Identifying the ear for music in children is not only an answer to the question of whether it is worth teaching music to a child, because music education itself does not harm anyone. To one degree or another, musical abilities in general and an ear for music in particular are characteristic of all people, except for those suffering from total deafness from birth. Revealing the degree of development of musical ear helps to plan the musical education of the child.
Unfortunately, entrance examinations in many music schools often turn into a visual demonstration of how it is impossible to diagnose ear for music. The child is asked to sing the individual notes that the teacher takes on the instrument, to determine by ear whether the teacher simultaneously plays one note, two (interval) or three (chord).
With such a diagnosis, little information can be obtained about ear for music. A child may "miss" the right notes, not because he cannot hear, but because he cannot control his voice. And most importantly, such methods have a very distant relationship to music.
Ear for music and other abilities
In musical activity, whether it is composing music, performing or perceiving music, musical abilities are manifested in a complex manner, therefore, an isolated diagnosis of individual abilities is doomed to failure. And the ear for music itself is a complex phenomenon that includes many elements. This is pitch hearing, timbre, and dynamic, absolute and relative hearing.
The main carrier of meaning in music is pitch, and it is not the pitch of a single sound that matters, but the combination of sounds of different pitch. Their ratio is formed into a system - a mode that allows you to perceive a combination of sounds of different heights, as an expression of a certain meaning. This ability is called modal feeling and is one of the foundations of musical ear.
Music unfolds in time, and the spatial coordinate (pitch) cannot be considered in isolation from the temporal coordinate (rhythm), therefore, the diagnostics of the modal feeling should be combined with the identification of the rhythmic feeling.
The semantic perception of pitch and musical rhythm is expressed in the active manifestation of musical ear - the ability to form abstract musical and auditory representations in the form of a melody, abstracted from timbre presentation and stored in this form by memory.
Diagnostic methods
One of the best ways to test your child's musical ability is to invite him to sing a song. It will be a complex manifestation of musical abilities in active musical activity. When accompanying a child on a musical instrument, one can trace how he reacts to the accompaniment: whether the rhythm matches, whether it falls into the key, and if it does not, whether it is trying to correct it, “looking for” the necessary sounds with his voice.
To refine the results, you need to apply additional methods.
To diagnose the modal feeling, you can play two versions of the melody - with a stable ending and an unstable one. Let the child choose which of these tunes is over and which one he wants to continue.
To diagnose the rhythmic feeling, you can play a number of musical fragments with different rhythmic organization (march, waltz, polka) and invite the child to move freely to the beat of the music.
To reveal the ability to abstract musical and auditory representations, you need to play the melodies on the instrument that the child has probably heard many times (“A Christmas tree was born in the forest”, songs from cartoons, etc.) and invite the child to name them.
This identification of musical abilities in general and musical ear in particular is as close as possible to real musical activity, and this is its effectiveness.
