. It is thought that these difficulties arise from dysfunction in the central nervous system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Management of dyslexia</span>

Management of dyslexia depends on a multitude of variables; there is no one specific strategy or set of strategies that will work for all who have dyslexia.

Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from language and may constitute an independent part of the phonological loop. The use of this term is problematic, however, since it implies input from a verbal system, whereas music is in principle nonverbal.

The neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. Scientists working in this field may have training in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, neuroanatomy, psychology, music theory, computer science, and other relevant fields.

Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition.

Beat deafness is a form of congenital amusia characterized by a person's inability to distinguish musical rhythm or move in time to it.

SingingCoach is a downloadable, learn-to-sing software program from Electronic Learning Products, Inc.

Catchiness is how easy it is for a song, tune, or phrase to be recalled. It is often taken into account when writing songs, catchphrases, advertising slogans, jingles etc. Alternatively, it can be defined as how difficult it is for one to forget it. Songs that embody high levels of remembrance or catchiness are literally known as "catchy songs" or "earworms". While it is hard to scientifically explain what makes a song catchy, there are many documented techniques that recur throughout catchy music, such as repetition, hooks and alliteration. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music says that "although there was no definition for what made a song catchy, all the songwriting guides agreed that simplicity and familiarity were vital".

Multisensory learning is the assumption that individuals learn better if they are taught using more than one sense (modality). The senses usually employed in multisensory learning are visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile – VAKT. Other senses might include smell, taste and balance.

Musical literacy is the reading, writing, and playing of music, as well an understanding of cultural practice and historical and social contexts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multimodal pedagogy</span> Teaching approach with different modes

Multimodal pedagogy is an approach to the teaching of writing that implements different modes of communication. Multimodality refers to the use of visual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and gestural modes in differing pieces of media, each necessary to properly convey the information it presents.

References

  1. ↑ "Susan Homan". Archived from the original on 2014-02-23. Retrieved 2014-02-08.
  2. ↑ Aniruddh, Patel. "Music and the Mind". Grey Matters. University of California Television. Retrieved 4 May 2011.
  3. ↑ Zatorre, Robert. J. (19 July 2001). "Do You See What I'm Saying? Interactions between Auditory and Visual Cortices in Cochlear Implant Users". Neuron. 31 (1): 13–14. doi: 10.1016/S0896-6273(01)00347-6 . PMID   11498046. S2CID   15924119.
  4. ↑ Baines, Lawrence (2008). Teacher's Guide to Multisensory Learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. ISBN   978-1-4166-0713-7. Archived from the original on June 13, 2010.
  5. ↑ Neil, Fleming. "VARK, A Guide to Learning Styles". Archived from the original on 2011-05-01.
  6. ↑ Kellaris, James (22 Feb 2003). "His study, Dissecting Earworms: Further Evidence on the 'Song-Stuck-in-Your-Head' Phenomenon". Presentation to Society for Consumer Psychology.
  7. ↑ DeNoon, Daniel. "Songs Stick in Everyone's Head". Health News. WebMD. Retrieved May 4, 2011.
  8. ↑ Sacks, Oliver (2007). MusicoPhilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Random House. ISBN   978-1-4000-3353-9.
  9. ↑ Sacks, Oliver (2007). MusicoPhilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Random House. ISBN   978-1-4000-3353-9.
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