Pitch
“There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means.” (David Bowie Quotes, 2015)
Pitch - So What?
The sequences of pitch changes in English, the patterns of rising and falling tone of voice, form “intonation contours.” Intonation contours are important cues to meaning. (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010).
The audio excerpt below illustrates the differences between the word “So” spoken with three different intonation contours. Figure 1 depicts these intonation contours visually as curves.
- Pitch - so what?
- Musical and linguistic pitch
- Pitch for teachers: Music selection; activities
Pitch - So What?
The sequences of pitch changes in English, the patterns of rising and falling tone of voice, form “intonation contours.” Intonation contours are important cues to meaning. (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010).
The audio excerpt below illustrates the differences between the word “So” spoken with three different intonation contours. Figure 1 depicts these intonation contours visually as curves.
The meaning of a given intonation contour is relatively clear and fixed for native speakers. Intonation contours can signal questions, emphasis, contrast, boundaries of utterances, emotions, and nuances of the speaker-listener relationship such as which knowledge the speaker believes the listener already knows. Command of intonation and other features of whole sentences are just as important to clear pronunciation and listening comprehension as are individual letter sounds (Beaken, 2009; Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010; Chapman, 2014; Gilbert, 2008; Levis & Grant, 2003; Terrell, 2012).
Pitch changes also contribute to the accenting of syllables. Accenting, like intonation, offers many clues to a speaker's intentions. I discuss accenting in more depth on the Rhythm page.
So pitch plays a key role in helping students both produce and comprehend speech. Nonstandard intonation also marks a speaker's accent as foreign. And more: without the proper intonation, a speaker can convey emotions s/he did not intend. This may lead to serious conflicts and misunderstandings. For one thing, intonation can signal politeness or humor (Terrell, 2012).
The intonation contours of English do not coincide with those of other languages (Beaken, 2009; Patel, 2008). And melody is not as important in most other languages as it is in English (Gilbert, 2008). Students may not notice the importance of this mismatch on their own. Thus pitch presents a challenge for many English learners. Those who speak tonal languages, such as many Asians, often benefit most from instruction in English intonation patterns (Lems, 2001; Terrell, 2012).
ESL teachers should therefore help students learn to recognize, decode, and produce English pitch patterns in speech. Using music to enhance pitch changes for students helps accomplish that. As I'll discuss in the section on selecting music, an understanding of pitch relationships also helps teachers enhance the learning of vocabulary and letter sounds.
Musical and Linguistic Pitch
Sound is energy in the form of vibrations of the air around us. "Pitch" refers to the frequency of the vibrations; the speed at which they move back and forth. Frequency makes a musical note or a voice sound "higher" or "lower" (Patel, 2008).
The audio below contains five notes, each higher in pitch than the one that came before.
Pitch changes also contribute to the accenting of syllables. Accenting, like intonation, offers many clues to a speaker's intentions. I discuss accenting in more depth on the Rhythm page.
So pitch plays a key role in helping students both produce and comprehend speech. Nonstandard intonation also marks a speaker's accent as foreign. And more: without the proper intonation, a speaker can convey emotions s/he did not intend. This may lead to serious conflicts and misunderstandings. For one thing, intonation can signal politeness or humor (Terrell, 2012).
The intonation contours of English do not coincide with those of other languages (Beaken, 2009; Patel, 2008). And melody is not as important in most other languages as it is in English (Gilbert, 2008). Students may not notice the importance of this mismatch on their own. Thus pitch presents a challenge for many English learners. Those who speak tonal languages, such as many Asians, often benefit most from instruction in English intonation patterns (Lems, 2001; Terrell, 2012).
ESL teachers should therefore help students learn to recognize, decode, and produce English pitch patterns in speech. Using music to enhance pitch changes for students helps accomplish that. As I'll discuss in the section on selecting music, an understanding of pitch relationships also helps teachers enhance the learning of vocabulary and letter sounds.
Musical and Linguistic Pitch
Sound is energy in the form of vibrations of the air around us. "Pitch" refers to the frequency of the vibrations; the speed at which they move back and forth. Frequency makes a musical note or a voice sound "higher" or "lower" (Patel, 2008).
The audio below contains five notes, each higher in pitch than the one that came before.
A series of pitch changes in speech is an intonation contour; in music it is a melody.
Spoken pitch normally changes continuously, like a smooth roller coaster. It glides from pitch level to pitch level. None of these pitch levels are privileged - that is, none are absolutely defined. In music though, pitch intervals usually divide the melody into discrete notes, like a series of stairways rising and falling. And almost universally around the world, musical pitch levels fall along a regular, defined scale. The particulars of the scales vary across the world's cultures, and by the limits of the instrument for which they are written. Two common categories of scales in western music are "major" and "minor" scales. But in theory, a culture could pick from an infinity of possible scales - it just depends on how far apart pitch levels are, and how many total pitch levels are on the scale. (Patel, 2008).
Figure 2 below shows a B major musical scale (Kraemer, 2015). Dark dots with light vertical lines radiating down from them indicate individual notes. The higher up a note is on the "staff" (the row of horizontal lines), the higher its pitch. The horizontal direction indicates time. Were a musician to play these notes on an instrument, s/he would play the top row from left to right, then the next row down - just as s/he would read a book. What Figure 2 illustrates is that one could "connect the dots" into a smooth melodic contour (curve), so it would look like a spoken intonation contour. Except that, when writing sheet music, the composer doesn't fill in the gaps.
Figure 2. One of the many possible musical scales (Kraemer, 2015).
Spoken pitch normally changes continuously, like a smooth roller coaster. It glides from pitch level to pitch level. None of these pitch levels are privileged - that is, none are absolutely defined. In music though, pitch intervals usually divide the melody into discrete notes, like a series of stairways rising and falling. And almost universally around the world, musical pitch levels fall along a regular, defined scale. The particulars of the scales vary across the world's cultures, and by the limits of the instrument for which they are written. Two common categories of scales in western music are "major" and "minor" scales. But in theory, a culture could pick from an infinity of possible scales - it just depends on how far apart pitch levels are, and how many total pitch levels are on the scale. (Patel, 2008).
Figure 2 below shows a B major musical scale (Kraemer, 2015). Dark dots with light vertical lines radiating down from them indicate individual notes. The higher up a note is on the "staff" (the row of horizontal lines), the higher its pitch. The horizontal direction indicates time. Were a musician to play these notes on an instrument, s/he would play the top row from left to right, then the next row down - just as s/he would read a book. What Figure 2 illustrates is that one could "connect the dots" into a smooth melodic contour (curve), so it would look like a spoken intonation contour. Except that, when writing sheet music, the composer doesn't fill in the gaps.
Figure 2. One of the many possible musical scales (Kraemer, 2015).
Musical melodies can be infinitely more expressive than English intonation contours (Coutinho & Dibben, 2013; Pogaceanu, 2013; Patel, 2008; Taruffi & Koelsch, 2014). That's because listeners decode speech intonation contours into their meaning simply on the basis of whether the intonation goes up, down, or stays the same. With music, on the other hand, listeners decode melodies based on a potentially infinite variety of relationships among notes (Patel, 2008). It's not just changes from pitch to pitch that listeners register in hearing separate musical notes; they also hear relationships between other notes being played at the same time - “chords” - and between notes separated by long distances.
The Tchaikovsky (2004) excerpt below illustrates the complexity of note-to-note relationships listeners might have to process just to understand a single instrument. In this excerpt, the rest of the orchestra mainly exaggerates some of the notes the violin plays. The music hints at the immense complexity of relationships a listener might have to process were a variety of instruments to play together.
In short, musical pitch changes and their structural and emotional meanings are to linguistic pitch changes what the whole field of higher mathematics is to primary school addition and subtraction.
The relative simplicity of linguistic intonation means that as long as spoken intonation contours have roughly the same shape, listeners will interpret them as the same. Higher and lower peaks and valleys may sound more energetic and emotional, but to a large degree, similar contour shapes convey the same meaning (Patel, 2008).
Tonic Chords
Musical pitch also departs from linguistic pitch in that, within the context of a given melody, certain chords - chords being multiple notes played simultaneously - sound more stable, or "tonally central," than others. Musicians call these stable chords “tonic” chords (ibid). Tonic chords are always the first chord played in any piece of music's chord progression. Tonic chords set the key for a piece. As in the case of the audio excerpt below, complete chord progressions virtually always not only start, but also stop on the tonic chord. Any chord can be a tonic chord.
The relative simplicity of linguistic intonation means that as long as spoken intonation contours have roughly the same shape, listeners will interpret them as the same. Higher and lower peaks and valleys may sound more energetic and emotional, but to a large degree, similar contour shapes convey the same meaning (Patel, 2008).
Tonic Chords
Musical pitch also departs from linguistic pitch in that, within the context of a given melody, certain chords - chords being multiple notes played simultaneously - sound more stable, or "tonally central," than others. Musicians call these stable chords “tonic” chords (ibid). Tonic chords are always the first chord played in any piece of music's chord progression. Tonic chords set the key for a piece. As in the case of the audio excerpt below, complete chord progressions virtually always not only start, but also stop on the tonic chord. Any chord can be a tonic chord.
We perceive tonic chords as resting places in the music. So when a sequence of chords returns to the chord that it started with, listeners get a comfortable, homey sense of a return to stability in the music (ibid).
English has tonic syllables. Unlike musical tonic chords, linguistic tonic syllables are not the first, but the last stressed syllable of a thought group (Chapman, 2014). They can indicate a boundary. In English, the pitch on the tonic syllable usually rises or falls markedly, thereby accenting this syllable. But nothing says a sentence needs to begin and end on the same note. Listeners don’t notice this (Patel, 2008).
Whole songs don’t always begin and end on the same chord either. But their “sentences” - chord progressions - usually do. Music can contain harmonic shifts. But In those cases, after the harmonic shift the new chord progression begins and ends on its tonic chord (Mary Szabo, personal communication, April 8, 2015).
In the audio below, "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" is played first in the key of C, then in the key of F (Stocker, Andress, & E.C. Schirmer Music Company, 1994). In accordance with the logic of chord progressions, each section ends on the same chord it started on - C in the first case, F in the second case. This demonstrates how even after harmonic shifts, tonic chords dictate the direction of music.
English has tonic syllables. Unlike musical tonic chords, linguistic tonic syllables are not the first, but the last stressed syllable of a thought group (Chapman, 2014). They can indicate a boundary. In English, the pitch on the tonic syllable usually rises or falls markedly, thereby accenting this syllable. But nothing says a sentence needs to begin and end on the same note. Listeners don’t notice this (Patel, 2008).
Whole songs don’t always begin and end on the same chord either. But their “sentences” - chord progressions - usually do. Music can contain harmonic shifts. But In those cases, after the harmonic shift the new chord progression begins and ends on its tonic chord (Mary Szabo, personal communication, April 8, 2015).
In the audio below, "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" is played first in the key of C, then in the key of F (Stocker, Andress, & E.C. Schirmer Music Company, 1994). In accordance with the logic of chord progressions, each section ends on the same chord it started on - C in the first case, F in the second case. This demonstrates how even after harmonic shifts, tonic chords dictate the direction of music.
Tonic chords interact with language. Individual notes don't appear to interact, however. According to Besson, et al (1998), off-key notes, meaning those that even most musically untrained listeners hear as "sour," or out of place, do not appear to interfere with listeners' ability to process the meaning of words set to those notes. But Bigand, et al (2001) played recorded language sounds paired with chord progressions, to see if tonic chords had any effect on how quickly listeners discriminated the language sounds. Chord progressions which did not end on a tonic chord interfered with listeners’ processing of the language phonemes.
Musical "sentences" not ending on tonic chords not only interfere with processing language sounds, they also slow processing of word meanings. This latter finding appears to apply even to the tone deaf (Poulin-Charronnat, et al, 2005; Tillmann, et al 2007).
This musical interference with language appears to be related to listeners' violated expectations (Patel, 2008; Poulin-Charronnat, et al, 2005). This implies that unexpected turns in music may hinder the processing of word meanings and sounds.
Tension
Stable, "tonic" chords do more than eliminate interference with language sounds; they also provide auditory orientation points in melodies. Listeners need orientation, because the chords and notes falling between the starting and stopping tonic chords can create a great deal of complexity, as well as a sense of tension, in music (Patel, 2008).
“Tension” in a melody refers to the listener’s sense that the music should continue; the music has unfinished business, something missing. Although the other three acoustic dimensions of loudness, duration and timbre can affect tension, it arises in large part from the pitch structure of a melody (ibid). “Resolution” refers to filling in this perceived gap in the music, a sense that the music has reached a stable point. Resolution generally coincides with a return to a tonic chord.
The Rachmaninoff (1990) excerpt below contains a passage which slowly builds in tension, as a lead in to the start of the piece. Rachmaninoff accomplishes the tension through a combination of loudness, rhythm and pitch relationships. A release of tension occurs with a return to the tonic chord, and the beginning of the melody proper.
Musical "sentences" not ending on tonic chords not only interfere with processing language sounds, they also slow processing of word meanings. This latter finding appears to apply even to the tone deaf (Poulin-Charronnat, et al, 2005; Tillmann, et al 2007).
This musical interference with language appears to be related to listeners' violated expectations (Patel, 2008; Poulin-Charronnat, et al, 2005). This implies that unexpected turns in music may hinder the processing of word meanings and sounds.
Tension
Stable, "tonic" chords do more than eliminate interference with language sounds; they also provide auditory orientation points in melodies. Listeners need orientation, because the chords and notes falling between the starting and stopping tonic chords can create a great deal of complexity, as well as a sense of tension, in music (Patel, 2008).
“Tension” in a melody refers to the listener’s sense that the music should continue; the music has unfinished business, something missing. Although the other three acoustic dimensions of loudness, duration and timbre can affect tension, it arises in large part from the pitch structure of a melody (ibid). “Resolution” refers to filling in this perceived gap in the music, a sense that the music has reached a stable point. Resolution generally coincides with a return to a tonic chord.
The Rachmaninoff (1990) excerpt below contains a passage which slowly builds in tension, as a lead in to the start of the piece. Rachmaninoff accomplishes the tension through a combination of loudness, rhythm and pitch relationships. A release of tension occurs with a return to the tonic chord, and the beginning of the melody proper.
Tension and resolution exist in language too. But meaning, rather than pitch relationships, cause most language tension. Thus, listeners may feel tension and expectation if they hear someone say, “You won’t believe what just happened!” Listeners may slide up to the edge of their seats, waiting to find out what happened. But whether the tone of voice begins and ends on the same pitch is irrelevant (Patel, 2008). What's more, a tone of voice which swings wildly up and down in pitch, while it can add to the sentence’s force and energy, isn’t the main cause of the tension.
This is illustrated by using the same emotionally charged up and down intonation when speaking the sentence “I don’t believe what he just did!” Both intonation contours may sound the same. But someone might say "I don't believe what he just did" in order to resolve a feeling of tension after both listener and speaker had witnessed something shocking, rather than to create tension.
In Summary: Musical melodies rely on a great variety of pitch changes, while English intonation contours rely only on whether a speaker's pitch rises, falls, or stays the same. Musical pitch levels are more absolutely defined than are linguistic pitch levels. Certain musical chords sound especially stable within the context of their melody. When a song writer pairs a word with a chord that isn't stable, this can interfere with the processing of both the word's sound and its meaning. This interference appears to be caused by violated expectations. Finally, pitch relationships in music can create tension.
Pitch for teachers
Music Selection
In selecting classroom music to illustrate particular intonation contours, the goal is to anchor and exaggerate the gliding, relatively arbitrary, and therefore elusive pitch changes of speech in the absolutely-defined (for a given instrument), and more enjoyable pitch levels of music.
The most important consideration for teachers should therefore be that the overall contour shape of the musical melody roughly matches the shape of the target speech contour. The big changes in the melody should accompany big changes in the same direction in authentic speech. And the music should not contain any big changes in pitch where the language does not. If teachers don’t follow this suggestion, students may incorporate spurious intonation patterns into their speech, or find themselves unable to distinguish the target pitch change from the “noise.”
Composers, however, build melodies of “skeletons” and elaboration (Patel, 2008). Smaller pitch changes in music which don’t match the target contour, the “elaborative” notes of the melody, are not a problem. Big goes with big.
To not just match but exaggerate the particular speech contour being targeted, big in speech goes with bigger in music. So during the awareness-raising phase of instruction, ideally the musical contour at the point in the song coinciding with a target contour pattern would rise higher than the corresponding rise in conversational speech.
Another consideration is whether the singer’s voice glides through pitch changes, or produces discrete pitch levels. Glides can more accurately mimic speech intonation.
Synchronized underscoring is using music like this that parallels, and if possible exaggerates, language. This is what I mean by mickey-mousing in ESL.
A Musical Example
The Terri Clark excerpt below (Clark, 2004) contains a melody that has roughly the same shape as an emotionally charged stretch of speech appropriate to the topic of the lyrics. Many of the musical high notes rise higher in pitch than spoken intonation would rise, and many of the low notes dip lower. This provides exaggeration. In addition, the singer’s voice glides through many of the pitch changes, rather than jumping from note to note. This gives the lyrics a more natural quality.
The pitch changes in this song as a whole can teach students to better recognize sarcasm in intonation, something many English learners struggle to do (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010).
This is illustrated by using the same emotionally charged up and down intonation when speaking the sentence “I don’t believe what he just did!” Both intonation contours may sound the same. But someone might say "I don't believe what he just did" in order to resolve a feeling of tension after both listener and speaker had witnessed something shocking, rather than to create tension.
In Summary: Musical melodies rely on a great variety of pitch changes, while English intonation contours rely only on whether a speaker's pitch rises, falls, or stays the same. Musical pitch levels are more absolutely defined than are linguistic pitch levels. Certain musical chords sound especially stable within the context of their melody. When a song writer pairs a word with a chord that isn't stable, this can interfere with the processing of both the word's sound and its meaning. This interference appears to be caused by violated expectations. Finally, pitch relationships in music can create tension.
Pitch for teachers
Music Selection
In selecting classroom music to illustrate particular intonation contours, the goal is to anchor and exaggerate the gliding, relatively arbitrary, and therefore elusive pitch changes of speech in the absolutely-defined (for a given instrument), and more enjoyable pitch levels of music.
The most important consideration for teachers should therefore be that the overall contour shape of the musical melody roughly matches the shape of the target speech contour. The big changes in the melody should accompany big changes in the same direction in authentic speech. And the music should not contain any big changes in pitch where the language does not. If teachers don’t follow this suggestion, students may incorporate spurious intonation patterns into their speech, or find themselves unable to distinguish the target pitch change from the “noise.”
Composers, however, build melodies of “skeletons” and elaboration (Patel, 2008). Smaller pitch changes in music which don’t match the target contour, the “elaborative” notes of the melody, are not a problem. Big goes with big.
To not just match but exaggerate the particular speech contour being targeted, big in speech goes with bigger in music. So during the awareness-raising phase of instruction, ideally the musical contour at the point in the song coinciding with a target contour pattern would rise higher than the corresponding rise in conversational speech.
Another consideration is whether the singer’s voice glides through pitch changes, or produces discrete pitch levels. Glides can more accurately mimic speech intonation.
Synchronized underscoring is using music like this that parallels, and if possible exaggerates, language. This is what I mean by mickey-mousing in ESL.
A Musical Example
The Terri Clark excerpt below (Clark, 2004) contains a melody that has roughly the same shape as an emotionally charged stretch of speech appropriate to the topic of the lyrics. Many of the musical high notes rise higher in pitch than spoken intonation would rise, and many of the low notes dip lower. This provides exaggeration. In addition, the singer’s voice glides through many of the pitch changes, rather than jumping from note to note. This gives the lyrics a more natural quality.
The pitch changes in this song as a whole can teach students to better recognize sarcasm in intonation, something many English learners struggle to do (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010).
The final line of the opening, “I’ve got better things to do,” comes on a point of resolution in the chord progression. A buildup of tension can create an expectancy in listeners (Patel, 2008). This focuses attention on the resolution - and the language accompanying it. Thus music can emphasize target language if the language coincides with a point of resolution in the music.
Points of resolution normally coincide with tonic chords, which adds the bonus that the musical harmonics won't interfere with mental processing of the word sounds and meanings (Bigand, et al 2001; Patel, 2008; Poulin-Charronnat, et al, 2005,). In this case, the resolution accompanies the line that explains the overall meaning of the song - and, appropriately, its title, "I've got better things to do." This adds to the rhetorical force of this line as well.
When it comes to using music to target vocabulary, it's very important that the words be sung clearly, and are not drowned out by the notes of the music (Ulate, 2007). It can help if target vocabulary does not coincide with an accented musical note. Clark's voice definitely isn't drowned out by the music, but it's possible her accent - "thaangs" for "things" - could cause learners problems.
Predictability
A more general principle relevant to selecting music for vocabulary learning presents itself from the various research on interference from non tonic chords. The researchers believed the interference may have come from the cognitive effects of violated expectations. Thus, in selecting music to enhance language, teachers should favor music which places the target vocabulary or sounds at predictable places in the music.
This means two things. First, ideally the target vocabulary isn't at the beginning of songs, or at the beginning of an unexpected turn in the music, like a harmonic shift. That's because the listener can't predict the harmonics at the beginning of a song, or at a turning point in the melody. And second, the very best place for new vocabulary is in a repeated line, since the repetition makes both the harmonics and the vocabulary predictable. As a bonus, the repetition will help students remember the words (Ormrod, 2011). And English learners need predictability to learn most effectively not just for these musical and linguistic reasons, but for emotional and cognitive reasons as well (Herrell & Jordan, 2008).
Teachers can also select music in which a given piece of target language - or language sound - always coincides with the same note. This too provides predictability for students. Contrasts, such as the difference between “cat” and “bat,” can be emphasized by pairing different words with different notes. If students are reading the lyrics while listening to the music, an increase in predictability can facilitate comprehension (Collins Block & Parris, 2008). Fortunately, many of the repetitive refrains in popular songs consistently pair the same word with the same pitch level.
In Summary: When selecting music to raise awareness of intonation, the notes of the music should at least mimic, and preferably exaggerate, the important peaks and valleys of authentic speech intonation. When teaching vocabulary, the music ideally pairs target vocabulary and sentences with tonic chords, that is with points in the music where tension is released, in order to draw attention to them, and ensure no interference with processing. To further prevent conflicts in processing, target vocabulary shouldn't accompany unexpected harmonic shifts. Instead, words should coincide with predictable parts of the music - ideally, as part of a repeated line. Music which pairs target sounds or words with differing notes can contrast the new language or language features more predictably. The repeated verses of pop songs make selecting music for vocabulary learning much easier than selecting music for intonation underscoring.
Activities
It is intonation awareness, as well as reflection on the functions of intonation in their own speech, that should occupy classroom time; teachers should not spend much time on the rules of intonation, which can be complex. Instead, they should raise awareness of the functions intonations serves, as well as the mechanics of producing pitch changes in actual speech (Beaken, 2009; Chapman, 2014; Gilbert, 2008; Levis & Grant, 2003).
As an introduction to the concept of pitch, as well as a subject for discussion and reflection, Terrell (2012) uses a video of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (2011), like the one below. This video makes the low-to-high pitch change between the syllables "some" and "where" especially noticeable. Many of the other pitch changes stand out too. One thing I especially liked about this video for pedagogical purposes was that later in the song, the singer tips her head up and down with some of the pitch rises and falls, effectively providing synchronized underscoring - mickey mousing - in reverse, from action to music. Whether intentional or not, this underscoring could help learners notice and comprehend the concept of pitch changes.
Points of resolution normally coincide with tonic chords, which adds the bonus that the musical harmonics won't interfere with mental processing of the word sounds and meanings (Bigand, et al 2001; Patel, 2008; Poulin-Charronnat, et al, 2005,). In this case, the resolution accompanies the line that explains the overall meaning of the song - and, appropriately, its title, "I've got better things to do." This adds to the rhetorical force of this line as well.
When it comes to using music to target vocabulary, it's very important that the words be sung clearly, and are not drowned out by the notes of the music (Ulate, 2007). It can help if target vocabulary does not coincide with an accented musical note. Clark's voice definitely isn't drowned out by the music, but it's possible her accent - "thaangs" for "things" - could cause learners problems.
Predictability
A more general principle relevant to selecting music for vocabulary learning presents itself from the various research on interference from non tonic chords. The researchers believed the interference may have come from the cognitive effects of violated expectations. Thus, in selecting music to enhance language, teachers should favor music which places the target vocabulary or sounds at predictable places in the music.
This means two things. First, ideally the target vocabulary isn't at the beginning of songs, or at the beginning of an unexpected turn in the music, like a harmonic shift. That's because the listener can't predict the harmonics at the beginning of a song, or at a turning point in the melody. And second, the very best place for new vocabulary is in a repeated line, since the repetition makes both the harmonics and the vocabulary predictable. As a bonus, the repetition will help students remember the words (Ormrod, 2011). And English learners need predictability to learn most effectively not just for these musical and linguistic reasons, but for emotional and cognitive reasons as well (Herrell & Jordan, 2008).
Teachers can also select music in which a given piece of target language - or language sound - always coincides with the same note. This too provides predictability for students. Contrasts, such as the difference between “cat” and “bat,” can be emphasized by pairing different words with different notes. If students are reading the lyrics while listening to the music, an increase in predictability can facilitate comprehension (Collins Block & Parris, 2008). Fortunately, many of the repetitive refrains in popular songs consistently pair the same word with the same pitch level.
In Summary: When selecting music to raise awareness of intonation, the notes of the music should at least mimic, and preferably exaggerate, the important peaks and valleys of authentic speech intonation. When teaching vocabulary, the music ideally pairs target vocabulary and sentences with tonic chords, that is with points in the music where tension is released, in order to draw attention to them, and ensure no interference with processing. To further prevent conflicts in processing, target vocabulary shouldn't accompany unexpected harmonic shifts. Instead, words should coincide with predictable parts of the music - ideally, as part of a repeated line. Music which pairs target sounds or words with differing notes can contrast the new language or language features more predictably. The repeated verses of pop songs make selecting music for vocabulary learning much easier than selecting music for intonation underscoring.
Activities
It is intonation awareness, as well as reflection on the functions of intonation in their own speech, that should occupy classroom time; teachers should not spend much time on the rules of intonation, which can be complex. Instead, they should raise awareness of the functions intonations serves, as well as the mechanics of producing pitch changes in actual speech (Beaken, 2009; Chapman, 2014; Gilbert, 2008; Levis & Grant, 2003).
As an introduction to the concept of pitch, as well as a subject for discussion and reflection, Terrell (2012) uses a video of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (2011), like the one below. This video makes the low-to-high pitch change between the syllables "some" and "where" especially noticeable. Many of the other pitch changes stand out too. One thing I especially liked about this video for pedagogical purposes was that later in the song, the singer tips her head up and down with some of the pitch rises and falls, effectively providing synchronized underscoring - mickey mousing - in reverse, from action to music. Whether intentional or not, this underscoring could help learners notice and comprehend the concept of pitch changes.
Functions
When it comes to teaching the functions of intonation, a good place to start is with how intonation indicates the boundaries of thought groups (Beaken, 2009; Chapman, 2014; Gilbert, 2008; Levis & Grant, 2003). Generally speaking, there is a marked rise, fall, or combination of rises and falls near the tonic syllable of an utterance (the last stressed syllable), indicating a boundary word. This rough correspondence makes the concept of grouping relatively simple, and therefore a good entry point for students.
Given a copy of a song’s lyrics without punctuation, students predict where the punctuation marks will occur, then verify their answers by listening to the song (Chapman, 2014). It is important to realize, however, that intonation in speech sometimes supersedes syntax and punctuation in writing (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010).
So students might be confused when a sentence in statement form, like “He’s nice,” is said in a questioning intonation: “He’s nice?” Following common sense, students seeing the syntax of the sentence written without punctuation would put a period at the end. Only when they hear it spoken might they know it’s a question. While this kind of practice could ground a lesson on question-versus-statement intonation (especially if students had to assign either a question mark or a period, depending on the context of the sentence), it’s a confusing complication when selecting song lyrics to teach grouping.
The next step is teaching students the fall-rise combination, which Beaken (2009) says is unique to English. The fall-rise contour usually functions as what’s called a “referring” tone. That means it refers to background knowledge; it refers to something the speaker thinks the listener is already aware of.
A fall-rise intonation may accompany “car” in the sentence “And the car?” This is illustrated in the audio clip below.
The speaker could be asking “What about the car? You didn’t say anything about it.” The speaker also might mean “You remember the car? Well, it has a flat tire.” In both cases, the car is something the speaker expects the listener to know about.
Because the basic division of pitch in speech is into fall and rise (Beaken, 2009), awareness of the functions of falling and rising intonation is also highly important. For example, rises sometimes signal questions.
But the essential point students need to understand is that rises usually indicate background information, while falls usually indicate information in the foreground - meaning new information and information the conversation is revolving around. Beaken (ibid) recommends that students listen to passages, and identify through intonation the knowledge which is known, and that which is unknown.
Because the basic division of pitch in speech is into fall and rise (Beaken, 2009), awareness of the functions of falling and rising intonation is also highly important. For example, rises sometimes signal questions.
But the essential point students need to understand is that rises usually indicate background information, while falls usually indicate information in the foreground - meaning new information and information the conversation is revolving around. Beaken (ibid) recommends that students listen to passages, and identify through intonation the knowledge which is known, and that which is unknown.
Musical accompaniment
When learning and practicing these intonation patterns, it may be difficult to find musical examples. A way around this is Gilbert’s (2008) recommendation that students use kazoos for learning intonation. These are inexpensive and easy to learn musical instruments that change in pitch simply by the player speaking or singing louder or softer into them. Students voice the correct intonation into this instrument, and the class can thereby create a speech melody from texts. This is textbook mickey-mousing.
I feel, however, that unless students already know the correct intonation contours for an utterance, a class full of untutored kazoos could turn into sonic chaos. So it would be best to limit this approach to practice, not instruction. For instruction, the class begins with a jazz chant (see the Rhythm page for a discussion of these). Once the students establish a rhythm for the repetitive chant, the teacher accompanies them with the kazoo to teach the melody. Only after the class is already mimicking the teacher’s intonation in their chant recital, do some or all of the students join in on kazoos themselves.
The kazoo can also exaggerate the highs and lows, for the times when teachers want to focus on raising awareness. A keyboard or other standard, tuned instrument using defined pitch intervals also works. The main thing to remember with tuned instruments using discrete notes is that ideally, the player performs a "glissando;" this means that when the pitch changes, it glides through intermediate notes, and does not jump a long distance. A glissando happens, for example, when a performer slides a finger across a piano keyboard. The glissando more accurately mimics the gliding pitch changes of speech.
Even a musically-untrained teacher or student can accompany speech with an inexpensive electronic keyboard, because the basic division of speech intonation is into falls or rises, and there are no privileged pitches in speech. The performer just picks an arbitrary point toward the middle of the keyboard and slides a finger to the right for rises, to the left for falls. For fall-rises the performer would start by sliding left, then slide right much further. The performer needs to slide right extra far, because the final rise on the fall-rise contour is higher than the initial fall.
If the pitch were level for a stretch of speech, then the performer taps the same note in time with the words. This would usually be the first note, the starting place of the glissando, because the rises and falls most often occur on the final, tonic syllable of an utterance; but for longer utterances, and especially those containing contrasting elements, this might not be the case.
The only stringent requirement of targeted musical accompaniment is that the teacher be able to identify whether the pitch of a target sentence is going up or down at a given point. This awareness does not always come naturally, even to native speakers (Chapman, 2014). A consistent rhythm is also a factor, but only when students need to follow along. When teaching intonation, teachers should sometimes play without reference to rhythm, to highlight pitch patterns in isolation (Liperote, 2006). Singing the same melodies with different rhythms also puts them in different contexts, which can assist in the transfer of the patterns to new contexts later (Ormrod, 2011).
Teachers unable to identify intonation changes by ear can Google "Intonation patterns" or "Intonation contours." Linguistics sites and Google Images contain many sentences with the contours drawn in next to the words.
After finding a sample sentence online whose intonation performs the targeted function, it is a relatively simple matter to replace the words, if a teacher needs to, in order to customize the material. Since only the shape of the contour, and to a lesser degree the height of peaks and valleys, matters (Patel, 2008), when writing new sentences it normally shouldn't matter how many words they have, so long as the basics of their grammatical structure are preserved. If the contour were stretched or shrunk to fit more or fewer words, the contour would still have it's signature effects on the meaning of the sentence.
Selectively targeting language like this is a key element of mickey-mousing in the classroom. In fact, targeted musical enhancement of language is the whole point of mickey-mousing; the music enhances not just language, but specific language, by exploiting objective similarities between beauty and the beast. The musical melody contour - beauty - underscores the speech intonation contour - a language feature that may present beastly obstacles to students - just as in a cartoon the melody of background music rises and falls in pitch as the beast races up and down staircases. By rising higher than the beast - exaggerating the pattern - beauty tames him.
Viscerally ingraining language
Listen-and-repeat activities should be a part of teaching intonation or any other pronunciation feature (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). In fact, Gilbert (2008) says that when teaching pronunciation, the class should always repeat utterances chorally from the start. This viscerally ingrains the language in students before any printed words or discussion of the subtleties of the pattern.
During this practice, teachers not only mickey-mouse the language with appropriate music, they mickey-mouse the shared music-language features with other modalities. Thus, to explain pitch rises, teachers lift their arms along with pitch level increases. This works best when students themselves mimic the body movements. Total physical response (TPR) is a very effective way to teach vocabulary like “high pitched,” without the need of translations (Asher, 2009).
At times this may prove especially important, because not all cultures visualize pitch levels as "high versus low." Some use other metaphors, such as “hard versus soft” (Patel, 2008). Teachers may want to discuss with students how their culture interprets pitch, before assuming that everyone will understand western mental schemas. But the nice thing about physical mickey-mousing is that even if the student doesn’t interpret the movement as high or low, it is still bringing out the fact that something is moving.
So any other back-and-forth movement is just as effective. And although Gilbert (2008) recommends having students stretch rubber bands to teach variations in the duration of syllables, the stretching also facilitates learning pitch. Students stretch the bands more for higher notes. Rubber bands actually fit pitch changes just as well as they fit the length-length correspondence to duration, because the increased tension of rubber band stretching corresponds to the increased feeling of tension in the vocal chords accompanying higher pitched notes.
Seeing the contours
Diagrams to illustrate contours help students see the patterns. Diagrams support students who have a hard time "playing by ear." The diagrams mickey mouse - underscore - the auditory concepts with visual aids. Teachers use a musical staff on the board, such as the one illustrated in figure 2 that introduced the concept of scales back in the Musical and Linguistic Pitch section (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010).
But teachers must be careful about asking students to draw the rises and falls of intonation contours themselves. Chapman (2014) found that even after instruction, not only students but native-speaker teachers had a difficult and frustrating time translating what they heard into shapes, or into words like “rise-fall.”
Nonetheless when students in Chapman's study first predicted contour shapes by drawing contours on written copies of speech, they performed better than when just listening to speech. Chapman found that students’ ability to hear and decode intonation progressed most of all when the contours were already drawn for them on the text. This told the students what to listen for, and improved their intonation awareness.
So when teaching intonation with music, one ready-made tool is commercially available sheet music. Teachers might want to "connect the dots" of the individual notes with penciled-in smooth curves, however, before using sheet music as a graphic aid. That would more accurately depict spoken intonation.
One nice thing about sheet music is that sheet music for songs already has words written in. And teachers can white out and then change the lyrics - or find strictly instrumental music - and only need concern themselves with finding a melody contour that roughly matches the speech contour they are targeting. So non-musician teachers could write their own songs. They just need to match syllables with notes.
If a real musician plays these songs, however, the rhythm of the notes (their prescribed duration, for example) may distort the natural rhythm of the sentence. This normally doesn't matter aesthetically, but it does make the songs less valuable pedagogically, as less authentic speech. They could still be useful for having some fun with intonation, and for illustrating contours without reference to rhythm, so as to isolate the concepts.
Awareness, understanding and practice
When teaching music students a melody, Liperote (2006) has students sing them using a single, "neutral" syllable, like "bum." This relieves students of the potential confusion and cognitive load of processing word meanings. She recommends separating the notes so they stand out.
Liperote also conducts her music students. This works in language classes too. Liperote points to herself, sings the melody, then points to the class, or to groups or individuals, to indicate their turn. Keeping the commands simple, intuitive and wordless like this provides yet more relief from extraneous factors and cognitive overload, so students can focus on pitch patterns in isolation.
Since awareness raising is the central goal of intonation instruction, students should also discuss pitch patterns in both music and speech. Terrell (2012) uses the Youtube video "It's Really Bad Karaoke" (2006) below as a discussion starter. In addition to garbled pitch, this video illustrates other aspects of bad pronunciation, and so can be used to spark discussions about the other acoustic dimensions, which I discuss on the Timbre and Rhythm pages.
When learning and practicing these intonation patterns, it may be difficult to find musical examples. A way around this is Gilbert’s (2008) recommendation that students use kazoos for learning intonation. These are inexpensive and easy to learn musical instruments that change in pitch simply by the player speaking or singing louder or softer into them. Students voice the correct intonation into this instrument, and the class can thereby create a speech melody from texts. This is textbook mickey-mousing.
I feel, however, that unless students already know the correct intonation contours for an utterance, a class full of untutored kazoos could turn into sonic chaos. So it would be best to limit this approach to practice, not instruction. For instruction, the class begins with a jazz chant (see the Rhythm page for a discussion of these). Once the students establish a rhythm for the repetitive chant, the teacher accompanies them with the kazoo to teach the melody. Only after the class is already mimicking the teacher’s intonation in their chant recital, do some or all of the students join in on kazoos themselves.
The kazoo can also exaggerate the highs and lows, for the times when teachers want to focus on raising awareness. A keyboard or other standard, tuned instrument using defined pitch intervals also works. The main thing to remember with tuned instruments using discrete notes is that ideally, the player performs a "glissando;" this means that when the pitch changes, it glides through intermediate notes, and does not jump a long distance. A glissando happens, for example, when a performer slides a finger across a piano keyboard. The glissando more accurately mimics the gliding pitch changes of speech.
Even a musically-untrained teacher or student can accompany speech with an inexpensive electronic keyboard, because the basic division of speech intonation is into falls or rises, and there are no privileged pitches in speech. The performer just picks an arbitrary point toward the middle of the keyboard and slides a finger to the right for rises, to the left for falls. For fall-rises the performer would start by sliding left, then slide right much further. The performer needs to slide right extra far, because the final rise on the fall-rise contour is higher than the initial fall.
If the pitch were level for a stretch of speech, then the performer taps the same note in time with the words. This would usually be the first note, the starting place of the glissando, because the rises and falls most often occur on the final, tonic syllable of an utterance; but for longer utterances, and especially those containing contrasting elements, this might not be the case.
The only stringent requirement of targeted musical accompaniment is that the teacher be able to identify whether the pitch of a target sentence is going up or down at a given point. This awareness does not always come naturally, even to native speakers (Chapman, 2014). A consistent rhythm is also a factor, but only when students need to follow along. When teaching intonation, teachers should sometimes play without reference to rhythm, to highlight pitch patterns in isolation (Liperote, 2006). Singing the same melodies with different rhythms also puts them in different contexts, which can assist in the transfer of the patterns to new contexts later (Ormrod, 2011).
Teachers unable to identify intonation changes by ear can Google "Intonation patterns" or "Intonation contours." Linguistics sites and Google Images contain many sentences with the contours drawn in next to the words.
After finding a sample sentence online whose intonation performs the targeted function, it is a relatively simple matter to replace the words, if a teacher needs to, in order to customize the material. Since only the shape of the contour, and to a lesser degree the height of peaks and valleys, matters (Patel, 2008), when writing new sentences it normally shouldn't matter how many words they have, so long as the basics of their grammatical structure are preserved. If the contour were stretched or shrunk to fit more or fewer words, the contour would still have it's signature effects on the meaning of the sentence.
Selectively targeting language like this is a key element of mickey-mousing in the classroom. In fact, targeted musical enhancement of language is the whole point of mickey-mousing; the music enhances not just language, but specific language, by exploiting objective similarities between beauty and the beast. The musical melody contour - beauty - underscores the speech intonation contour - a language feature that may present beastly obstacles to students - just as in a cartoon the melody of background music rises and falls in pitch as the beast races up and down staircases. By rising higher than the beast - exaggerating the pattern - beauty tames him.
Viscerally ingraining language
Listen-and-repeat activities should be a part of teaching intonation or any other pronunciation feature (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010). In fact, Gilbert (2008) says that when teaching pronunciation, the class should always repeat utterances chorally from the start. This viscerally ingrains the language in students before any printed words or discussion of the subtleties of the pattern.
During this practice, teachers not only mickey-mouse the language with appropriate music, they mickey-mouse the shared music-language features with other modalities. Thus, to explain pitch rises, teachers lift their arms along with pitch level increases. This works best when students themselves mimic the body movements. Total physical response (TPR) is a very effective way to teach vocabulary like “high pitched,” without the need of translations (Asher, 2009).
At times this may prove especially important, because not all cultures visualize pitch levels as "high versus low." Some use other metaphors, such as “hard versus soft” (Patel, 2008). Teachers may want to discuss with students how their culture interprets pitch, before assuming that everyone will understand western mental schemas. But the nice thing about physical mickey-mousing is that even if the student doesn’t interpret the movement as high or low, it is still bringing out the fact that something is moving.
So any other back-and-forth movement is just as effective. And although Gilbert (2008) recommends having students stretch rubber bands to teach variations in the duration of syllables, the stretching also facilitates learning pitch. Students stretch the bands more for higher notes. Rubber bands actually fit pitch changes just as well as they fit the length-length correspondence to duration, because the increased tension of rubber band stretching corresponds to the increased feeling of tension in the vocal chords accompanying higher pitched notes.
Seeing the contours
Diagrams to illustrate contours help students see the patterns. Diagrams support students who have a hard time "playing by ear." The diagrams mickey mouse - underscore - the auditory concepts with visual aids. Teachers use a musical staff on the board, such as the one illustrated in figure 2 that introduced the concept of scales back in the Musical and Linguistic Pitch section (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 2010).
But teachers must be careful about asking students to draw the rises and falls of intonation contours themselves. Chapman (2014) found that even after instruction, not only students but native-speaker teachers had a difficult and frustrating time translating what they heard into shapes, or into words like “rise-fall.”
Nonetheless when students in Chapman's study first predicted contour shapes by drawing contours on written copies of speech, they performed better than when just listening to speech. Chapman found that students’ ability to hear and decode intonation progressed most of all when the contours were already drawn for them on the text. This told the students what to listen for, and improved their intonation awareness.
So when teaching intonation with music, one ready-made tool is commercially available sheet music. Teachers might want to "connect the dots" of the individual notes with penciled-in smooth curves, however, before using sheet music as a graphic aid. That would more accurately depict spoken intonation.
One nice thing about sheet music is that sheet music for songs already has words written in. And teachers can white out and then change the lyrics - or find strictly instrumental music - and only need concern themselves with finding a melody contour that roughly matches the speech contour they are targeting. So non-musician teachers could write their own songs. They just need to match syllables with notes.
If a real musician plays these songs, however, the rhythm of the notes (their prescribed duration, for example) may distort the natural rhythm of the sentence. This normally doesn't matter aesthetically, but it does make the songs less valuable pedagogically, as less authentic speech. They could still be useful for having some fun with intonation, and for illustrating contours without reference to rhythm, so as to isolate the concepts.
Awareness, understanding and practice
When teaching music students a melody, Liperote (2006) has students sing them using a single, "neutral" syllable, like "bum." This relieves students of the potential confusion and cognitive load of processing word meanings. She recommends separating the notes so they stand out.
Liperote also conducts her music students. This works in language classes too. Liperote points to herself, sings the melody, then points to the class, or to groups or individuals, to indicate their turn. Keeping the commands simple, intuitive and wordless like this provides yet more relief from extraneous factors and cognitive overload, so students can focus on pitch patterns in isolation.
Since awareness raising is the central goal of intonation instruction, students should also discuss pitch patterns in both music and speech. Terrell (2012) uses the Youtube video "It's Really Bad Karaoke" (2006) below as a discussion starter. In addition to garbled pitch, this video illustrates other aspects of bad pronunciation, and so can be used to spark discussions about the other acoustic dimensions, which I discuss on the Timbre and Rhythm pages.
In Summary: In teaching intonation, awareness is more important than rules. One way to teach awareness and practice intonation effectively, and without needing musical training, is to accompany chants with a kazoo or keyboard. This is a prime example of synchronized underscoring, or mickey-mousing. The specific intonation to focus on first is grouping, because it is so common. Then the fall-rise pattern, because it is unique to English. After that, teachers can focus as needed on fall-versus-rise functions. To illustrate concepts and help focus learning on the mechanics of pitch production, it helps to isolate the pitch from extraneous factors like rhythm. It also helps to underscore intonation with other modalities than just hearing. Body movements and visual aids, like sheet music, provide further mickey-mousing. Finally, since awareness-raising is the central goal, students need opportunities to discuss intonation in music and speech.