Cognitive Aspects Of Musical Development example essay topic

Musical Development as a Cognitive Ability Cognitive Psychology Abstract This paper discusses theories of cognitive development and its relationship to musical development. Cognitive development is closely related to musical development and learning. Jean Piaget developed theories of the cognitive development in children. Musicologists have developed theories on how musical development has cognitive components. Cognitive development is acquired through interaction with an environment, just as musical development is acquired through interaction with a musical environment. Jean Piaget on Cognitive Development Cognitive development is the investigation of how mental skills build and change with increasing physiological maturity (maturation) and experience (learning) (Sternberg, p. 444).

Cognitive development involves qualitative changes in thinking, as well as quantitative changes, such as increasing knowledge and ability (Sternberg, p. 444). Most cognitive psychologists agree that developmental changes occur as a result of the interaction of maturation (nature) and learning (nurture) (Sternberg, p. 444). According to Sternberg, despite the differences in theoretical approaches, there are some basic principles that that crosscut the study of cognitive development (Sternberg, p. 446). First, over the course of development, people seem to gain more sophisticated control over their own thinking and learning. As people grow older, they become more capable of more complex interactions between thought and behavior. Second, people engage in more thorough information processing with age.

Third, people become increasingly able to comprehend successively more complex relationships over the course of development. Finally, over time, people develop increasing flexibility in their uses of strategies or information. (Sternberg, p. 446) He explains that as people grow older they become less bound to using information in just a single context, and they learn how to apply it in a greater context (Sternberg, p. 446). One of the most influential contributors to developmental research is Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). His theory of cognitive development is one of the most comprehensive in the field (Sternberg, p. 446). Piaget believed that the function of intelligence is to aid in adaptation to the environment (Sternberg, p. 447).

In his view the means of adaptation form a continuum ranging from relatively unintelligent means, such as habits and reflexes, to relatively intelligent means, such as those requiring insight, complex mental representation, and the mental manipulation of symbols (Sternberg, p. 448). Piaget further proposed that with increasing learning and maturation, both intelligence and its manifestations become differentiated- more specialized in various domains (Sternberg, p. 448). Piaget believed that development occurs in stages via equilibration, in which a child seeks balance (equilibrium) between both what they encounter in their environments and what cognitive processes and structures they bring to the encounter, as well as among the cognitive capabilities themselves (Sternberg, p. 448). Sternberg explains that in some situations, the child's existing schemes are adequate for confronting and adapting to the challenges of the environment; the child is thus in a state of equilibrium (p. 448).

However, at other times, the child is presented with information that does not fit with the child's existing schemes, so cognitive disequilibrium arises; that is, the imbalance occurs when the child's existing schemes are inadequate for new challenges the child encounters (Sternberg, p. 449). In this type of situation the child attempts to restore equilibrium through assimilation- incorporating the new information into the child's existing schemes (Sternberg, p. 449). In contrast if the child is not able to assimilate the new information's / he will go through a process of modifying the existing schemes called accommodation- changing the existing schemes to fit the relevant new information about the environment (Sternberg, p. 449). According to Piaget, the processes of assimilation and accommodation account for all of the changes associated with cognitive development.

(Sternberg, p. 449). In Piaget's view, disequilibrium is more likely to occur during stages of transition; that is, although Piaget posited that processes go on throughout childhood as children continually adapt to their environment, he also considered development to involve discrete, discontinuous stages. Musical Development Theories In his paper, "Musical development theories revisited", Keith Swanwick suggests that theories of musical development should meet certain criteria (p. 229). Theories of musical development should: - have musical validity; - have relevance across different musical activities; - take account of both maturation and cultural settings; - identify qualitative, sequential, and hierarchical changes; - have widespread cultural application; - be supported by reliable data (Swanwick, p. 229).

He discusses the musical development theories of Mary Louise Serafine, Howard Gardner, and L. Davidson & L. Scripp. Serafine offers a direct challenge to traditional psychological models and her approach is concerned with underlying cognitive processes (Swanwick, p. 229). She poses the question, 'what is the nature of musical thought?' (Swanwick, p. 230) She attempted to present a meta-psychological model that stood outside of specific and different musical activities or modalities (Swanwick, p. 230). The main characteristic of this universal cognitive activity is awareness of movement in time.

Whereas, musical tomes are not heard in isolation or in pairs of stimuli to be identified or discriminated, but are sensory experiences from which the listener constructs musical properties (Swanwick, p. 230). Gardener's theory focuses on the concept of symbol systems, which he defined as follows: 'symbolism requires appreciation of an object and the capacity to link the object to a known picture, label, or kind of element that denotes it' (Swanwick, p. 231). According to Davidson and Scripp, the interaction of motor and literacy skills enables the student to link performance, concept, and percept. Reflective thinking appears as an important dimension of musical development that arises from the more inactive stages where skills are first manifest, and are later linked to the symbolic literacy of the musical culture (Swanwick, p. 231). These are just a few of the theorists for musical developments cognitive aspects. When the theories are looked at in detail, they all address the criteria that Swanwick proposes.

However, like theorists in cognitive development, they do not agree on how the musical development of children should be addressed or measured". The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music", by John A. Sloboda addresses the way that music is a cognitive skill. He addresses many of the different cognitive aspects of music. I will be focusing primarily on his chapter six, which entails the cognitive aspects of musical development. He explains that musical skill is constructed from a base of innate abilities and tendencies (Sloboda, p. 194). Every human advance involves building on what is already present (Sloboda, p. 194).

Piaget has proposed that the type of learning we are capable of at any age is determined by the general features of our intellectual equipment at that age (Sloboda, p. 194). According to this view, cognitive development is to be partly explained in terms of the ordered acquisition of new general cognitive abilities and structures (Slobodan, p. 194). Piaget's well supported view is that, there is a universally shared order of passage through various cognitive stages, and that each stage is characterized by a fairly rapid advance in skill acquisition as the new capacity is applied to a whole new range of specific skills that the child is engaged in (Sloboda, p. 194). These stages are brought about by accommodations that occur as the child learns a particular skill (Sloboda, p. 194). If musical development is looked at through the eyes of Piaget, there is a possibility of discovering invariant sequences of musical development possibly linked to general changes in other cognitive domains (Sloboda, p. 194). Sloboda goes on to explain the main elements of enculturation, which include: the shared set of primitive capacities which are present at birth or soon after, the shared set of experiences which a culture provides as children grow up, and the impact of a rapidly changing general cognitive system as many other skills supported by culture are learned (Sloboda, p. 196).

All of these elements combine to make a roughly similar sequence of achievements for the majority of children in a culture, and a set of roughly similar ages at which these various achievements occur (Sloboda, p. 196). Sloboda formulates stages during which musical enculturation occurs. These stages similar to Piaget's stages of cognitive development, explain at what point children acquire certain musical abilities. First, there is the first year of life.

The first evidence of musical awareness is some form of differentiation of musical sequences from one another or form non-musical sound sequences (Sloboda, p. 198). Any new or unusual sound will capture a young baby's attention. However, Sloboda suggests that a child is responding to a change in auditory experience from the rapid pitch and amplitude modulations of speech, to the steadier parameters of song, or that he is particularly responsive to definite types of waveform (Sloboda, p. 198). It seems that children come to distinguish musical sounds from non-musical ones, as shown by greater attention, movement, and vocalization (Sloboda, p. 202). Second, there is the pre-school child (age one to five). The first striking change in overt behavior after the first birthday occurs at about eighteen months when spontaneous singing begins to occur (Sloboda, p. 202).

This suggests that musical development at this age is proceeding along a genuinely separate stream to speech (Sloboda, p. 202). At this stage there is no evidence that children are attempting to imitate heard songs; rather it seems as though they are experimenting with melodic interval construction (Sloboda, p. 202). Between the ages of two and three, spontaneous songs become longer and begin to display greater signs of internal organization (Sloboda, p. 203). By the age of two to two-and-a-half a new milestone is reached, children begin to attempt to imitate parts of the songs they hear around them (Sloboda, p. 204).

The first aspect is that children imitate are the words- not the complete words, but particular salient or often repeated sections (Sloboda, p. 204). In the second year of life, most children learn to walk. This allows a much increased range of movements, an increase which is represented in movements to music (Sloboda, p. 207). During the third and fourth years of life the child develops imitative capacity to the point where whole songs can be repeated (Sloboda, p. 205). Generally, the rhythm and pitch contour is mastered before the ability to reproduce precise intervals and maintain the same tonality throughout the song (Sloboda, p. 205). Most children can accurately reproduce the familiar songs and nursery rhymes of their culture by the age of five (Sloboda, p. 205).

In order to elicit movement responses, to music, in children of five years it seems necessary to ask them to make particular movements (Sloboda, p. 207). Piaget's investigations of intellectual development led him to propose a profound change in general cognitive ability at around the age of seven or eight (Sloboda, p. 209). He labels this change from 'pre-operational' to 'operational' thought (Sloboda, p. 209). The most recognized indicator of this change is the child's ability to perform well on tasks involving the concept of conservation of quality (Sloboda, p. 209). A common example of this stage transition is when a child sees liquid poured from short squat beakers into tall thin ones. The child still in the pre-operational stage thinks that the taller glass has more liquid, while the child in the operational stage knows that the amount of liquid is the same, this ability is called conservation (Sloboda, p. 209).

Several music researchers have attempted to construct musical analogues of similar tasks (Sloboda, p. 209). Pf leder (Sloboda, 1964), for instance, played children the same melody at two different speeds and asked if they were the same (Sloboda, p. 209). Only 50 percent of five year olds though they were the, but by the age of eight this proportion had risen to 94 percent (Sloboda, p. 209). Although this aspect of musical development is of profound psychological importance and interest, it is not conservation (Sloboda, p. 210). But it shares with conservation the increasing awareness by children of the possibility of going behind surface perceptual features in their search for underlying patterns and structures (Sloboda, p. 210). The main developmental trend between ages five and ten would be the increasing reflective awareness of the structures and patterns that characterize music and which are already implicit in the child's inactive repertoire (Sloboda, p. 210).

In conclusion, there is some evidence of special propensities which support the early establishment of a 'stream' of specifically musical development (Sloboda, p. 214). Very young children seem particularly responsive to musically pitched sounds, and are responsive to changes in pitch and rhythmic sequence (Sloboda, p. 214). By the age of five children are able to use underlying tonal and metrical structures to guide their song performance, even though they seem to have no reflective awareness of such structures (Sloboda, p. 214). Changes in musical awareness between the ages of five and ten seem to reflect a general intellectual change from inactive competence, which is displayed only within the bounds of specific and directed activities, to a reflective awareness of the structures and principles which underlie such competence (Sloboda, p. 215). Piaget would characterize this change as moving from pre-operational to operational though (Sloboda, p. 215). In music it is marked by an increased ability to explicitly classify music as conforming to rule or style, and an increasing advantage of memory and perceptual tasks for those sequences which conform to rule (Sloboda, p. 215)

Bibliography

Sloboda, J.A. (1985) The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music.
Oxford Psychology Series No. 5. Clarendon Press, Oxford. pp. 194-215. Sternberg, Robert J. (2003) Cognitive Psychology.
Thomson-Wadsworth. Third edition. pp. 444-449. Swanwick, Keith (2001) "Musical Development Theories Revisited.