ction is one which has a great deal of evidence to back it. Whether or not these terms and the forms of memory they purportedly encapsulate ultimately stand the test of time, it is clear that procedural and declarative memory are relatively independent. For example, damage to the medial temporal lobe of the brain can prevent new declarative memories from being formed but leave procedural memories intact. Thus, such a patient can fail to recognize the doctors he sees everyday for years. At the same time, he can learn perceptual and motor skills (e.g., mirror drawing) at a normal rate over days of practice, while denying that he has ever seen or done the task before!(1)
What does this have to do with music? W. Jay Dowling, a prolific and highly respected music researcher believes this distinction has important consequences for music and this essay attempts to summarize some of his findings and views.(2)
In music education, learning the fact that the key of G has one sharp engages the declarative memory system. In contrast, learning to play the G scale well involves procedural memory. Practicing is largely a sensory-motor skill and merely thinking about learning to play can't substitute for the real thing. So both forms of memory are engaged in music instruction. However, Dowling points out that there is a more subtle, yet vital, aspect of procedural memory in music than practicing an instrument. He refers to the implicit mental schema that people acquire merely by being exposed to Western tonal music. Thus, hearing such music actually programs the brain to have a tonal framework within which musical sounds are automatically referred and processed.
Dowling gives an example. "Hearing the dominant chord in a particular context sets up a readiness to process the tonic chord more efficiently when it occurs. ... knowledge is represented implicitly rather than explicitly. The listener does not say to himself "Oh, there is a dominant and now I bet there will be a tonic. The listener's experience is one of hearing a dominant 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 informat