LISTENING TO MUSIC AND READING COMPREHENSION
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Learn about the speech, rhythm, listening to music, reading and Literacy connection on the Educational CyberPlayGround™.
It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing . . .
~ Duke Ellington
"Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler".
~ Albert Einstein
Evolutionary Science: Music is communication, Music is language. We hear and process all language as sound first and THEN we process the sound as as meaning something which we call a language. Remember we are animal and we will respond to a growl - hearing it as something dangerous - and that has meaning which will let us survive.
As language develops some cultures pay attention to the pitch of the word and the rhythm of the word. In all cultures, If it doesn't have the right rhythm nobody will understand.
Hear: Cab Calloway: Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.
"I was so happy first learning to sing the songs and then how to write."
http://www.latimes.com/News/nationworld/world/la-041502nushu.story
Nüshu, Women's Secret Script - Yang learned alongside a neighbor girl, Gao Yinxian, who eventually became a prolific nushu author. "I was about 10 years old or so," Yang said. See Link
WHO IS ALLOWED TO KNOW?
BBC -
Ballads were responsible for spreading Literacy. [1]
The Roots of Print, Power, Politics, Literacy, Ballads, Plays.
Listen to 17th Century Print Culture
Who is Allowed to know? Thought and Failed Censorship
Who is allowed to write, who is allowed to read, who is allowed to hear, who is allowed to print, who is allowed to publish! It is now and has always been about our unknown culture makers - shapers of our consciousness vs. the Owners of culture/ the Power Elite who own the supply chain of money by thought control.
Henry 8th establishes treason by words, controls reading, women reading.. Elizabeth grants a Printing Monopoly to certain people in return for obedience to the authority of the church and Crown. First to appear is cheap single sheet printed ballads extreamly popular that come directly out of the oral culture then goes back in. Telling sensational stories with a moral purpose, warning the readership with their punishment commanding them to repent.
[2] BBC - Wales The Story of Welsh - Reading the Word
In 1718 the first book to be printed on a permanent printing press in Wales was a ballad about smoking - Can o Senn iw hen Feistr Tobacco (A Song of Rebuke to his Old Master Tobacco).
While LISTENING takes place: Eyes vs. Ears
- There is more activation in the left-hemisphere brain region called the pars triangularis (the triangular section), a part of Broca's area (sometimes called verbal working memory) that usually activates when there is language processing to be done or there is a requirement to maintain some verbal information in an active state.
- The greater amount of activation in Broca's area suggests that there is more semantic processing and working memory storage in listening comprehension than in reading.
- Because spoken language is so temporary, each sound hanging in the air for a fraction of a second, the brain is forced to immediately process or store the various parts of a spoken sentence in order to be able to mentally glue them back together in a conceptual frame that makes sense.
- Written language provides an external memory where information can be re-read if necessary. To remember what you've heard you need to re-play spoken language, you need a mental play-back loop, (called the articulatory-phonological loop) conveniently provided in part by Broca's area.
Music and Reading are interconnected.
Music Makes You Smarter Research over 30 research articles
Study Ties Mental Abilities To Interaction of Emotion and Cognitive Skills
Languages' rhythm and language acquisition by Franck RamusEHESS doctoral dissertation defended 25/11/99 Discipline: Cognitive Science
Journal of Research in Music Education 35, 4: 221-235.
This article compared alternative methods of teaching rhythm.
Second- and third-graders were divided into four groups--a control group, a group which used Kodaly syllables, a group which used Gordon syllables, and a group which used meaningful words, such as "Washington" and "Mississippi." The four groups were pre-tested and post-tested on recognition, dictation, and performance. The most significant finding was that the Washington-Mississippi group scored best in the performance post-test.
Learn about the rhythmic structure of human speech communication, speech and music connection and Interdisciplinary Social Rhythm Researchers.
LITERACY | MUSIC | RHYTHM
Mandarin, is a tone language. In tone languages, a single word can differ in meaning depending on pitch patterns called "tones." For example, the Mandarin word "mi" delivered in a level tone means "to squint," in a rising tone means "to bewilder," and in a dipping (falling then rising) tone means "rice." English, on the other hand, only uses pitch to reflect intonation (as when rising pitch is used in questions).
2007
Research finds music training 'tunes' human auditory system
Provides concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem’s sensitivity to speech sounds. This finding has broad implications because it applies to sound encoding skills involved not only in music but also in language.
The findings indicate that experience with music at a young age in effect can "fine-tune" the brain's auditory system. "Increasing music experience appears to benefit all children -- whether musically exceptional or not -- in a wide range of learning activities," says Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and senior author of the study. "Our findings underscore the pervasive impact of musical training on neurological development. Yet music classes are often among the first to be cut when school budgets get tight. That's a mistake," says Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology and Physiology and professor of communication sciences and disorders. "Our study is the first to ask whether enhancing the sound environment -- in this case with musical training -- will positively affect the way an individual encodes sound even at a level as basic as the brainstem," says Patrick Wong, primary author of "Musical Experience Shapes Human Brainstem Encoding of Linguistic Pitch Patterns." An old structure from an evolutionary standpoint, the brainstem once was thought to only play a passive role in auditory processing.
Using a novel experimental design, the researchers presented the Mandarin word "mi" to 20 adults as they watched a movie. Half had at least six years of musical instrument training starting before the age of 12. The other half had minimal (less than 2 years) or no musical training. As the subjects watched the movie, the researchers used electrophysiological methods to measure and graph the accuracy of their brainstem ability to track the three differently pitched "mi" sounds.
"Even with their attention focused on the movie and though the sounds had no linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians," says Wong, director of Northwestern’s Speech Research Laboratory and assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders. "We've found that by playing music -- an action thought of as a function of the neocortex -- a person may actually be tuning the brainstem," says Kraus. "This suggests that the relationship between the brainstem and neocortex is a dynamic and reciprocal one and tells us that our basic sensory circuitry is more malleable than we previously thought."
A study of the effect of music on the behavior of slow learners - Anne Savan, Aberdare Boys School, Aberdare
It has been observed that lack of co-ordination in children with special educational needs causes frustration, which results in angry, disruptive behaviour. During a five-month period a group of ten children with special educational needs were bombarded with sound by playing orchestral music (mainly Mozart) during normal learning activities. The resultant effect on their behaviour was remarkable. The pupils became calm and co-operative within minutes of the music being switched on. The effect lasted for the duration of the lesson and was repeated every lesson for the whole of the five-month trial period. Controlled measurements of body temperature, blood pressure, breathing rate and pulse rate were made in an attempt to suggest a reason for the observations. The results indicate that the co-ordination centre of the brain may be stimulated by certain frequencies and the resultant effect is to slow down the whole body metabolism biochemically, producing a calming effect on the pupils.
Just The Opposite of a calm mind that can focus are the babies who watch infant educational videos and TV. These are the kids at risk for developing ADD.
Dr. James Catterall education professor at the University of California/Los Angeles, found that students who were highly involved in the arts had higher grades and standardized test scores.
Playing music can be good for your brain Stanford study finds it helps the understanding of language.Stanford University research has found for the first time that musical training improves how the brain processes the spoken word, a finding that researchers say could lead to improving the reading ability of children who have dyslexia and other reading problems.
The study, made public Wednesday, is the first to show that musical experience can help the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language.
The research also eventually could provide the "why" behind other studies that have found that playing a musical instrument has cognitive benefits.
"What this study shows, that's novel, is that there's a specific aspect of language ... that's changed in the minds and brains of people with musical training," said researcher John Gabrieli, a former Stanford psychology professor now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge
"Especially for children ... who aren't good at rapid auditory processing and are high-risk for becoming poor readers, they may especially benefit from musical training."
What's promising about the study, researchers believe, is the notion that the brain isn't an immutable organ fixed at birth but is adaptable -- that, with training, people can change their mental agility. The study focused on adults, but researchers want to expand the scope of their work to children as early as next summer.
One education observer cautioned against pinning too much on the research until it's proved that music actually helps children read better. [[ No other studies have shown that music has any real impact on reading ability.]] (THIS IS NOT TRUE THERE IS RESEARCH ~ KE)
"We need to make sure we're not promising parents and kids there are these magic bullets they can rely on -- that they don't have to work at learning to read, that they can play music," said Michael Kamil, a Stanford education professor who has not yet read the study.
All the research was performed at Stanford in 2004 and was presented Wednesday at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. It will be published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in December.
The researchers used adults -- from 28 to 40 individuals, depending on the part of the study -- divided into musicians and non-musicians matched by age, sex, general language ability and intelligence. To qualify, the musicians must have started playing an instrument before age 7 and never stopped, practicing several hours every week.
Researchers first had the two groups listen to three tone sequences of different pitches in rapid succession. As the various tone sequences were played faster and faster, the musicians outperformed the non-musicians in their ability to distinguish among the tones. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scanners, or fMRIs, showed that the musicians had more focused, efficient brain activity as they did this.
The researchers then examined how musicians and non-musicians processed similar word syllables, like "da" and "ba." A person has only a 40,000th of a second to differentiate between the two sounds when the physical signal hits the ear, and the musicians made those rapid auditory distinctions more accurately and quickly than non-musicians did.
When the two sounds were clearly different, like "da" and "wa," the two groups performed similarly, the differences emerging only in the finer distinctions.
"The musicians are better able to detect small differences than the non-musicians, which is surprising," said Nadine Gaab, a postdoctoral associate who moved from Stanford to MIT with Gabrieli. "Non-musicians have the same experience with syllables as musicians."
Other research has shown that musical experience improves the ability of people to hear pitches and increases verbal memory. But until now, no one has explained why mastering a musical instrument plays a role in that, Gaab said.
Many children who become poor readers have a trouble making rapid auditory distinctions, Gabrieli said. That becomes a reading problem, because when the teacher explains that this letter is a "p" and this one a "b," a student with poor processing ability might not hear the difference.
"Once they don't hear the difference, the thought is that they're going to have a hard time" understanding the difference when the letters are written on a page, Gabreli said.
He and the other researchers would like to do a study as early as next summer involving children with auditory deficiencies who are struggling to read to see whether a summer of musical enrichment hones their language skills and helps them hear language better.
That is the kind of study that needs to be done, said Kamil, the Stanford professor who urged caution in looking at the latest study.
"Unless he's demonstrated that it makes a difference in the real world, and you have some kids there and they learn to read better, I would be reluctant to attach any real significance to it at this point," Kamil said. "I'm not saying it won't work, but we really don't know."
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/17/MNGQ9FPODP1.DTL
Hear:17th Century Print Culture.