Annotation for Upitis, Rena
Children's Understanding of Rhythm: The Relationship Between Development and Music Training
Annotation (by Bill Tilghman):
- In this study, seventy-two children, ages 7 through 12 and both
musically trained and untrained, were given standardized clinical
interviews in which their understanding of simple rhythms was
assessed through a variety of tasks. These included producing and
interpreting symbolic notations of rhythmic patterns, as well as
relating the metric hierarchy to melodies both aurally and
through motor actions. A central aspect examined was the
distinction, developed in earlier research by Jeanne Bamberger,
between figural and metric symbolic descriptions of
rhythmic patterns. Metric descriptions, like our standard Western
notation of rhythm, use symbols that convey information about the
durations of events, regardless of how these events combine into
groups or clusters. Figural descriptions reflect an attempt to
depict rhythmic figures or groups: the symbols show which events
group together rather than which ones have the same duration. The
data indicated that between the two types figural descriptions
were preferred by children and were the easiest for them to
produce and interpret, regardless of their age or level of formal
musical training. Musically trained children, however, were
better able to read descriptions of both types than their
untrained counterparts, and children's ability to keep time and
to relate metric beats to melodies correlates directly with their
ability to read metric descriptions. Older children were better
at all tasks than younger children. The findings also suggested
that figural and metric abilities develop in parallel (rather
than in serial order, where figural development precedes metric
development) and that children of all ages and abilities are able
to separate the two kinds of rules (figural and metric rules were
never mixed within a single description).
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