Singing is so much more than saying words to changing pitches over rhythmic duration. Singing is technical. You must control your breathing. You must listen to your voice, and the other voices and instruments around you. You must be aware of your body, and manipulate it the correct way to produce a proper sound. Singing is intellectual. You must read poetry from the lyrics, make connections to historical, cultural and narrative allusions and influences in and of the music. Singing is emotional. You need to determine meaning, feelings, and over encompassing ideas, and ultimately decide the best path to convey those emotions and ideas through the vocal and performance choices you make. Singing is reflective. It makes you reflect on your own feelings about an idea or meaning. It also makes you reflect on your strengths, your areas of improvement and the next steps to achieve your goals.
Communicating orally is much the same. You have to be able to have control of your voice, be able to manipulate your body to convey meaning, understand what you are saying and reflect on your successes and where you still need to go to get better.
There are a lot of resources and information on the benefits of singing and language development in young children. Children use singing to help them develop articulation skills when they begin to learn how sounds shape words, and the meaning of multiple words together. It helps them learn the construction of languages. Singing can be used to model the rhythmic patterns and tones in speech to better improve a child’s deeper understanding the structure of words and sentences. Studies have found that singing unfamiliar texts to familiar tunes can improve reading fluency.
With all this information about the benefits of music and singing to teach young students the basics of language construction, I assumed when I began to research a way to connect music and oral communication for a lesson plan for the middle grades, I would be overwhelmed with activities and rich content to choose from. I was highly mistaken. While there are many a blog or article touting the benefits of music/singing to communication skills, it is generalized into a surface statement without any accreditation or supporting findings. It was even harder to find any lesson plans, activities, or a direct explanation of the reasoning behind the connection of oral communication and music, specifically singing.
Reading through the specific expectations in the Ontario Language Curriculum under the Oral Communication strand, I immediately saw a correlation of required skills and my experience with singing instruction. Curious, I explored the Music strand of the Ontario Arts Curriculum. I found some expectations that could easily match with the oral communication expectations. Since I have 18 years of singing experience, and my teachable is vocal music, I wanted to create a lesson combining these two curriculums of oral communication and singing.
I choose to focus on the use of musical elements and vocal effects to infer meaning and mood, accompanied by facial expressions and gestures. I created a lesson plan that allowed students to compose an arrangement of a familiar holiday carol to convey a new mood, by changing elements such as pitch (tone), tempo (pace), accents (inflection), dynamics (volume) etc., and requiring them to perform the arrangement using facial expression and gestures to help communicate their mood. The students watching their peers perform were expected to actively listen to their peers, identifying the elements and expressions used and determining the mood from what they heard.
Cross Curricular Lesson Plan
In that single lesson, I used more expectations from both strands than I could assess. For music, the lesson provides opportunity to sing and/or play, in tune (C1.1), apply the elements of music to create a specific effect (C1.2), create musical compositions for a specific purpose (C1.3), identify the elements of music in the repertoire they perform, listen to, and create, and describe how they are used (C2.2). In the language strand, this activity asks students to actively listen to their peers’ arrangements, determine and communicate the inferences made from listening and watching their peers and identify the purpose of the performance. It requires students to create and present an idea with purpose (convey a specific mood), by using appropriate vocal and non verbal elements in a clear manner. That is roughly covering 5 music expectations, and over 10 oral communication expectations!
The above image shows the many connections between the Grade 6 oral communication curriculum and the music curriculum. Can you find anymore?
Singing can be an engaging way to teach and practice almost all of the oral communication expectations in the Ontario curriculum. There are 3 overall areas listed as skills students should learn in middle school oral communication: listening, speaking, and reflection. Music and singing can easily be incorporated into each of these sections.
Listening
Music has the uncanny power to elicit powerful emotions, as well as convey a variety of intentional and unintentional messages with or without words. Music is complex, consisting of many layers and elements to be absorbed, identified and interpreted. Part of good listening skills consist of being able to isolate and identify all the elements of what you are hearing, direct or in direct. Music provides a rich combination of sounds to practice deep listening skills in order to gain information and make connections. This translates to oral communication because when listening to someone speak, you do not just hear the words someone speaks. Yes, you hear the words. But you also hear the tone or quality they use. You hear their stresses and pauses on certain words. You hear where they breathe. You hear the speed in which they speak. You hear the volume of their voice. All these elements give you information about what the words mean and you make inferences based on this information. It might have nothing to do with what the actual words said mean.
“I got promoted.” If someone says this in a higher tone, you might infer that they are excited, or if there is a quiver in their voice, you might interpret that they are nervousness or uneasy about the news. The words are still the same, but the implications are different. You can gain information by listening to the accents on the words. A stress on “promoted” might mean something very different to a stress on “I”, as if they were surprised they got the promotion. Volume might indicate angry, happiness, fear, sadness etc., speed might indicate the same emotions.
These elements go hand in hand with watching skills as well. Communication is more than just sounds, but also consists of observing and interpreting body language and how certain facial expressions, posture or gestures can alter the meaning of a certain phrase.
Singing teaches all of these skills. When you watch a professional singer, you will notice not only the lyrics they sing, but facial expressions they use, movements they make, accents or timbre of the words/notes, and the dynamics they use. These elements help the singer “tell the story” or present the meaning of the song on a deeper level than just text. One way to help students practice this listening skill of gaining information from elements beyond the text is by watching singers perform a song in a different language. They will learn to pick up information without the lyrics to help them. This allows them to isolate the cues needed to infer information. The music helps engage students more readily than simply listening to a speaker, as well as easier to hear and see the subtle indicators of non-text oral information.
Lyrics are the text of singing, and along with the elements discussed above, provide even more opportunity for students to practice analyzing meaning, point of view and overall comprehension of the song. They then are able to reflect on the influence or affect the elements had on their understanding, and the effectiveness of the performance/presentation. From there, connections to other musical or non-musical media or ideas can be made to further extend their knowledge.
Students need to practice actively listening to all elements of communicate to learn and apply what they see and hear into their own oral communications.
Speaking
The above non-text elements that provide information to the audience of a singer obviously are important to put into practice when singing yourself in order to communicate effectively. By learning to listen and watch for these tools of communication and how it can be used to convey different meanings, students should then be able to understand and be able to implement them into the own singing.
While taking private singing lessons, and eventually when I privately taught vocal lessons, one of the biggest things I was told, and emphasized, was to “tell the story” of my song. Yes, technique was important too, but if I didn’t tell the story, what was the point of singing the song? So I would create a song map. I would interpret the poem of the lyrics, and figure out what I was trying to say as a character, and what I was feeling in each phrase. What was the most important thing in this phrase that I wanted my audience to understand? Would changing the stress on a word change the meaning I wanted my audience to understand? If I sang this part soft, what did that mean? If I sang it loud, it would often change the feeling entirely. For example, one song I love to sing is “I’m not afraid of anything” from Songs for New World (unfortunately I don't have a recording of me performing it) and the final phrases claim that the character won’t let anything or anyone stop her because she is not afraid. Now, I could sing the entire ending in full belt, loud and confident, and convey the same meaning as the word imply. However, I like the sing the final “I’m not afraid” softly, implying a contrasting idea to the text that perhaps I am not so unafraid and confident. Unfortunately I don't have a recording of me performing it yet, so I can't demonstrate what I mean.
As a performer, facial expressions and gesture can reinforce or contrast with the literal implications of the text. Students need to practice the manipulation and understanding of body language’s ability to provide more information than just the text.
This video is from recital I had about 7 years ago, and is one of my favourite songs for expression and body language. I had fun playing 3 different "characters", living on 3 different levels, which I used my body language to help represent timidness, formality, and looseness. I played around with excitement, sarcasm and self discovery in my facial expressions. I used dynamics to convey and contrast certain ideas. Overall, a fun experience to practice communicating all this characters feelings!
By singing, students can play with interpreting lyrics, experiment with vocal effects, create a character with distinct expressions, similar to drama, but with unique musical constraints and freedoms. Singing also develops students’ projection, posture and breathing regulation in a more controlled manner over drama.
Reflection
Singing is a very vulnerable and intimate physical endeavor. It is unique to you, and is purely an instrument of your body. Because of this, there is a deep connection to our singing voice. It is you close companion and can carry a lot of weight of self-confidence, and provide you with rich opportunities to reflect on your abilities, but also reflect on your emotional and physical well being. This dissertation explores the areas of reflection that can be gained from singing. The first is our Self-Reflective Vocal Experiences. Not only do you reflect on your own perception on your sound, but also on your narrative self vs. experiential self. It forces you to reflect on your introspective perception of your body, which then allows you to reflect on your physical and mental well being. Singing allows you to connect with your individuality of your own unique voice. By creating awareness of interpretations when listening and performance choices made to convey certain emotions, singing opens up a reflective window into the inter-workings of the emotional self and the perceptions of the world around you. Pretty deep stuff for a 5th grader!
Because of the apparent familiarity and control we have over our voice, we can use it as a flashlight, to explore its origin, history, mental and physical and social clues and influence. In this context, the voice can be seen as an avatar of the self; they both contain this paradox of being apparently timeless and immutable while being also inherently embedded in the present and shaped by our past experiences (age, traumas, accents, intonation, fillers, vocal posture). - Rebecca Kleinberger
Students also learn to assess themselves by listening and watching their performances and reflecting on what they might not realize they are doing, or notice improvements they didn't recognize at the time of performing. Students (and anyone, really) should be encouraged to record themselves during practice and performance in order to gain insight into their growth and provide an objective tool for perception.
More research needs to be made into explicitly connecting the use of singing instruction and how it can improve and develop oral communication skills in not just young children, but also into the middle grades. Maybe this is something I will pursue in a master program one day, who knows. However, one thing is for sure. I am grateful to my grandmother for putting me in singing lessons. I have never been more appreciative of the extra benefit I gained from learning how to sing, and definitely have a deeper understanding how it has helped me in my confidence to speak, convey, and control my emotions. Now to teach my students the same skills!
0 comments:
Post a Comment