Human singing: Towards a developmental theory.

Abstract

ABSTRACT - The aim of this article is to propose a revision of models of singing development that identify age-related stages of mastery of basic elements of Hie Western-European music system. Instead, emphasis is placed on structural and process-oriented approaches, on growing meta-cognitive strategies, on conceptual analyses that go beyond Western-European conventions and on a methodology that allows assessing the simultaneous configuration of linguistic and musical elements in children's vocal organization from an acoustical standpoint. Hence, singing is conceptualized from various perspectives, conventions associated with singing are analyzed, and basic rules of children's songs are exemplified by careful examination of a single song. A micro-genetic analysis of early song singing illustrates a method for studying a child's strategies in organizing a song. Finally, a seven-stage developmental sequence is proposed as a heuristic for further research. KEYWORDS - singing, development, children, developmental sequence of singing, theory, characteristics of singing, conventions, language and music, analysis of singing 1. INTRODUCTION Human singing is an interdisciplinary domain because it covers musical, linguistic, physiological, cultural, psychological and developmental aspects. The present article addresses theoretical issues related to singing and its development. The developmental perspective entails the search for origins and the investigation of general laws of emergence of novelty in irreversible time (Valsiner, 2003). The main interest concerns the following question: How does singing development begin, and what aspects of singing change during childhood? This article does not intend to give a thorough literature review on empirical studies on children's singing (e.g., Stadler Elmer, 2002; Welch, 2006), nor does it include a review of the development of perception of music and language (e.g., McMullen & Saffran, 2004; Patel, 2008), nor an exploration of infant directed singing (e.g., FaIk, 2009; Longhi, 2009). Rather, the focus is more theoretical. After a brief historical review of ideas about the course of the development of singing and after addressing the shortcomings of these ideas, there follows an outline of a general framework within which singing is considered as an elementary and universal form of human musical expression. For any theory, careful conceptual analyses and descriptions are essential; hence, the next two sections are devoted to characterizing singing and to analyzing conventions that apply to music and to singing, including an illustration of the rules of children's song singing with a song in the German language. Finally, hypotheses on a developmental sequence of singing are proposed as a heuristic in order to replace previous conceptions. An example of a micro-genetic analysis of a very young child's spontaneous song singing provides a representation of this early emergent competence in its complex organization. Almost a century ago, the developmental psychologist Heinz Werner (1917) published the first empirical and pioneering study on children's singing development using phonograph recordings. He asked 45 children between the ages of 2.6 and 5 years to invent melodies with and without given lyrics. Whereas Werner assumed that all of these children would have been able to reproduce a complex children's song such as Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen (Fox you stole my goosey gander) covering a vocal range of a seventh (11 semitones), he characterizes their typical melodic inventions as consisting of a small number of tones, small vocal range, small intervals, falling directions, and continuous repetitions. Further, he postulated a falling glissando or portamento to be the melodic nucleus from which the Urmelodie, the original or primary melody in the form of a falling minor third would have emerged. Most interestingly, he related this early melodic form to the prosodie pattern of calling names, thus emphasizing the relationship between melody and prosody. …