You may generate a number of questions while designing and delivering Tonal Discrimination activities.  Such questions provide great opportunity for you to further uncover the process of tonal audiation. Children with a background in meters, tonalities, and syllables have much to teach us about the process of music learning. Designing activities that explore your questions can bring new insights into the workings of the musical mind. Exploring your questions with various ages will provide new insights into the process of music learning and how it may or may not relate to age.

Can the children discriminate between and among more than two tonalities? Are they discriminating tonalities or simply tonal syllables? Can the children identify tonalities by name? Can the children identify the tonalities without tonal syllables? What about discriminating tonic and dominant pitches? What can children do musically as a result of being able to discriminate same and different in tonalities?

The musical mind steeped in tonalities understands the difference between tonalities in sound. Tonal syllables entice audiation to reflect on itself, to become aware of tonal knowing, giving voice to what audiation knows in sound. Discrimination Activities compel audiation to further reflect on itself, to become aware of tonalities and the distinguishing characteristics of each tonality, bringing audiation to greater command of its own knowing. Contrasting only two tonalities best clarifies the definition of each, making each tonality more tangible, more well-defined in audiation. Children learn what something is by learning what it is not. The musical mind that has a handle on several tonalities through Discrimination Activities with two tonalities in Duple and then in Triple meter, finds very little challenge in discriminating between three or more tonalities, or two tonalities in unusual meters. Is it necessary to design activities with three tonalities? Perhaps to teach you more about the workings of the musical mind, but not necessarily for the children’s growth.

Are the children discriminating between tonalities or just between tonal syllables? When children have the appropriate background in tonalities, tonal syllables adhere to sound, causing audiation to reflect on itself and become aware of what it knows in sound. Tonal syllables are not an imposed system on the musical mind that is steeped in tonalities, but rather, the tonal syllables become part of the sound. The musical mind knows tonal syllables only in sound. Syllables give voice to the distinguishing characteristics between tonalities, but only in the context of the tonalities in sound. The syllables are otherwise meaningless to the musical mind. Only the thinking mind would try to discriminate between syllables without the sound of the tonalities.

Can children identify tonalities by name? Perhaps, perhaps not. The goal of Tonal Discrimination Activities is to give the musical mind the opportunity to compare and contrast tonalities in sound, not to formally label tonalities. Your incidental use of the names of tonalities will ultimately lead the children to use the terms, but the child who refers to Dorian tonality as “rim rums” and Mixolydian tonality as “sim sums” is far more advanced than the child who can only label or define Dorian and Mixolydian tonalities theoretically. Children will learn the labels informally through your incidental use of them and begin to use them as their own.

Can children identify the tonalities without tonal syllables?  Perhaps, perhaps not.  Ultimately, the goal of using syllables is so that we can forget them—that audiation becomes so strong that it doesn’t need the syllables that helped audiation become so strong. At this point, however, the goal of Tonal Discrimination Activities is not to identify tonalities without syllables. When children become adept at distinguishing between tonalities with syllables, it is always interesting to throw in an occasional example without syllables and see what the children do with it, or to nudge the thinking mind out of the way. The challenge of identifying tonalities without syllables is far greater than one might think, as not only does it require children to reflect on their audiation of tonalities without the language of syllables that has given voice to their audiation, but it requires audiation to infer those syllables from the sound—to determine from the sound alone whether they are hearing “rim re rim ra ri ro ru rum,” or “sim se sim sa si so su sum,” or another tonality. You may discover that the musical mind may “practice” this skill with a variety of song literature, as when four and five year olds speak up to let you know that the song you just introduced in Mixolydian tonality, for example, “is like Wake Up, Jacob.” They may not have the words to articulate that the two songs are in the same tonality, but they surely demonstrate unexpected awareness of tonal knowing.

What about discriminating between tonic and dominant pitches? Tonality is the broader organization of pitches and therefore the first to be addressed in Tonal Discrimination Activities. Hearing same and different in tonalities teaches children to reflect on audiation for same and different in smaller degrees. Until this point, children have engaged in Resting Tone Activities with and without syllables, with tonic and dominant pitches most prominent both in audiation and in tonal syllables. Inviting discrimination between the resting tone and “the working tone” is easy, and will be addressed in later postings.

What can children do musically as a result of being able to discriminate same and different in tonalities? The real purpose of any Tonal Activity is to develop skill that can be applied to musical encounters other than Tonal Activities—to make exciting music. The greater the tonal skill, the greater the in-tune singing and the greater the command and skill of the singing voice becomes in all tonalities.

Tonal Discrimination Activities are also the pre-requisite for tonal reading, as reading requires audiation to reflect on itself even more, becoming so aware of itself that it can be mirrored in notation. Concrete understanding of tonalities in audiation, with syllables, with an awareness of differences between tonalities and characteristic sounds of each are necessary in order to learn to read music with “effortless ease.”