Psychology of Music Education — Final Paper
November 28, 2024
The Effect of Motioned Pitch Contour on Tunefulness in Rote Singing
Introduction and Justification
In my mixed-age elementary music classes, I like to teach songs by rote. Many of my students can read basic rhythms, and several have a basic understanding of the treble staff, but their musical backgrounds and skills vary so widely that notated music is rarely a comfortable option for everyone. I find rote singing to be more reliable and accessible. When I teach songs in this manner, I rely on echoing and hand motions. I occasionally use solfège and Curwen hand signs, but more commonly, I simply move an unshaped hand up and down to match the melodic contour of each line. As a kinesthetic/visual learner myself, I developed this technique on the instinct that providing input through another sense might create more access points for different types of learners.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether moving my hand up and down in a physical melodic contour while teaching a rote melody in a group lesson affects the tunefulness of individual singers. For this project, I collaborated with my Elementary II class—a group of 11 fourth and fifth graders. I have worked with all 11 of these students for over a year and know them to be confident, relatively tuneful singers. I frequently teach them songs by rote using my motioned contour technique, so this study was not a significant departure from our typical teaching and learning styles.
Literature Review
Research on musical imagery and physical movement in relation to music supports a connection between kinesthetic input and pitch perception. Eitan and Granot (2006) asked 78 college students to visualize an animated human character of their choice moving as in an imagined film shot, using a variety of musical stimuli with changing parameters (e.g. pitch, tempo, loudness) as the “soundtrack” for the character’s motion. These students then filled out a forced-choice questionnaire regarding the specific motions that their character made for each stimulus. In comparing each stimulus to the motions associated with it, Eitan and Granot found that all of the investigated musical parameters significantly affected motion imagery. Especially relevant to my own study is their conclusion that “aspects of pitch contour were related to verticality, in line with the Western tradition of notation” (p. 237). Kohn and Eitan completed a similar study in 2016, this time with physical motion rather than imagined. 106 children between ages 5 and 8 listened to musical stimuli involving changes in specific music parameters. The children were asked to move their own bodies to these stimuli after hearing them a few times. Kohn and Eitan observed not only that pitch direction was frequently embodied through the use of vertical motion, but also that the “effect of pitch direction was mediated by temporal order, suggesting that overall pitch contour, rather than local direction only, affects bodily motion” (p. 40). My own pitch contour technique, motioned vertically in front of my body, aligns well with the findings of these studies.
Much research exists on the relationship between hand motions and singing accuracy, mostly focusing on solfège syllables and Curwen hand signs as used in Kodály-based music programs (Demorest & May, 1995; Reifinger, 2012). Furthermore, many hand sign studies base their analysis on success in sight-singing. McClung’s 2008 study, for example, sought to establish whether using Curwen hand signs while sight-singing a passage might have an effect on a singer’s accuracy. McClung asked 38 high school singers, all of whom used solfège syllables and Curwen hand signs frequently and extensively in their choral programs, to sight-sing two passages with and without Curwen hand signs. McClung found no significant change in pitch accuracy when these singers used hand signs. Using a similar approach, Cassidy (1993) tested the effect of solfège syllables and Curwen hand signs on sight-singing accuracy in 91 undergraduate elementary education majors. Five groups were prepared: one control group, in which no systematic sight-singing training was used, and four treatment groups trained in different sight-singing systems (use of the neutral syllable “la,” use of letter note names, use of solfège, and use of Curwen hand signs in combination with solfège). The results of this study demonstrated a measurable improvement in sight-singing accuracy for the group using hand signs paired with solfège, as well as the group using solfège alone, when compared with the other three groups.
As my own students have not received much (if any) sight-singing training in my classes and I did not have the time preceding this study to teach them those skills, I instead based my own analysis on pitch accuracy and general tunefulness. Some existing research has set a precedent for this sort of analysis. Cassidy (1993) included rote singing in her study, asking her five sight-singing groups to sing a familiar children’s song; she found no significant change between pre- and post-test scores in any of the groups, implying that the skills gained by some of her subjects did not carry over to rote singing. Steeves (1984) collected pitch and interval discrimination data from two intact fourth grade classrooms before and after 37 weeks of Kodály-based instruction. One classroom had learned Curwen hand signs, while the other had not. The data revealed statistically significant improvement in scores in the hand sign class over its non-hand-sign counterpart. Boisvert (2019) completed rote singing tests on two groups of kindergarten-aged children before and after 30 music lessons. These groups were taught the same songs, but again, one group used Curwen hand signs while the other did not. In this case, however, Boisvert found no significant difference in singing accuracy between the Curwen hand sign group and the control group.
Methods
I collected my data on November 19 and 21, 2024 for a total of two data collection periods. I saw Elementary II on both of these days from 2:00 to 3:00 pm. At the beginning of the first data collection period, I described my study to the students, emphasizing that my research is for my own education, and will have no effect on them other than the possibility that “I might become a tiny bit better at my job.” I then taught the class four short folk songs one after another, timing each song lesson for future reference. I taught the first and third songs with motioned contours; for the second and fourth songs, I only used my hands to cue phrase echoes. Following the group lesson, I held brief individual meetings with each student who chose to participate in the individual portion of the study. In each meeting, I took audio recordings of the student singing the songs I taught in the group lesson. I modeled each song once before the student sang it, with or without hand motions as specified, and provided lyrics when requested by the student.
During the second data collection period, I taught four new folk songs, each chosen to be a near-match to one of the initial four songs in terms of length, form, complexity, key, and melodic range. I taught these near-match songs in same order and for the same amount of time as I taught their counterpart songs during the previous session, but I reversed the hand motion condition, teaching the second and fourth songs with motioned contours and forgoing motions for the first and third songs. I held individual meetings again on this day, calling students in the same order to keep consistent the amount of time each student had to practice or audiate the songs (as in Killian & Henry, 2005). I asked the students to echo the four new songs and repeated my audio recording procedures. At the end of the second data collection period, I asked my students to fill out a brief paper survey about their perception of my motioned contours: whether they liked, disliked, or felt neutral about the contours; whether they thought the contours had a positive effect, negative effect, or no effect on their ability to learn a song; and whether they wanted me to motion contours more frequently, less frequently, or with the same frequency moving forward. Finally, I asked them to identify up to four favorite songs from those I had taught them during the study.
My song selections were as follows. Most were complete melodies, while a few are excerpts (see Appendix for notated songs). Melodies taught with a motioned contour are listed in bold.
Data Collection and Analysis
On each day of the study, nine students were present and eight chose to participate in the individual recording sessions. I collected 64 audio samples, each of myself singing a folk melody followed by a student repeating that melody. To quantify this data, I conducted a double-blind scoring process in which I rated the tunefulness of each student recording on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 lacking most of the structural directionality of the original and 4 being a near-perfect replication. Deviating from some other commonly used methods for judging pitch accuracy (Apfelstadt, 1984; Phillips & Aitchison, 1997), I moved my focus away from whether specific pitches were sung accurately, listening instead for accurate contour, interval size, and overall recognizability of the tune. This approach acknowledges that some children are more comfortable in certain vocal ranges, and that a student’s conscious or unconscious choice to transpose the melody need not detract from its overall effect. My partner, a beatboxer and self-taught singer, assigned his own ratings to each recording using the same system, strengthening the scoring process through triangulation (Hinchey, 2008). I took the mean of our ratings as each individual recording’s tunefulness score. The mean tunefulness scores for each song, calculated using the scores of the six students who participated in both sessions, are represented below (see Appendix for complete data).
Between the songs in Song Pair 1, the mean tunefulness score for the control condition was much higher than that of the hand condition. In all other song pairs, however, students performed better under the hand condition. This pattern was reflected in the overall mean tunefulness scores across all control songs and all hand songs. Between these two overall scores, I observed an increase of 0.39584 in the hand condition. I found this increase to be statistically significant with an alpha of 0.1.
These patterns were consistent in the students’ individual data as well. Song Pair 1 had each student perform measurably better in the control condition, while the other three song pairs showed score increases in every case where the hand condition was applied (with only one exception for one student). The students’ individual overall tunefulness scores were higher in the hand condition than in the control condition, demonstrating increases of 0.125, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.625, and 0.625, respectively.
To get a sense of how other variables besides hand motion might have affected student performance, I completed some additional analysis using the tunefulness scores. Students performed best in Song Pair 1 (with an average score of 3.08333), and struggled the most with Song Pair 2 (with an average score of 2.54167), although the difference between hand and control scores in the latter pair was so large that I see little point in analyzing these values closely. I calculated the range of each student’s hand and control scores and found that students were slightly more consistent under the hand condition (with an average range of 1.41667) than the control condition (with an average range of 1.75). I found no notable correlation between students’ overall score ranges and the effect of the hand condition on those students; the two students with the largest score ranges, 2.5 and 3, also represented the lowest and highest extremes of average score increase (.125 and .625, respectively). Finally, the data shows that I scored recordings an average of 0.125 higher than my partner did, and that the Thursday scores averaged 0.39584 higher than the Tuesday scores (only counting those students who participated in both sessions).
The survey results demonstrate a general fondness (or at least tolerance) for my motioned contours among my students. Of the nine students surveyed, seven reported that they “like” this hand technique, and six reported that the hand movement “helps [them] learn.” They were more neutral when asked how often they would like me to use the hand motions in the future: three circled “More often”; five selected “The same amount”; and one asked for “Less often.” The final question on the survey, which asked students to circle up to four of their favorite songs from the study, showed little correlation between student preferences and any other variable. The hand songs received thirteen “favorites,” while the control songs received only slightly fewer at ten. The two best-performed songs, “Let Us Chase the Squirrel” and “Alabama Gal” received one and six “favorites,” respectively. The full data for this final question is represented below.
Discussion and Conclusions
The purpose of this study was to determine whether moving my hand up and down in a physical melodic contour while teaching a rote melody in a group lesson affects the tunefulness of individual singers. I found the mean tunefulness scores of the hand condition songs to be higher on average than the mean tunefulness scores of the control condition songs. Given the statistical significance of that result, I may conclude that my hand motions did meaningfully increase the tunefulness of my students’ singing within this study. Each individual student saw this same improvement in their average scores under the hand condition, albeit to different extents. I also observed slightly more uniform performances within each student’s individual data in the hand condition than in the control condition. The paper survey results established that while the majority of my students report liking the hand contour, it does not seem to affect their enjoyment of specific songs.
Overall, my findings seem to align with previous research as discussed in the literature review. The connection that I observed between melody and physical movement on a vertical plane clearly underscores the relationships observed by Eitan and Granot (2006) and Kohn and Eitan (2016). The existing studies on Curwen hand signs and pitch accuracy are not directly relevant to my own research, but my findings are somewhat consistent with those studies that find hand motion of any sort to improve pitch accuracy (Cassidy 1993; Steeves, 1984).
A question remains as to why the hand motions had this positive effect on tunefulness in my students. I do see a potential explanation in one adaptionist theory of the origin of music: that early musical practices allowed for the rehearsal of coordinated movement (Thompson, 2015). Supporters of this theory believe that music, particularly rhythmic practices, may have helped early hominids strengthen their group movements such as hunting and herding. The coordinated movement at play in this study is the internal process of singing itself. Singing a high note is different from singing a low note; it feels different and requires different physiological support. When I taught songs to my students without using my hand, they were already quite united; the music allowed for the class to sing in unison, and to carry out these physical processes at the same time. My singing, however, was not visible or externally perceptible to my students except through the sound of the pitches I sang. By using my hand to motion pitch contour, I introduced a movement cue of my own. The high visibility of this cue was much easier for my students to interpret than my singing alone. They were thus able to sing with increased precision and stronger physical memory, even when repeating the songs on their own.
While most of my students’ data was consistent in showing score increases under the hand condition in Song Pairs 2, 3, and 4 (and a score decrease in Song Pair 1), I had one student—Student E—whose results contradicted my overall findings. This student performed equally well in both conditions for Song Pairs 1 and 3. In Song Pair 2, they scored 2 full points higher in the hand condition than the control. In Song Pair 4, they scored 1 point lower in the hand condition. Student E’s full data, including “difference” values calculated by subtracting the condition score from the value score in each song pair, is represented below.
Averaging the differences between Student E’s hand and control performances seems to show an average difference of 0.25, which on the surface suggests that this student’s tunefulness, like that of their classmates, is strengthened by my use of hand motions when teaching. On the other hand, the raw data contains no clear correlation. With so few songs and scores to analyze, it is difficult to come to a convincing conclusion, but it appears that the motioned contour did not reliably affect this individual student’s performance. At the same time, in their paper survey, Student E reported that they like the hand motion and feel that it helps them learn, despite the data saying otherwise. Perhaps some aspect of the hand motion gives them a sense of confidence or security; perhaps these feelings help them in a different way, one that affects some other part of their musicianship or general wellbeing.
Student E’s results serve as an excellent reminder of the many limitations of this study. An 11-person class is a very small population size, and the six students who participated in the full study are not an appropriate sample for that population. The same can be said of the number of song pairs used in the study. While I initially planned on six song pairs, I eliminated two due to time restrictions. Out of the four remaining data points, three supported my findings while the fourth (Song Pair 1) did not. In a larger study, that one data point would not hold so much significance, but on such a small scale, it is difficult to ignore. Given the size of this study, it is conceivable that my findings themselves are actually a result of sample error.
If I were to repeat or expand this study in the future, I would prioritize gathering a greater amount of data. I might find a way to include all 11 students in the study, or try it with my 17 first, second, and third graders. I would also use more song pairs. If I composed the songs myself, I would have more control over their similarities and differences (such as funny or confusing lyrics, which this study does not explore). Given more time to process and analyze the data on a more technical level, I could also analyze each recording—or a smaller selection of recordings—in Melodyne Essential, a software that can isolate and label pitches in audio clips. This approach would provide me with truly objective data regarding pitch accuracy (Yarbrough et al., 1991).
While the scale of this study was too small to determine conclusively whether and why my mentioned contour affects the tunefulness of my students’ singing, it does still offer enough information that I feel confident continuing to include the technique in my teaching. My findings show that it is possible, if not likely, that my use of hand motions in rote song lessons increases tunefulness in at least some of my students, and that at least some of my students feel as though the hand motions assist in their learning process. This study and its findings will benefit my teaching and my classroom moving forward, even in some unexpected ways. After the paper survey reported a unanimous love for “Alabama Gal” across all of my students, I shuffled my curriculum around. Two weeks later, I taught them a new folk dance in its entirety before revealing that it goes with the “Alabama Gal” tune, and we shared a moment of total musical joy together. We moved our whole bodies to the song, not just our hands.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Kelley Kasak-Collins for her enthusiastic support of my research, to Dr. Tina Beveridge for her guidance in designing this study, to Justin Hull and Jacqui Slayter for their time and physical presence during the data collection process, and to Mosie Burke for his assistance in processing and analyzing the data.
References
Apfelstadt, H. (1984). Effects of Melodic Perception Instruction on Pitch Discrimination and Vocal Accuracy of Kindergarten Children. Journal of Research in Music Education, 32(1), 15–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/3345277
Boisvert, S. (2019). Vocal Accuracy in Preschool Children: Are the Curwen Hand Signs Really Useful? Research and Issues in Music Education, 15(1). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1271551.pdf
Cassidy, J. W. (1993). Effects of various sightsinging strategies on Nonmusic majors’ pitch accuracy. Journal of Research in Music Education, 41(4), 293–302. https://doi.org/10.2307/3345505
Demorest, S. M., & May, W. V. (1995). Sight-Singing Instruction in the Choral Ensemble: Factors Related to Individual Performance. Journal of Research in Music Education, 43(2), 156–167. https://doi.org/10.2307/3345676
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Steeves, C. (1984). The effect of Curwen-Kodaly hand signs on pitch and interval discrimination within a Kodaly curricular framework (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.doi:10.11575/PRISM/15968
Yarbrough, C., Green, G., Benson, W., & Bowers, J. (1991). Inaccurate Singers: An Exploratory Study of Variables Affecting Pitch-Matching. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 107, 23–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40318418
Appendix