El equipo asistencial en el proceso de toma de decisiones

As seen from the reviews of the literature, the experiment, and the teacher interviews, understanding the reasons for out-of-tune singing is a complicated matter, and understanding how to remedy it, more so. While the purpose of this project was to shed a little more light on this multi-faceted problem, no single overarching conclusion can be made. Several important things came to light, though, and each deserves further examination.

Limits of a traditional experiment

Scientific research is not devoid of methodological concerns. Because complex problems must often be broken down into several separate questions, one wonders if the results of individual studies can really be summed to provide meaningful answers. For example, in the current experiment, one of the main findings was that amusics appear to have deficits in visuospatial working memory. Whether this can be used as evidence towards the broader hypothesis (a relationship between musical deficits and learning disabilities) is not clear.

Also, deciding what to examine in a study is a process that inherently

involves bias. If one’s eventual goal is to find out whether out-of-tune

individuals have some kind of broader cognitive difference, choosing one

hypothesis over another is at least partly subjective, based on the personal

interests of the researcher. This is just one way which makes it impossible to have a truly objective experiment.

There is also the concern that the data gathered from a typical

experimental situation is divorced from the skills it purports to examine. Some of the participants themselves raised this point; they were concerned that being asked to sing in English (a second language to some), or being asked to sing something they were not entirely familiar with would affect their ability to sing.

(One participant suggested humming as a way to circumvent the problem, but

this raises a whole other set of concerns—i.e., whether humming involves the

same cognitive processes as singing). And, despite the established reliability

and validity of tasks like Corsi Blocks, there are always concerns that the

underlying cognitive process involved in a particular task may not necessarily

be the mechanism at work (Berch, Krikorian, and Huha 1998, 329). In an ideal

experimental situation, all factors except the ones being measured would be

controlled for across participants. However, there will inevitably be practical

and financial constraints. To obtain meaningful statistical results, recruiting

enough participants for each experimental group is important. This often takes

a considerable amount of time, especially if one is dealing with rare populations

such as amusics. The more participants one has, the more confident one can be

that the findings apply to the general population. Time and financial concerns

also limit how much one is able to examine: in the current study, the entire MBEA was not able to be administered.

Other factors that are difficult to control for include: prior exposure to different musical cultures, inexperience with singing aloud, ambient noises affecting concentration, inexperience with using a computer, etc.

Bridging the gap between music researchers and music educators

Another issue that came to light was the very different approaches to the same problem by researchers and educators. In most of the psychological literature reviewed on amusia and “tone-deafness,” the main concern, whether expressed overtly or not, seems to be with explaining and understanding the problem in as much detail as possible. Music educators (both in the literature and those interviewed for this study), on the other hand, seem to be more focused on remedying the problem and finding workable solutions, rather than trying to understand its origins.

Both of these concerns are important. It is often necessary to

understand the origins of a problem (in this case, what makes people sing out of

tune) in order to find ways to fix it. Both educators and researchers would

benefit from each other’s expertise. The educators interviewed for the current

study indeed expressed interest in being able to access research more easily.

The disconnect between research and education is a problem that applies broadly to all aspects of education, not just music (Casanova 1989). A recent review of the literature that deals with this problem identified one of the major themes as “the need for step-by-step procedures for interpreting research and implementing it in the classroom” (Warby et al. 1999, 205). A “Universal Translation Format” is provided and expanded upon by the authors. It consists of seven steps educators can follow to help them locate and understand

research. The seventh step focuses on transferring the research into practice.

While this is a very useful tool for educators who want to understand the research currently available, it is not much use to educators who simply do not have the time to extensively review the available literature. This is especially true for music educators, whose time is even more limited because of

performances and other musical events. It also puts the responsibility for transferring research into practice solely on the teachers, when ideally it should be a combined effort between teachers and researchers.

One problem teachers often encounter with research is that even when

experiments go beyond theoretical underpinnings and actually examine the

efficacy of a particular intervention, results can often be ambiguous, confusing,

or buried under a considerable number of alternate explanations. This makes it

difficult for an educator to decide whether a particular intervention is even

worth implementing, or whether it needs amendments.

Both educators and researchers would benefit from a more collaborative dialogue. It seems what is needed is some sort of intermediary between

educators and researchers. Researchers need to be able to communicate their research findings and relevance to educators in ways they can easily access and put into practice. Educators, in turn, also need a way to communicate their concerns to researchers, so that researchers tackle problems that are of relevance to the classroom. Perhaps a partnership between local schools and universities could facilitate this exchange of ideas. A system could be set up where teachers could raise their concerns and ask questions, and researchers, in turn, would have access to a vital source of information to consider when coming up with or designing research experiments. Involving educators in the process even further, by requesting their ideas on the similarities of musical

“tests” to real-life music learning experiences would also help foster trust between researchers and educators, and help educators feel more comfortable with the conclusions eventually made from experiments.

Usefulness of experiments

Notwithstanding their problems, experiments can still provide highly

valuable information. Solutions to problems are easier to come by when the

problem is understood from all angles. In the case of out-of-tune singing,

teachers often resort to trial-and-error methods that are tailored to each student.

While they may eventually stumble upon a solution through their own intuitions and the responses from the student, this method often takes a considerable amount of time, and perhaps wasted efforts exploring interventions that may not end up being useful.

Research experiments have the eventual goal of understanding the problem as a whole by first understanding its parts. The current available research on amusia and other reasons for out-of-tune singing is helpful in that it sheds light on the exact nature of the deficits and possible reasons for them.

Without a controlled experiment, the result referred to in Chapter 2 (that amusics may have a deficit in non-sequential visuospatial working memory, or at the very least, that pitch perception and non-sequential visuospatial memory may be related) would not likely have been discovered. If this result is

replicated and confirmed in future studies, it could help shed light not only on the origins of amusia, but also provide clues on possible interventions. Perhaps amusics would benefit from training in visuospatial working memory, and this would ameliorate their pitch perception deficits as well.

Researchers have not yet reached the point of designing remedial help for amusics or other out-of-tune singers, but presumably they are headed there:

one attempt has already been made in designing a remedial program for

someone with acquired amusia (due to brain damage) with positive results (Weill-Chounlamountry et al. 2008, 332). Future research will hopefully focus on devising similar interventions for those with congenital amusia as well.

As mentioned earlier, it is important that music educators be involved in this type of future research. They already have years of practical experience in devising methods to help the out-of-tune singers in their classrooms, and their discoveries could be the basis for future research experiments on interventions for out-of-tune singers, amusic and otherwise.

Usefulness of interviews/case studies

The lack of significant results for the Tone Deaf group was also an

interesting finding. It solidifies the fact that there is a salient difference

between amusics and those who cannot sing in tune due to other, unknown

reasons. This is where the teacher interviews proved helpful in providing

answers that the experiment could not. They hypothesized many reasons for

out-of-tune singing—technique problems, physical conditions, lack of

experience or familiarity with music, difficulties attending to music, and

individual differences in music learning. These suggestions all deserve further

individual experiments of their own, but in the meantime, the usefulness of the

information gathered from interviewing music teachers on their experiences and

informal “case studies” with students cannot be taken lightly. Besides being a

rich source of information for future studies, interviews with music teachers who have direct experience teaching others to sing provide us with other useful pieces of information as well. For example, it is interesting and important to know that many students who struggle to sing in tune, sometimes severely so, can in fact be taught to sing correctly, with varying degrees of effort. This should provide encouragement to many who currently consider themselves

“tone-deaf.”

Whether any of the success stories recounted by the teachers had amusia is impossible to know. It would be beneficial to students and educators alike for the knowledge of amusia to become mainstream (and the research more accessible) so that educators could potentially screen amusic students early on, and perhaps alter their teaching methods accordingly.

Helping those with musical learning disabilities

At present (to the author’s knowledge), there has only been one documented and confirmed case of amusia in a child (Lebrun et al. in press).

This 10 year old child had severe difficulties singing in tune, perceiving music,

and remembering music. Her choir director had never encountered such

difficulty in helping a child sing in tune over her 30 year career. The child

attends about 10-12 classical concerts a year with her mother, is part of a choir

that meets 4 hours per week, and was constantly exposed to recordings of

Mozart as she was growing up. Therefore, her deficits cannot be explained by a lack of exposure to music or a lack of motivation. Her other cognitive abilities are normal.

Presumably there exist other children with amusia—adult amusics complain of their musical difficulties since childhood. Ideally, the eventual supports for amusics and other out-of-tune singers, as well as for those that have learning challenges with other aspects of music need be aimed at children as well as adults. More research is needed to know what these supports could be, but they should be similar to supports for other types of learning disabilities:

more time, adaptation of materials, alternate teaching methods, modifications

according to specific needs, etc. In the meantime, the child version of the

MBEA (Lebrun et al. in press, 3) could be used as a possible screening tool for

music educators to use in their classrooms, not only for identifying amusic

children, but for differentiating children who have perceptual problems with

music from those who do not.

CONCLUSION

The inability to sing in tune impacts not only affected individuals themselves, but also their friends, family, classmates, and music instructors.

Individuals with this problem have varying levels of responsiveness to intervention attempts. The problem of out-of-tune singing also attracts the attention of researchers, who have focused their attention on amusia, a deficit in pitch perception.

To better understand the problem and discover potential intervention methods, information was collected through reviews of relevant educational and psychological literature. Four singing teachers were also interviewed and asked to speak about their experiences with out-of-tune students. An

experiment that examined whether out-of-tune singing was related to visuospatial ability was also conducted. All of this information was put together not only to create a multidisciplinary understanding of out-of-tune singing, but also to generate ideas about how to create a more open dialogue between music researchers and music educators.

From the singing teachers, we learned that difficulty with hearing the difference between notes seems to be a significant contributor to many

students’ singing problems. Other factors were given equal importance, such as

improper breathing techniques, hormonal changes, and lack of familiarity with the music or with the act of singing. They are also concerned with the broader issues surrounding singing problems. They make sure their classrooms or lessons are emotionally safe places for students to explore their voices, and place as much emphasis on the enjoyment and exploration of music as they do on correct notes. They also take steps to mitigate the effects of out-of-tune singing on the ensemble.

From the experiment, we learned that amusics may have difficulties with visuospatial working memory, and that this may contribute to their

difficulties with music processing. It may hinder their perception of music as a whole, which could in turn cause them to not acquire the musical “grammar” of their culture and contribute to their deficits in pitch processing. We also

learned that those with the inability to sing in tune despite normal pitch perception (called Tone Deaf in the experiment) do not share this same difficulty in visuospatial memory, strengthening the idea that this condition is separate from amusia. More research is needed to further explore and confirm amusics’ deficit with visuospatial working memory, as well as to explore reasons for out-of-tune singing in the absence of amusia. (The teacher

interviews provide a wealth of information for researchers wishing to come up

with testable hypotheses on the matter.)

The final chapter explored the usefulness and limitations of both very different method of collecting data (interviews and case studies vs.

experiments). Case studies focus on the individual experiences of teachers and students, and teachers’ attempts to come up with practical solutions to

problems. Experiments focus more on a very detailed understanding of small, particular parts of the problem, aiming eventually for a complete understanding that will then lead to hypotheses for intervention.

The lack of communication between music researchers and educators was also examined, and possible ways to close the divide were suggested.

Educators and researchers need a forum where they can come together and regularly have access to each other and share ideas in ways that are mutually beneficial. Educators’ ideas gained from hands-on experiences in the

classroom have the potential to be an important source of information for researchers looking to understand all facets of out-of-tune singing. Researchers also need a way to communicate research findings to the people it would most benefit, educators and students.

The chapter ends with a reflection on what can be done currently for

those with “music disabilities,” singing-related or otherwise. Musical learning

difficulties should be treated as other learning difficulties and given appropriate

individualized attention and consideration. In regards to amusia specifically, it

is suggested educators use a version of the MBEA to screen for deficits in pitch perception. In the absence of research on how to ameliorate amusia, screening for the problem would at least provide educators with information that would help them tailor the direction of their interventions.

The desire to express oneself musically, whether through the voice or

otherwise, seems to be an innate part of being human. As the interviewed

teachers pointed out, the singing voice is a very personal thing, and singing

exposes one to emotional risks that are not present with other, external

instruments. While there are many adults who continue to have an interest in

music despite their inability to sing in tune, there are probably just as many who

were turned off of music at a young age, discouraged by others’ insensitive

responses to their attempts at singing. Many of the comments made by

participants in the experiment highlighted this reality. No child should be

barred from the enjoyment of singing simply because they have more difficulty

with it than their peers. In an ideal world, interventions would be provided to all

such children so that they could perform to the best of their ability and enjoy

participating in singing experiences. In cases of true amusia where remediation

attempts prove unsuccessful, musical interest should be channeled to other

instruments instead of turning the child off music entirely. If educators and

researchers share their knowledge and collaborate on future research

explorations, perhaps these ideals could be met, and those who sing out of tune never turned away from their desire for full participation in musical

experiences.

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