Download Musical Experiences - Los Angeles Mission College

Los Angeles Mission College
Lilamani de Silva
Child Development 7
Abilities Relevant to Music
1. Hearing, auditory acuity, and auditory discrimination are basic to learning skills.
2. Vision, body awareness, gross and fine motor skills, directionality, and laterality determine the ability to move expressively
in response to directions and in the use of musical instruments.
3. Growing acquisition of receptive and expressive language, articulation, diction, and expressive use of the voice in speech
influence the child’s ability to sing.
4. The cognitive abilities of memorization, sequencing, imitation, classification, and making relationships and choices affect
each child’s ability to create new (for him) lyrics, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, and to express perceptions of
dynamics, mood, form, and timbre.
5. Over all of these related academic skills lies the ability to pay attention-not only to perceive on the instant using the senses
(sight, sound, and kinesthetic awareness) but to internalize that perception and to process and retain it for the use in the
immediate situation or in future ones.
Musical Experiences
Based on an understanding of child growth and development, the teacher initiates musical experiences that develop
appropriate skills, concepts, and attitudes. Teachers should remember, however, that “in musical development, as in all growth
processes, each child is unique, and each child’s musical growth must be understood and respected.”
Specifically, a musical experience may be composed of any or all of the following. Although they are listed separately,
each is dependent upon the others and all are essential components of the music program. Active listening is the continuing
generator.
 Listening
 Moving
 Singing
 Playing instruments
 Creating
The child listens to the music in his environments and responds to it experientially. In so doing, he becomes increasingly creative
and expressive in his ability to move, sing, and play instruments.
Musical Leanings
All experiences lead to learning, from the simplest rhythmic experiences of being rocked to sleep to the more
sophisticated challenge of playing one rhythmic pattern while singing an other. When musical experiences are related to the
developmental continuum, the learning is acquired without difficulty. As concepts are internalized and integrated by the child,
he grows in his ability to interpret and create. The satisfaction and pleasure he derived from his earliest spontaneous musical
expressions are now extended to his conscious use of what he has learned.
The most important areas of musical learning or explore Dimensions of Music are as follows:
 Beat: An accent of sound or a continuing series of accents
 Melody: A sequence of tones of varying pitches organized in a rhythmically meaningful way
 Pitch: The highness or lowness of a tone on a musical scale
 Rhythm: A sense of movement and patterns in music created by beats, the duration and volume of sounds, and the
silences between sounds
 Tempo: A sense of slowness or rapidity in music
 Timbre (TAM-bur): The unique tone quality of a voice or a musical instrument
 Tone: An individual musical sound
 Volume: The softness or loudness of a sound