Teaching Students to Play Songs by Ear in Elementary Music
A few days ago on Instagram stories we talked about playing a song by ear. And there were a few follow-up messages about how we might facilitate this process. So that’s what we’ll talk about today.
We’ll talk about what’s really happening when we play by ear, which is that we’re actually just listening and creating meaning out of the melody. We’ll talk about a step-by-step process we can use to play by ear. We’ll back up in case we need to brush up on some prerequisite experiences. And we’ll dive into a few logistics that will help things go a little more smoothly.
I remember learning to play by ear. When I was a kid, I loved playing songs by ear. It was actually a problem as I was in piano lessons because I didn’t want to read the page. (And I know I’m not alone! Maybe you can relate to this.) My sister commented to someone at our house once, “Victoria just plays all the notes on the piano until she finds the one she’s looking for.” And she was right! That was my strategy. I would sing the song one pitch at a time, and do my best to follow it up and down the keyboard. Which was fine if all the pitches were right next to each other. But if the melody ever skipped around, I didn’t have a way to know where it landed. So I would stop the song and sing the pitch I needed to play next. I would sustain that pitch and just play all the keys until I found the pitch that matched the one I was singing. But by then I had forgotten the fragments of the melody I had figured out before! So I had to back up to the beginning and get to the same spot and do the same process over again. This process took a long time. And I am confident it was not pleasant to listen to. It did work for me, I could figure out the song eventually. It just took a lot of perseverance because my strategy was essentially to bang my head against the wall until I knocked the wall down.
I was on the right track, but what I didn’t quite understand yet is that a melody lives in a scalar grid of melodic contour and intervallic relationships. So as long as you know how to think about the song there’s almost nothing between thinking it in your head and playing it on the keys.
Playing by ear is not out of reach for anyone. And it’s certainly it’s not out of reach for the elementary musicians we work with, especially because we can teach a pathway to playing by ear that is intuitive and based on some very elemental ways of knowing music.
Let’s talk about some of those ways.
Making Sense by Ear: Listening to Lines instead of Dots
If we’re going to teach how to play by ear, we’ll need to teach how to listen to music. And there are a few different approaches we could take. You might recall a few options from your aural skills days, solfege syllables or intervals (maybe your school used scale degrees my undergrad did, but I think that’s the exception). Let’s talk about solfege syllables (in moveable do), intervals, and melodic contour as the main tools we’ll utilize for listening.
There’s some interesting research that has been done about how people perceive the music they’re hearing. Are they listening to a series of disconnected pitches that when you step back, end up creating a melody? Or are they listening to a cohesive phrase that moves around scalar grid and is dependent upon tonal context? In other words, are we hearing isolated intervals, or are we hearing tonal relationships?
Dowling, W. J. (1986). Context effects on melody recognition: Scale-step versus interval representations. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3(3), 281–296.
Rogers, M. R. (1983). Beyond intervals: The teaching of tonal hearing. Indiana Theory Review, 6(3), 18–34.
For our purposes today, I want to suggest that listening within a tonal context, to a melody that moves along a scalar grid, is the most useful approach. Intervals will be a part of that approach, but measuring the distance between pitches is something we’ll always do within a tonal context, as a way to describe the melodic contour. Because do re mi is a different melodic function than sol la ti even though the intervals are the same distance apart. This is one of the many reasons we use solfege syllables as the primary way to discuss melody. It has to do with listening to function instead of just listening to distance.
When we help students play by ear, one of the important things we can do is help them think about what the phrase contour looks like. We’re listening to a swoopy line that we could paint on a canvas with a paintbrush, not isolated pitches we would dab on the canvas.
We’re combining melodic contour with solfege with intervals to create a painting of the melody that we can transfer to an instrument. It all starts with listening.
Listening Experiences
When we introduce a melody that students are going to eventually play by ear, we won’t start by explaining what intervals are and we won’t start by asking them to memorize solfege syllables.
We’ll start where we always start: active, embodied, communal musical experiences. In an active music room, that looks like a lot of physical, aural, and visual modes of musicing.
Physical, Aural, Visual
In order to play a song by ear, we need to have internalized the song. How do we internalize a song? We use our senses to have repeated, active experiences with it.
I’ve talked about this in a blog post on physical preparation before, but very quickly I think it’s worth mentioning here. Physical, aural, and visual modes of musicing are ways to experience music. They are not the only modes of learning we use, but in my opinion, music can be very easily thought of as something we hear, something we see, and something we physically do.
Playing by ear is an extension of feeling music in our bodies, especially when we talk about playing songs on barred instruments. When the melody steps up, our mallets step up. When the melody skips down, our mallets skip down. So one of the important things we’ll do is find a way to show the melodic contour physically by putting the melody in our bodies. We’ve already talked about one possible way: getting out our melody paintbrush and painting the melody.
Let’s do that with a few melodies:
Bitonic: Jack and Jill (s-m)
Our paintbrush is basically just moving up and down through space
Tritonic: Plainsies Clapsies (s-l-s-m)
Our paintbrush is moving up, then down, then down. That pattern repeats over and over.
Tetratonic: Ickle Ockle (s-m; s-m-l-s; s-m-d)
The first and the third phrase looks very similar to Jack and Jill. The second phrase has a high pitch, kind of like Plainsies Clapsies. The last phrase ends on a low pitch, the lowest one in the whole song.
Sing and analyze the melody
Of the target phrase we’re working with, which word is the highest? What pitch is that? Which word is the lowest? What pitch is that? If there’s a new pitch, is it a lot higher / lower than the other pitches we know, or is it just a step higher / lower?
If all the pitches in the song are known at this point, we can sing on solfege and show hand signs.
Bitonic: Jack and Jill (s-m)
Sing and move to show: high h igh low low high high low low or s s m m s s m m
Tritonic: Plainsies Clapsies (s-l-s-m)
Sing and move to show: sol up sol mi sol sol up up sol mi or s l s m s s l l s m
Tetratonic: Ickle Ockle (s-m; s-m-l-s; s-m-d)
Sing and move to the last eight beats to show: s s m m s m s m low or s s m m s m s m d
The big part of playing by ear happens before we play a single bar. The bulk of the work in playing by ear is figuring out the solfege by ear. Once we’ve done that, there’s a direct line to the instruments.
Sing on solfege and use a visual representation
Inside The Planning Binder, the go-to visual I use for analyzing a melody and connecting it to visual representation is a barred instrument that’s placed vertically, so the low side is on the bottom and the high side is on top. I also like the visual of stairsteps. Another great visual is the five-line staff! Sometimes I combine these visuals, like putting the stairsteps on top of the barred instrument or putting the staff lines behind the barred instrument.
And at this point, we’re basically done! All we need to know is where to start our melody - what key we’re in - and then we just put the pieces we’ve been singing and moving to onto the keys.
If I tell you where do is on the barred instrument, we can figure out the rest of the solfege family from there! Because I know that a skip above do is mi. A skip above mi is sol. Re lives between mi and do. And la is a step above sol. When I know where one pitch is, I know where the entire song lives on the instrument! Because I know how all the pitches are connected to each other in the melodic line.
Bitonic: Jack and Jill (s-m)
If sol lives on C right now, we’ll skip down one to find mi (A) and we can play our song from there. If sol lives on G right now, that means mi lives on…. E because mi is a skip down from sol.
Tritonic: Plainsies Clapsies (s-l-s-m)
If sol lives on G right now, la is on A because la is a step higher than sol. If sol lives on D right now - which we probably wouldn’t do, but it’s good practice anyway - la would live on E.
Tetratonic: Ickle Ockle (s-m; s-m-l-s; s-m-d)
If we want to play the last eight beats of the song and we decide do lives on C, then that means we skip up past D so mi can live on E. And we skip up again to find sol on G.
We can transpose the song anywhere, as long as the keyboard is set up for it, because we’re looking at a relationship of connected solfege syllables.
In some situations, this is all we’re going to need to do to ask students to play a melody by ear on a barred instrument. But if this is students’ first time playing a barred instrument or playing a melody on a barred instrument by ear, there are a few steps we’re going to need to take. So let’s back up and talk about instrumental experiences.
Instrumental Experiences
The experiences we just talked about lead students to figuring out solfege by ear. Once we know the solfege of a song, it’s a very simple transfer to playing it on a barred instrument, provided we have the appropriate knowledge of the instrument mechanics, and we have some level of proficiency in playing the instrument we’re using. This is one reason we use barred instruments as the primary melodic instrumental experience. The barrier to entry is much lower than say a violin or a recorder. This is what we mean when we describe the instrument as being elemental.
For barred instruments, that mostly just means we know which is the high side and which is the low side. So let’s talk about some of the prerequisite experiences we’ll want to have.
Instrumental Mechanics
When we look at a barred instrument, we can think of it like a mountain or a pine tree, with the short side at the top, making the high sounds, and the long side at the bottom, making the low sounds.
Barred Instrument Exploration
I could probably do a whole episode on barred instrument exploration, because there’s so much fun in how we hold the mallets, how we take the bars off, how we pick up the instrument… But for now, let’s just talk about figuring out which is the high side of the instrument and which is the low side, and connecting it with repertoire.
Bitonic: Jack and Jill (s-m)
Make your mallets walk, skip, tiptoe, slide, etc. up and down the hill
Tritonic: Plainsies Clapsies (s-l-s-m)
Drop your scarf from the top of the instrument to the bottom. Throw it from the bottom up to the top, then let it fall back down.
Tetratonic: Ickle Ockle (s-m; s-m-l-s; s-m-d)
Where is your fish swimming? Let’s swim all the way to the top and splash around, then dip down to the bottom of the ocean.
Trichordal: Dona Arana (d-r-m; m-r-d)
Help Dona Arana spin her web up and down the instrument
Tetratonic: Let Us Chase the Squirrel (d-r-m-s; d-r-m-r; d-r-d)
Chase the squirrel up the tree! Chase it down the tree! The squirrel stopped on one branch, which one was it?
The first experiences we’ll have with barred instruments will probably be the barred instrument placed vertically. The next step is to move the instrument horizontally, so that the high side is on the right and the low side is on the left. But notice that the high and low side haven’t changed - we just changed the placement of the instrument.
So now we’ll do the same activities again, this time with the instrument placed horizontally.
Logistics
When students are working on playing a melody by ear, there’s some empty air time we’ll need to be prepared for in class. We want students to figure this out on their own, and in many cases, they’ll just need a few moments to noodle around before the melody is solidified. This is an example of independent work in elementary general music, which can feel a little strange to us because we’re so used to learning that takes place in an ensemble setting.
Everyone has a Job
One of the things I like to do here is to have students work with a partner to figure out the melody. This is because if someone gets stuck, they have a friend there to help them. They can also check their work together instead of always going to the teacher to ask if they’re playing it correctly.
Episode 34 was all about Strategies for Sharing Instruments and one of the most important pieces was that everyone has a job. As students are working together to figure out the melody, one partner sings and plays while the other partner sings and points or sings and does hand signs to the melody. They can sing on letter names. They can sing on solfege syllables. They can sing on text. Everyone has something to do.
Practice Sharing
I like to work toward students sharing mallets without me telling them when to pass mallets off. This is another way we can help students learn to monitor their own work - we’re not scheduling and controlling every single note they play. They have a team task they’re accomplishing together. They don’t need us. That’s the point here!
If students are ready to share mallets without our input, we can let them know how long they have to play and set the expectation that they can share without us telling them when to switch mallets. Then we can give them a heads up when time is half way over, then when they have 20 seconds left. An example script might be…. You have three minutes to work with your partner and figure out this phrase by ear. I know you don’t need me to tell you how to share. I trust you to work together as a team. Then later, You have about a minute and a half left. Just now I walked past a group and I heard someone say, “Here you go, you try now and I’ll point to the bars while you play.” That is exactly what sharing sounds like! And then just a quick note that it’s time to wrap up their melodies.
If students aren’t there yet - and that’s ok! This is a learned skill - a great boundary is to pass off mallets every other turn.
Managing Noise
We’ve talked about sharing mallets, and noise is an important consideration here. If students are using mallets, I recommend flipping them over so they’re not playing with the head, they’re playing with the end of the stick. This makes the sound much quieter!
Another option is not using mallets at all! Students can play with their fingertips instead.
Getting Started: Just one Phrase
If this is a brand new thing for your students, don’t feel like you need to tackle an entire song all at once! Choose one target phrase from a known song, and just try it. See what students are ready to do.
This can work with essentially any song you’re learning. Find a target phrase that has basically all known melodic elements. Walk through the physical and aural and visual steps we talked about earlier if you haven’t already. And then later when you sense that students are ready, ask them to figure out one phrase of the song by ear.
I wish I could go back in time and teach eight-year-old Victoria some of these things we’ll talk about today. Because when you can play a song by ear, without relying on notation, so many musical doors open up. It gives you freedom to play songs from other people just by hearing them in your head, and equally important, it allows you to take the songs you have created in your head and actualize them on an instrument.
