Pitch and the Child (Reflection on Ch. 5)

p. 102 "At about six months, children develop a sense of their own culture's ways of constructing melodies, probably in the same way that they develop a sense of the syntax in their native language."

As we have been learning about children's musical development, I am repeatedly amazed by how rapidly and how much children's musical senses develop. The table (5.1) on p. 104 lists percepts and concepts by age group - I am curious as to how it's possible to measure an infant's response to differences in pitch.

p. 110 "Around the age of six or seven, children begin to develop a clear sense of tonality, or that a piece of music is centered within a logical system and moves within that system to a final point of resolution or rest."

Again, I'm surprised to learn how early this concept is understood - however, contextual information seems to indicate that while children may, for example, develop a clear sense of tonality, they likely do not have the words or ideas fully formed enough to actually express that concept.

p. 117 "Research in pitch perception shows that people develop sensitivities to pitch and pitch structures as a natural part of responding cognitively to the music that surrounds them."

This is related to the idea on p. 102 (see first quote). It makes perfect sense that we form our ideas about pitch based on what we hear around us - same as language, but I hadn't ever thought of it in that way... my idea of pitch is based entirely on what I've grown up hearing. In last year's class (World Music in Education), we talked about this a little bit in reference to exposing students to music of other cultures - how it will initially sound "weird," and how that's partially because different cultures have different systems of tonality. I think it's so cool how we all have a unique musical "language" based on our culture, just as we have our own spoken language, learned from our parents and our culture.