Children's Descriptions and Representations of Music

The purpose of this study was to compare children's descriptions and representations of music. The subjects were students, aged 5-10 years, who had been enrolled in a Suzuki string program from 7 months to 4 years. The research questions posed showed that: symbolic representations (drawings/markings), verbal descriptions, and ratings for motor skills in performance were similar across age, gender and length of musical training. The drawings of the children were classified as: pictures/icons, music symbols, and abstract lines/shapes. These children were about evenly divided between drawing pictures and music symbols. The descriptive vocabulary used by 75% of these children involved music terms. The musical dimensions that children found salient and thus chose to draw/describe were pitch, notes, rhythm and timbre. Future studies need to determine (a) at what level of training or development a child becomes aware of the unique rather than the general features of a music composition; and (b) which teaching methods will be most effective in helping children expand their comprehension of music from the kinesthetic/performance domain to their appropriate usage of symbolic representations and descriptions of music.