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The Tuneables is an award-winning children's music education DVD and CD series designed to teach the key building blocks of music at a critical time in a child's development. Sponsored by the Music Intelligence Project, this fun, interactive program engages children in songs and activities that provide a foundation of music understanding and growth in intellectual development. Ages 3-8.
Buy your copy today at: www.thetuneables.com/the-music-shop/
MIP Tip
To help prepare your child for active music instruction and learning, play recordings of music by Mozart and others as a background for other activities and rest time when the child is very young.
Movement Is Essential For Music Learning
All human performance of music involves movement. We move our vocal mechanisms; expand and contract our lungs; manipulate instruments with hands, arms, lips, tongue, etc.; dance with our feet; jump, spin, sway, and bend with our bodies—all in connection with rhythms and tones of music. In addition, all movements must be precisely timed and executed for a successful music performance. The human capacity to learn and execute a large number of complex movements with split-second accuracy enables 100 musicians to perform together in a symphony orchestra, or an individual to recreate a performance of a solo piece of music over and over.
The movements required in music performance are not casually acquired, but learned after much practice. Such practice can and often involves trial and error as we learn to "remember" the combinations of muscle movements needed for a musical response. The brain becomes "wired" to send a complex set of "instructions" that cause muscles to react at precisely the correct time.
Adding to this complexity of mental activity is the need to simultaneously remember and execute movements and coordinate them with the melodies, rhythms, and harmonies of the music that is being heard or recalled. The complexity expands further when note reading is added to the process. The "wiring" movement is expanded and interconnected, also through practice, to those parts of the brain that process sounds, symbols, and feelings.
Because of its complexity, music learning, with its requirement for coordinated movement, is unique in its developmental impact on the brain. No other learning activity engages so many senses, interconnects so many parts of the brain, and provides so much enjoyment.
Music Curriculum Is Important for Young Children
Many young children experience music informally through such means as singing games, hearing songs sung on television, music time at preschool, and interacting with parents who feel comfortable providing music experiences for their children. Such informal encounters with music are valuable as pleasurable moments and as readiness experiences for sequential music learning.
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