Children's Invented Notations as Measures of Musical Understanding

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of children's invented notations as a measure of their musical understanding. Notations were compared on the basis of their inventor's performance on tests of perceptual discrimination, performance by singing and playing, and their age. Sixty children aged between 4 and 8 years were tested for their perceptual discrimination with the rhythm and tonal subtests of the Primary Measures of Musical Audiation (PMMA) (Gordon, 1979). After each child reproduced a short folk song by singing and playing, he or she was asked to "write the way the song sounds". Three independent judges scored the children's singing and playing for their tonal and rhythmic accuracy and the children's invented notations for indications of tonal and rhythmic awareness. A correlation of all independent variables showed scores on PMMA rhythm, PMMA tonal, singing, and playing and the child's age to be significantly related. Because of the multicollinearity among variables, a principal components analysis was performed that extracted one factor and assigned a factor score to each subject. Inventors were divided into two groups. Mean factor scores for each group of inventors were compared using a one-way ANOVA. Significant differences (F = 39-12, p<-001) were found between musical understanding factor scores for groups of inventors. The higher the musical understanding factor score, the more likely the notation reflected pitch awareness. Likewise, inventors were grouped according to rhythm awareness. Mean factor scores for groups were found to be significantly different (F= 24*41, p< 001). The higher the musical understanding score, the more likely that the notation embodied an awareness of rhythm. The results of this study suggest that skills in perception and performance, as well as age, may contribute to musical understandings that are reflected in children's invented musical notations, lending evidence to the validity of children's invented notations as a measure of their musical understanding.