t chord and then hearing a tonic as its natural resolution. ... The implicit knowledge is stored as procedures for handling incoming patterns of stimulation. "
One of Dowling's experiments is illustrative. Both naive and musically educated subjects heard melodies which included notes (pitches) that "fall into the cracks in between the standard notes on a piano keyboard". Dowling devised an intricate way of forcing subjects to make judgments before they had a chance to store the melody and think about it; that is, he forced them to rely on their procedural memory store. Dowling found that the mistuned notes were automatically assimilated to the nearest semitone in the regular scale. Most interestingly, there was no difference between naive subjects and those with musical training. Thus, mere exposure to Western tonal music was sufficient to induce the brain to develop a standard tonal schema, which it then uses to automatically classify pitches. This is a matter of procedural learning and memory. By the way, the effects were not due to "hard-wired" brain circuits present at birth because tonal processing is culturally bound; exposure to another tonal system would produce a schema for that system.
On the basis of these types of findings and general considerations, Dowling argues that too much of education (all education not merely music education) is based on declarative learning in which facts are passed on by lectures. He argues for specific emphasis on procedural learning, suggesting greately increased experience with music itself. He goes so far to suggest that "...if instead of talking to children, teachers got them singing i t would help a lot and would produce active involvement. Also, it is fun. It is more fun to sing than to listen to someone lecture."
Implicit in this view is that we tend to under-emphasize the potential of procedural learning, perhaps because we personally aren't generally conscious of it. By specifically setting up situations in which students increase their procedural store of information, one can take advantage of the brain's penchant for automatically making sense out of streams of sensory experience. In other words, hearing and producing music by singing should produce a great deal of procedural learning, building additional and more complex schemas to form a broader and deeper basis for the automatic processing and interpretation of more complex aspects of sensory experience. That is, enhancing learning by performance.
In Dowling's words, "It is via the automatic procedures we develop that in a very fundamental way we perceive and understand the world. With music, this can be done quite effectively, I think, by engaging all students actively in perhaps simply having them sing rather than talk about music.
-- N. M. Weinberger
(1) There are many accounts of this and similar findings on brain
and memory. For a highly readable book, now slightly outdated
but still very informative, see Squire, L. (1987). Memory and
Brain,. New York: Oxford University Press.
(2) Dowling, W. J. (1993). Procedural and Declarative Knowledge
in Music Cognition and Education, in Tighe, T. J. and Dowling,
W. J. (eds.), Psychology and Music: The Understanding of Melody
and Rhythm, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Purists and Utilitarians
The following opinions about music. are based on the reports
of scientific studies. This does not mean that the opinions of
the editor carry the same importance as the results of such studies
themselves. They are simply opinions, intended to provoke thought
and sometimes perhaps even argument, but ultimately to energize
and enlarge action on music
Recently, I was astonished to learn that many music educators
are either disinterested in or even quite negative about certain
areas of music research. In particular, some leading figures
disdain research on the relationships between music and other
aspects of human behavior. For example, they appear to be quite
unhappy about studies that investigate the potential beneficial
effects of music education on child development and co