Keys to Music Learning

Notational Audiation: Deep Dive with Sarah Boyd

• Krista Jadro and Hannah Mayo • Season 3 • Episode 11

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Sarah Boyd joins Keys to Music Learning to discuss emergent music literacy, notational audiation, and effective strategies for teaching reading and writing with an audiation-based approach. In this episode, we discuss:

  • Sarah’s journey into researching music literacy
  • How emergent music literacy prepares students for notation
  • Key research findings on notational audiation and its cognitive processes
  • The role of keyboard feel in the reading and writing process
  • Practical activities for introducing notation informally
  • How Sarah integrates emergent literacy into her teaching
  • The impact of reading and writing book clubs for Sarah's students
  • Recommended resources for teachers looking to deepen their understanding

Listen now and discover new insights into music literacy!

Show Notes:

Books & Research Mentioned:

Research Studies:

  • The Mental Representation of Music Notation – Brodsky (2008)
  • Thinking in an Objective Measure of Notation-Evoked Sound Imagery (2018)
  • Emergent Music Literacy Study – Dr. Suzanne Burton

Practical Tools & Websites:

Connect with Sarah Boyd:


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Introduction to Audiation-based Piano Instruction and Music Moves for Piano

Ready to learn more about audiation-based piano instruction and Music Moves for Piano? Visit Music Learning Academy for online courses, webinars, and resources.

Want to dive into audiation-based piano instruction? Check out Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe.

00:00:11 Krista Jadro

Welcome to Keys to Music Learning. I'm Krista Jadro of Music Learning Academy. 

 

00:00:16 Hannah Mayo

And I'm Hannah Mayo of Mayo Piano. 

 

00:00:19 Krista Jadro

Join us as we discuss common goals and challenges in the piano studio and offer research-based ideas and solutions to guide every one of your students to reach their full musical potential with audiation. 

 

00:00:31 Hannah Mayo

We are very excited today to have Sarah Boyd with us again. Welcome back, Sarah. 

 

00:00:39 Sarah Boyd

Thank you so much. It's so fun to be here. 

 

00:00:43 Hannah Mayo

Sarah is here today to talk to us about emergent music literacy and reading and writing the audiation-based way. And I know that this is a topic that many people are very curious about. How do we teach reading and writing? When do we teach reading and writing? So, we're really excited for you to be here with us today and talk about some of your research because you've done quite a bit of research in this area. 

 

00:01:13 Sarah Boyd

Yes, I actually went back to grad school so I could answer this big question for myself. How do I lead my students who have been, you know, building sequential skills in audiation from the first lesson and make a successful transition into applying it to notation? So, yeah, I had some big questions and I wanted some big answers, which is why I put the time in for research and I'm glad I did. I'm happy to share it. 

 

00:01:47 Hannah Mayo

And that was no small task because listeners, if you remember, Sarah is the mother of four and went back to grad school as a mom of four and a piano teacher. So those are some really big questions that I'm sure you found really big answers to. What else inspired this move to go back to grad school and research this topic? 

 

00:02:15 Sarah Boyd

Oh, yeah, thanks for asking. You know, I was fortunate to be mentored by Marilyn Lowe herself and to learn about Music Moves directly from her. And that was a wonderful experience. I was able to be in workshops with her and, you know, we're talking 2010 to 2012. However, I did not have the community or the support that Music Moves teachers have today because of this podcast and because of Music Learning Academy, Facebook groups. 

 

00:02:48 Sarah Boyd

So truly, I felt like I was pretty much on an island leading my students through Music Moves for Piano when I was starting this process back in 2010 and I was going along pretty good, you know, I had Jenny Fisher. Shout out to Jenny, because we're both based in Michigan. She's about an hour from me. 

 

00:03:08 Sarah Boyd

So, we would get together for, you know, these long brainstorming sessions. But when it came to the Reading and Writing Book, I really was just walking the students through the book reading what it said to do in the book and doing my best interpretation of it. However, I noticed that I was falling back on my traditional ways of teaching reading. 

 

00:03:32 Sarah Boyd

I had all this time and energy put into building audiation skills. But then I got to the reading and writing book, and I didn't really know how to apply those skills to this book. I went back to like, okay, well, we better, you know, name those lines and spaces. And if this is a C, then you got to remember that that line below it is the A and there's bumpy B. 

 

00:03:55 Sarah Boyd

Right? Because I don't know who else was taught bumpy B, but that's what I was taught by my piano teacher. So, my first, I like to call them my first-generation students. The students who I first led through this process from, you know, starting as first graders. And they, many of them stuck with me until, like, eighth, ninth grade, high school. 

 

00:04:14 Sarah Boyd

That first generation of the Reading and Writing Book was. It was very bumpy. It was a process. I felt I was letting the students down really, because they were struggling. And I think they felt defeated sometimes looking at those pages. And I felt defeated not really knowing the purpose of the pages. And having that experience, I knew when my second generation of students was coming through that I wanted to do things differently. So, it always goes back to the students, right? The students teach us and help us learn, and they inspire us to reach out and push ourselves when we know we want to know more. 

 

00:04:59 Krista Jadro

And when you went back to grad school, Sarah, was it your intention to look into this reading and writing process, or is that something that you decided when you were in school? 

 

00:05:09 Sarah Boyd

It actually was my intention from the beginning. And I was lucky that Heather Shouldice, of Everyday Musicality podcast. Shout out to Heather. I was lucky that she was only an hour from me. And it just so happened that one of the silver linings of the pandemic was that the grad program for Eastern Michigan went completely virtual in the fall of 2020. 

 

00:05:35 Sarah Boyd

And I saw my opening. I saw the chance that, hey, I can study with the professor I want to study with. And much of it will be accessible online. I jumped in, basically. It's one of those things that I wrote the email one day and the next day I was signed up. Didn't really think about it much past that. 

 

00:05:56 Krista Jadro

It was meant to be, Sarah. It was meant to be. So, you're in grad school. Your intention is to look into this reading and writing process, research it. Where did you start? What questions were you asking yourself? Where did you look? 

 

00:06:13 Sarah Boyd

I'm really glad you guys asked me this question because I went back and I looked at my first assignments in that fall 2020 semester. And I remember that I was assigned to present a chapter from a book called Musicianship Focused Curriculum and Assessment. This book is available on Amazon. It's also published by GIA. And several MLT practitioners have chapters in this book. 

 

00:06:41 Sarah Boyd

Heather assigned each person in the class a chapter to present to the class. This was a curriculum and assessment class. And so, I think she knew I was interested in music literacy. And so, she assigned me her chapter, which was called Developing Music Literacy. And I had to basically dissect this chapter and, you know, present it in a way that made sense to the class. 

 

00:07:06 Sarah Boyd

So, I went back and I found one of my first assignments, like what I actually presented. And I remember that I had to figure out what are the things the student needs to do before they are ready to approach music literacy? Like, what skills do they need to first establish and what's the readiness that they need to have for the formal instruction that reading music really does require. 

 

00:07:37 Sarah Boyd

And then the final step was how do we actually take those instructional steps, those steps to guide students through discrimination learning when we're applying it to notation? So really I hit the ground running. My first assignment was, and I highly recommend this book, it was to read that chapter of Heather's in Musicianship Focused Curriculum and Assessment. 

 

00:08:05 Krista Jadro

And who is that by? You said there's many authors and who is the editor? 

 

00:08:11 Sarah Boyd

That's edited by Colleen Conway, and she's at the University of Michigan and she's a great resource. I believe that she also is a major part of the GIML Audea. 

 

00:08:24 Krista Jadro

I don't think I've actually heard of this book before, so I wrote it down. We'll make sure to include the link in the show notes for this book for listeners who might be interested in reading it. 

 

00:08:35 Sarah Boyd

Yes, I would recommend this book especially for that chapter on developing music literacy because it was the first place that I walked through, from a teacher's standpoint, what was needed, what's the readiness, and then how to apply these skills in a discrimination-based way. You know, when we look at music notation, I think it's easy for our old glasses to be on the traditional lens that we think the student needs to all of a sudden apply all of these non-musical, non-audiation ideas to the page. As far as, like, make sure you memorize the lines and spaces, make sure you say the order of sharps in their order, like these types of theoretical concepts, really. And when I read this chapter, it was the first time someone was really teaching me how to walk a student who's begun with audiation through a successful path in notation. I love Marilyn's reading and writing books, but since there isn't a teacher guide, I definitely needed help understanding how to use those books. And this chapter was one of the first steps towards helping me understand that process. 

 

00:09:58 Hannah Mayo

So, when you talk about readiness for notational audiation, what does that look like? I know that's a loaded question. 

 

00:10:09 Sarah Boyd

That's a great question. You know, in a Music Moves for Piano lesson, we are moving and singing and chanting and creating from the very beginning. And those are the foundational vocabularies that the student is bringing to later build upon when they are going to begin reading and writing. So just, we can always go back to the language analogy, can't we? 

 

00:10:37 Sarah Boyd

Just like a child begins with listening and babbling in their native language, someone who is studying music is going to begin with building a listening vocabulary, listening, moving, imitating, speaking vocabulary, where they're singing, chanting, performing patterns, and then a conversing vocabulary we like to call it in language, which for us in music is creating and improvising. 

 

00:11:06 Sarah Boyd

And thankfully, all of those skills are built into the teacher's guides. In Music Moves for Piano. So even if you are not sure of how to do that, if you are following the teacher's guides, you are most likely giving your students those skills. I know that's what I was doing. I was just reading the teacher guide one line at a time. 

 

00:11:25 Sarah Boyd

So, my students had those, my first-generation students, they had those language vocabulary areas developed. They had a wide variety of listening, speaking, creating. And then, you know, we were going through what we like to call partial synthesis in Music Learning Theory, which is bringing context to the sounds we're hearing aurally. 

 

00:11:51 Sarah Boyd

Right? So, it's partial synthesis because the student is going to name the context by what they're hearing. And the student who has developed these early vocabularies, singing, moving, creating, they're able to recognize from just hearing whether something is major or minor or whether something is duple or triple. And once a student can bring context to what they're hearing, that's when they're ready for symbolic association. 

 

00:12:22 Sarah Boyd

So that is a long answer to what the readinesses are. But it really does go back to the skill learning sequence, and it does go back to following the steps in the teacher's guide. You can know that those activities are preparing your students for reading and you know, students will ask me, when are we going to read? 

 

00:12:45 Sarah Boyd

And I love to tell them, well, we already are. Because we are beginning to read from the very beginning. Readinesses do prepare students for reading. So, I tell them we are beginning to read. 

 

00:12:58 Krista Jadro

And Marilyn would always say that Gordon said that she had to write lesson plans, and I'm so grateful that she did, because when you're first starting, especially with the formal instruction of book one, it's overwhelming. And she also said for listeners who might just be starting out, she said, it takes three years to really, truly get comfortable with any of these books. 

 

00:13:17 Krista Jadro

And I believe it. 

 

00:13:21 Sarah Boyd

It's so great to remember these reminders and give yourself time. Absolutely. 

 

00:13:28 Krista Jadro

So you mentioned the chapter written by Heather Shouldice in the Musicianship Focused Curriculum and Assessment book. What other sources did you use as you were kind of diving into this research? 

 

00:13:44 Sarah Boyd

Well, honestly, the next source I looked at was I began to realized that I needed to branch out and read what other MLT practitioners were writing about notational audiation and the process of reading. Like I said, I have always read the teacher guides by Marilyn Lowe, and they are gold. But there's so much to be learned when we read what other MLT practitioners have written. 

 

00:14:16 Sarah Boyd

So next I read Weaving It All Together by Heather Shouldice, and she has really practically applied these principles of leading a student through the skill learning sequence in a classroom. And even though the MLT piano setting is usually a small group or maybe a private lesson, everything in that book definitely, again, walked me very clearly through how am I going to take a student, you know, fromsymbolic association, which is that very first time that the student encounters written notation and the teacher leads them through it. 

 

00:14:57 Sarah Boyd

Because symbolic association is a part of the discrimination level of learning, which is when the teacher is modeling the answer. All of those, like, very clear, practical steps. In her book, Weaving It All Together was my next tool. 

 

00:15:15 Hannah Mayo

So, Sarah, with symbolic association, that's kind of like a first step for sort of bridging over to reading and writing. What does that look like for you now? What does symbolic association look like whenever you're getting students started? Because I think that's probably one of the big mysteries. It's like, how do you actually start this process? 

 

00:15:40 Sarah Boyd

Yes. And for me, I think at first, I thought, oh, well, now the student's ready to read, and I put the familiar pattern in front of them and they read it. However, it's actually the opposite. I read it to them. So, it looks like the teacher saying, you know, here are those familiar patterns that we've been singing. 

 

00:16:04 Sarah Boyd

I want you to look while I sing it. And so (Sarah sings) If the first pattern I've been singing is Do Mi So or Mi So Do, I would sing to them pattern one, Mi So Do pattern two, Re Ti Re. And I would sing the whole, you know, whether it's all four in a row or all 12 in a row, depending on the time or how much we are doing that day. 

 

00:16:37 Sarah Boyd

I would sing definitely a string of four in a row to the student. And then I would say, now it's your turn. Look and read. And they would sing it, while they're looking, back to me after they've heard and watched and seen it modeled for them. So basically, it's entirely from the teacher, when it's in symbolic association and you're teaching the student what those words mean, to associate the sounds that are familiar with the symbols that are on the page. And when you break it down that way, that term symbolic association doesn't seem quite as scary, right? Because when I first heard it, I was like, I can't even get that in my mind. 

 

00:17:23 Sarah Boyd

I'm never going to get this. But really and truly, I'm taking those familiar sounds and I'm matching them with the look of the notation and modeling it to the student. 

 

00:17:34 Krista Jadro

And when you did this with your second generation of students, what differences did you notice? 

 

00:17:41 Sarah Boyd

Well, right away, I noticed more comfort with the process because they were being guided. So, the student was, instead of being dropped into inference learning, where I was asking them to infer and identify, I was instead showing them what we were doing, and they were able to recognize. So, I like to remember how Heather Shouldice taught me the difference between discrimination and inference being recognition for discrimination. 

 

00:18:16 Sarah Boyd

I was teaching them, here's what we've done. Here's what it looks like. Now you can recognize this, and I'll show you what it sounds like. And then the difference between that and inference learning, which is, here's something new. You haven't seen this before. And can you put the pieces together for yourself and identify what you're seeing or what you're hearing, which both are excellent, and we need both levels of learning. 

 

00:18:41 Sarah Boyd

But it's really important for the teacher to know what level of learning they are asking the student to practice, which was a big question of mine. I did not know when I was leading a student in discrimination versus inference the first time through. So that was one thing I saw the student be more comfortable because I was allowing them to do recognition before identification. 

 

00:19:07 Sarah Boyd

And also, I had prepared them with a greater experience in emergent music literacy, which we haven't really talked about. But that was another part of the research that I encountered in grad school. The whole idea that a student can be immersed and exposed to notation long before we're asking them to recognize it, just through tools of finding and looking and matching, much like a student is immersed in their native language before they're learning to read and write when they're, you know, you think of a child who might be a preschool age is recognizing words all around them in culture very similar to that, that can be applied to music notation, which, again, I learned that from weaving it all together from Heather Shouldice’s book. 

 

00:20:06 Krista Jadro

So that brings us back to the research and the sources that you use. Are there any other kind of major research studies or books that you read that had an impact on your research? 

 

00:20:22 Sarah Boyd

Okay, yes, there are quite a few others. 

 

00:20:25 Krista Jadro

We would love to hear about them. 

 

00:20:27 Sarah Boyd

I will first mention that when I encountered the idea of emergent music literacy, right away I went and I said, I have to find out, has there been any research done using emergent music literacy? And I only found one study. But actually, Krista, I think you and I talked about this study because it's with Suzanne Burton. 

 

00:20:47 Sarah Boyd

Dr. Suzanne Burton, who studied her own students and her ability to introduce them to rhythmic notation before they were reading and how the student was able to use rhythmic notation with understanding even before having gotten to symbolic association. So, her study really changed my understanding of the amount that I could be doing of preparation and readiness for students before they get to the reading books. 

 

00:21:23 Krista Jadro

She was just beginning that research when I was a grad student there, so I remember her talking about it. And I was teaching early childhood classes at a local Montessori school as well at the time. And I remember having my students giving them paper and then just having them explore rhythm notation, and they would go up and write their chants on the board. 

 

00:21:41 Krista Jadro

And it was a lot of fun to explore with them. 

 

00:21:45 Sarah Boyd

I really loved how she stressed the informal exposure to notation at this stage. So just like a student in Keyboard Games is a part of a music environment, and we are bringing them into informal guidance. We are not correcting necessarily or expecting them to play everything the exact same way. We are modeling it so that same idea could be applied to notation, which is what I read in her study, that, yeah, students can experiment with their own, writing down rhythm chants or reading each other's chants or the teacher writing down the chant that the student says and showing them this is what it looks like. 

 

00:22:29 Sarah Boyd

Those ideas opened up a whole new world for my students, which now really has made them more comfortable once we get to the Reading and Writing Book. Because these pieces of music, these ideas, these parts of the note, what the note is made of and how there's space notes and line notes, how it goes left to right, up and down, these ideas are more comfortable to them. 

 

00:22:53 Hannah Mayo

Sarah, are there any other activities or games that you want to highlight in the emergent music literacy umbrella, like the things that you do with students before they get to the Reading and Writing Music Notation books that Music Moves has? 

 

00:23:14 Sarah Boyd

So, actually, I think one of the most helpful ideas is to remember a little sequence that I developed with a few other MLT/Music Moves teachers. We worked on these ideas together. So, Celeste Watson especially, and I worked on these ideas together, of whatever you want them to notice in notation, you can first ask the student to find it. 

 

00:23:42 Sarah Boyd

Then you can ask them to build it, like with a magnet staff or with pennies and paper or whatever type of manipulative you might have. Then you can ask them to match it. Maybe you have flashcards where there, you know, here's all the song to sing flashcards. Will you find me all of the ones that have one sharp at the beginning, or will you use these tonal pattern flashcards? 

 

00:24:10 Sarah Boyd

And will you find me the flashcards that have only space notes so then you can ask them to match and then finally copy where they actually are writing something down. And I also know that Janna Olson helped me with this idea, so I have to say Janna as well. I spoke with her in detail about these preparation activities. 

 

00:24:31 Sarah Boyd

But, yeah, the idea of find, build, match, and then copy can be applied to really anything you see on the page, whether it's, will you find all of the notes that have black note heads? Will you build me black note heads using the note parts that we have? Anything that you see, especially in the beginning of the Reading and Writing Book, there is section one, which is about the parts of the note and the parts of the staff as well. 

 

00:25:04 Sarah Boyd

And then Section 6, which is about line notes and space notes and how they are different spaces apart, basically about intervals and stacking triads. Anything in those two sections of the book can be broken down into that idea of find, build, match, and copy. 

 

00:25:26 Hannah Mayo

All right, so we've got our emergent music literacy going. We've got our informal approach to note parts and the staff. What happens next and what research did you come upon to tell you what happens next?

 

00:25:46 Sarah Boyd

Yes, I would say where I went next, especially with my own learning, was finding out what is actually being said about notational audiation outside of Music Learning Theory. I greatly value the work of Dr. Gordon, and honestly, it changed my life when I met him in 2008. And I have not looked back. 

 

00:26:11 Sarah Boyd

I have not looked back since. However, I had not spent time reading what else was being written about notational audiation. And so, I actually did a project where we were assigned a literature review, which means you have to pick topic and read as much literature on the topic, as much research literature on the topic as you can, and then find common threads and summarize it. 

 

00:26:39 Sarah Boyd

So, my goal was to read as many studies as I could on notational audiation, which led me down a humongous rabbit hole of neuroscience and introduced me to many new words where I had to read these studies, some of them several times, to understand them. But what I found, which was really encouraging, was that almost, not almost, every study I read at one point said the word context. 

 

00:27:13 Sarah Boyd

And they said in order to have someone successfully audiate notation, they have to understand context. So, one of the first studies I read involved just defining the term. And it's called The Mental Representation of Music Notation. This was first studied in 2008. It's really one of the first studies that looked at notational audition. 

 

00:27:45 Sarah Boyd

And the researcher, Brodsky, his work was basically to find out what is the cognitive process? What does the brain do when someone is audiating notation, when they are actually hearing the sound of the printed page without ever hearing it out loud, without making any sounds, when it's fully mental, what is the brain doing? 

 

00:28:07 Sarah Boyd

And his result was finding that actually the vocal cords are moving. There's actual muscle movement in your throat, and it's like a deep, deep muscle movement, but you are actually moving muscles when you are thinking the notation in your head. And also, your brain is… It's called motor imagery. It is actually bringing up, like putting together images of what you are thinking. 

 

00:28:40 Sarah Boyd

And a different study then built on that first one in 2018, and they found that the less accurate a singer was, the larger they had to move their vocal folds when they were thinking music, when they were thinking notation. And so, they tied the idea of accurate singing, being able to sing in tune with a relation to context, with the understanding of a resting tone. 

 

00:29:11 Sarah Boyd

The more accurate someone was able to sing, the greater ability they had to build an auditory image. They called it the auditory image, meaning notational audiation, understanding what the page sounded like without hearing it. So those two ideas really gave me, you know, just an excitement. It validated what we do, what we spend our time doing in piano lessons. 

 

00:29:38 Sarah Boyd

We spend time building singing, right? We spend time building this musicianship in our students. The songs to sing that are written into each lesson. That's why I tell my students, well, you are reading, because those songs to sing are going to help them with their notational audiation, their accuracy in singing. 

 

00:30:03 Sarah Boyd

And I would say the one. If I could sum up one other point, because truly, it's a whole rabbit hole. Like I mentioned, there's a lot here once you go down and you start reading. But it's exciting to find out that notational audiation is a term that is being widely used. It's actually been labeled as an emerging term in mental practice. 

 

00:30:27 Sarah Boyd

A study in 2019 included notational audiation in its list of emerging terms. So, it is not just a word that we are saying in the MLT circle. It is a word that you'll find in research. However, I found that on the whole, many of the research studies came to conclusions that they didn't want. 

 

00:30:48 Sarah Boyd

They didn't find a lot of success with the groups of people they studied. The musicians they studied, many of them were not successful with their notational audiation tests, and they found a small percentage could do what they set out to find, could be successful with notational audiation. And one researcher even wondered, is it even a big deal if we can barely find the skill in musicians? 

 

00:31:16 Sarah Boyd

Which, you know, it goes to show that the understanding of the skills that build audiation, the sequencing, that's still something that needs to be developed, and it's growing. But the understanding of what builds audiation is still not something that has truly been included in these studies as far as what I've read. 

 

00:31:45 Krista Jadro

So, if the researchers are using the term notational audiation, are they mentioning at all in the research studies the development of being able to audiate or even what audiation means? 

 

00:32:00 Sarah Boyd

They actually are using the term audiation in a way that we would use differently because they're mainly saying auditory imagery, which we know that audiation is the comprehension and the understanding that one brings to music whether it's heard out loud or not heard out loud. But auditory imagery, that inner hearing, is what you find more often in these studies. 

 

00:32:29 Sarah Boyd

And so, yes, I understand what you're saying. They are not truly understanding what they're asking is what I think. Yeah, if I can say one more study that really excited me. It was the study in 2018 called Thinking in Music: An Objective Measure of Notation Evoked Sound Imagery in Musicians, and you can hear, even in that title, they've used a little bit of a different term, notation, evoked sound imagery. 

 

00:33:02 Sarah Boyd

So, it's like they're saying audition, but not quite understanding what they're asking. However, this test, it's a test you can actually take for yourself. You can go to www.thinkinginmusic.com and you can test how well you can audiate notation. And the way they are testing and getting their results is basically if the participant has to decide if two different sequences match harmonically. 

 

00:33:34 Sarah Boyd

And I found across several studies what was successful, what the researchers were finding was successful for a person with notational audiation was, like I mentioned before, they understood context, but they understood harmonic function. And this study from 2018, the way they are determining if someone has notational audiation is truly if they can hear if two different examples match harmonically, one will be slightly different than the other. And the person, person has to determine if the one they heard out loud and the one that they only can see match harmonically. So that's just another support for what we do in Music Moves because we are using chord roots from the beginning, even in Keyboard Games, we can sing the chord roots of the familiar folk tunes in that book. 

 

00:34:29 Sarah Boyd

And of course, the student is learning how to harmonize their folk tunes in Book One and beyond. So that harmonic understanding is a huge piece of notational audiation, and that is being found in research. 

 

00:34:42 Hannah Mayo

Yeah. It also validates the whole tonal learning sequence of our familiar patterns, which outline, tonic and dominant, and then later subdominant and then other tonalities which infers, you know, secondary harmonies in major and minor. And just like what a validation that is. 

 

00:35:04 Sarah Boyd

It truly is. You know, when I took the test, because I obviously I tested myself, I thought, well, can I do this? It's a very difficult test, but I was about 80% successful, which I found like, I thought, like, okay, that's pretty good. If I had taken that test before, having gone through my own musicianship growth with Music Learning Theory, with my own understanding of the skill learning sequence, and, you know, doing it myself, I would not be able to take that test if I did not have the knowledge and my own audiation skills that I have now, which really, I built from the ground up. You know, I built from listening to the Pattern CD, singing the songs without words, books by Dr. Edwin Gordon, and, you know, listening to the Music Moves CDs so yes, everything we are doing, it is. 

 

00:35:57 Sarah Boyd

It is going to be something that's essential for the student when they go to reading and writing. Which again is why I tell the student that, yes, you are learning to read music from the very first lesson, just looks a little different. 

 

00:36:13 Krista Jadro

And you've presented this information to teachers and just wondering how they have been receptive of these findings in all of your research. 

 

00:36:26 Sarah Boyd

Yeah, I've been able to present this with teachers local to me and then also with a wide variety of teachers through webinars or even through the GIML International Conference last summer. And I found that on the whole, especially Music Moves teachers are excited to know, first about the idea of applying these emergent music literacy activities to the lessons from the very beginning. 

 

00:36:54 Sarah Boyd

Building that into your Keyboard Games plan. Right. Like this is something that can be built in. Maybe one student is at the piano doing their performance piece at the end of the lesson, and the other student is built doing a match game or finding note parts. That idea is a practical way that teachers have been excited to apply it. 

 

00:37:20 Sarah Boyd

I'd say the other feedback I've been given from teachers is that it feels a little bit like a relief knowing that there is a clear path to help your student go through reading and writing. It doesn't have to remain a mystery, especially knowing that you as the teacher are the guide and the model in that very, very first stage of symbolic association. 

 

00:37:47 Sarah Boyd

And the student doesn't have to all of a sudden magically put these things together. Sometimes your students will. I've had students who, they get to the point and they're ready to look at the notation and they can sing it because they have the skills. For them, perhaps it's partly their aptitude, partly what their strength is, but for others, they'll need to do every single step with you, and that's okay. 

 

00:38:14 Sarah Boyd

You'll be able to help them succeed. So, I'd say that teachers have been receptive, however, I mean, there's always more questions and a lot of times the answer is “it depends” because it's going to. It is going to be different for every student. 

 

00:38:33 Hannah Mayo

Yeah, we drive a lot of people crazy with that answer, but that really is the answer a lot of the time. I have a question about… This is sort of going back, but I just thought of it. The concept of keyboard feel. Can we talk about how keyboard feel and having a really good handle on all of your essential keyboard skills plays into the reading and writing process? 

 

00:39:05 Hannah Mayo

And the reason I'm bringing this up is because in the Music Moves curriculum, which many of our listeners use or are thinking about using. There are questions about why we don't do reading and writing until about midway through Book Three. And part of that reason that we know is because in Book Three, there's a lot of keyboard skills that are introduced and a lot of developing of older keyboard skills. 

 

00:39:37 Hannah Mayo

So, I'm wondering if any of your research or the use of this research in your own teaching has sort of led you to any Aha moments about keyboard skills and keyboard feel as that relates to the reading and writing process. 

 

00:39:57 Sarah Boyd

I'm so glad you brought that part up. You know, that's actually something Janna talked to me quite a bit about, the need to connect the look of the notation with the feel of the keyboard. And we know as pianists, we have patterns that will fall under our hands, and many times these have grown out of our skills, whether it's arpeggios, the cadence, the scale. 

 

00:40:27 Sarah Boyd

So actually, a study in 2019, that it was a case study, it looked at just four pianists, and they were asking which of these pianists made the most successful attempt after mentally practicing notation. And then they interviewed each pianist and the one who was able to most accurately play a piece of music that they had only mentally practiced. 

 

00:40:57 Sarah Boyd

They had not heard it aloud. They were not able to actually play any part of it. They could only look at it, and then they needed to play it. The one who was the most successful, when she was interviewed, she said she was. I'm quoting this from the article. She grasped larger wholes, she identified repeated patterns. She used comparison, and she generalized relationships. And those are all pieces that we take from our keyboard skills. I actually love allowing my students to see the look of the skill while they're playing it. So, if you look on Student Book One, page, page 45, when C is DO, the arpeggio and the cadence is actually printed on that page. I think this is an opportunity for our students to do exactly what you're saying, Hannah, to connect the look of the notation with the feel of the skill. 

 

00:41:58 Sarah Boyd

And I think the earlier they can connect those two, the more success they'll have when we do go into reading and writing, into unfamiliar notation. But if a student can easily grasp the feel of what an arpeggio, you know how it looks. Line, line, line, or space, space, space. If they can easily grasp the feel under their hand and notice the connection to what it looks like, that's something that I've seen my own students succeed in. 

 

00:42:30 Sarah Boyd

I've even tried this out when I'm giving them rote repertoire to notice. You know, oh, hey, this kind of looks like Springtime. You know, you just played Springtime and here's a piece where it has the same look of line space line space line space. And there's your DO right there. And they've noticed the connection between the shape of that pentascale with the look of the pentascale. 

 

00:43:03 Krista Jadro

So, when looking at a piece of piano repertoire, there is a lot on the page. And Dr. Gordon was not a pianist. He did not play piano. So, his skill learning sequence, while it gives us so much information, kind of only takes us so far in the piano world, if that makes sense. 

 

00:43:25 Krista Jadro

Right, because really, we are dealing with a lot on the page. The students are dealing with so much on the page. What research do you feel needs to be done for more understanding of notational audiation when it comes to the piano world? 

 

00:43:41 Sarah Boyd

Oh, that's a great question. Well, it's so amazing that we have Dr. Gordon's research to guide us with the skill learning sequence and then to know that we had Marilyn Lowe, who is such, you know, she was an excellent pianist in herself, an excellent piano pedagogue. I encourage everyone to read the history of Music Moves. 

 

00:44:06 Sarah Boyd

I know this is a side note, but really Music Moves grew out of her, her excellent piano teaching. She had already been doing things differently, so her own leading us through Music Learning Theory as applied to the piano. That's really why we love the teacher guides, right? Because we have her guidance. 

 

00:44:30 Sarah Boyd

However, like you're saying, I do agree that we need more research in the field of notational audiation, especially applied to piano, because the research I read, really, it's still asking questions that they're not including audiation as part of the understanding for where they're starting from. For example, in one study from 2010, they studied, if children were more familiar with a melody, would they be able to play more correct notes when they first played it after hearing it several times? 

 

00:45:10 Sarah Boyd

And of course, they found that yes, the children that were familiar with the melody played significantly more correct notes than those who were not familiar with the melody. However, this is something that it wasn't from an audition-based study. It was from just researchers studying what makes piano students successful. There's still a lot of questions in the research world of what makes a piano student successful with reading music and what makes them struggle with reading music. 

 

00:45:41 Sarah Boyd

I'd like to point to Eric Bluestine's blog actually, and Eric Bluestine, his book is called The Ways Children Learn Music you can also find Eric Bluestein's blog of the same title, the Ways Children Learn Music, on the Web. And if you look on his sidebar, you can click on Music Literacy as one of the titles of categories that he's written on. 

 

00:46:09 Sarah Boyd

He actually has written, and this was part of his dissertation, the Idea of Applying Phonics and the Whole Word Approach in Language to Music. So, I think it would be very interesting for, first of all, for this to be more widely known. It wasn't something I knew about until I got to meet him this summer at GIML Conference. 

 

00:46:37 Sarah Boyd

And he's actually asking the question if it's possible to teach students tonal reading through individual pitches that are in a context. So, he's giving students still context. They're still beginning from tonality inside of a key, still beginning with harmonic function, still beginning with the familiar basis that we use with singing, moving, creating. 

 

00:47:08 Sarah Boyd

But then there is something to be said for understanding individual pitches inside of a pattern. And I won't be able to fully describe what he's written about, but I do encourage people to read his blog post, which again, you'll find on The Ways Children Learn Music. But he, when he studied this, he found no significant difference between groups that read whole pattern, individual pitches, whole pattern and then individual pitches. 

 

00:47:40 Sarah Boyd

And then the fourth group was individual pitches plus whole pattern. He didn't find any significant difference between the students when they were doing tonal reading, which was they were elementary students, they were doing sight singing. I do find that my Music Moves students, sometimes we need to point out individual pitches. And I'll do this through saying DO is the, you know, first space, and I'm going to sing the other pitches. 

 

00:48:10 Sarah Boyd

But I want you to sing do every time the first space comes up. You're going to be in charge of DO. And we'll sing a string of four patterns, especially if we're doing something that's in an unfamiliar key that we haven't read in before. So, the idea of understanding an individual pitch inside of a context, I think is something newer that we haven't talked about as much. 

 

00:48:33 Sarah Boyd

But it's real. It's something I've been experimenting with and that I would love to see explored more. 

 

00:48:41 Hannah Mayo

Yeah, I think Eric refers to the individual pitches. He calls them phenomes. And it's a very interesting blog post. I actually want to go back and read it. But also, if you're interested in this, the Leonard Bernstein lectures, there's a lot of pointing to this idea of language/music. If this is a word a phrase is this. 

 

00:49:16 Hannah Mayo

And can we break music down to like, what's the smallest unit of measure we can possibly break down music too? It's very fascinating to hear him talk about it from not an MLT perspective, but just a musical genius perspective. 

 

00:49:36 Sarah Boyd

I feel like there's more to be researched and read and explored for students in piano, especially because as piano teachers and people who are trying to apply MLT to piano, we encounter so much repertoire. And that's a wonderful thing about our strand of MLT, our application to MLT. You know, I feel like the amount of reading and writing that our students can do is usually much greater than perhaps another strand because for one, we may have our students for 10 years. 

 

00:50:22 Sarah Boyd

I have students who I've taught from first grade to senior year of high school, and so I have a long time to explore reading and writing with them. Also, we have many times just a one-on-one relationship or a small group relationship. So, we have these opportunities to explore reading and writing and we have such a wonderful humongous amount of piano repertoire for our students to explore. 

 

00:50:48 Sarah Boyd

So, I do feel like reading and writing is especially a big question in the piano world for that reason. But if I could mention one other resource, it would be... I know I've mentioned a lot, but I just keep reading. I can't stop reading on this topic. This fall I read Thinking and Playing Music by Sheryl Iott and she is a teacher who taught widely at universities, especially in the state of Michigan, but she has done a humongous amount of research in the area of applying these cognitive approaches, the neuroscience behind learning music with an MMLT lens and two piano lessons. 

 

00:51:34 Sarah Boyd

So, her research as well in her book Thinking and Playing Music. Again, so much to break down. But if I took one thing away from that book, it was also context. So, what we are giving our students in context of tonalities, meters, and then allowing them to use what they know through improvisation, that cannot be overestimated. 

 

00:51:59 Sarah Boyd

I was just reading again last night in preparation for the podcast and came across a part of Sheryl's book where it talked about improvisation being the number one way to apply what you know and to actually cement it. Just like Marilyn said, improvisation cements learning. 

 

00:52:18 Hannah Mayo

And Sarah, you have this really cool concept that I would love for you to talk a little bit about. It's a book club, a reading and writing book club that you do with your students. Could you tell us about that? 

 

00:52:30 Sarah Boyd

You know what I. I would love to share about this. The book club idea basically came out of my second generation students needing to finish our Reading and Writing Book One. They were seventh graders. The summer was coming up and I was like, I gotta get you guys to finish this book. We've started it in fifth grade. 

 

00:52:48 Sarah Boyd

What are we doing? And I said, you know what, we're all gonna come together. We're not gonna do this separately. We're gonna call it book club. And it's always going to have snacks because book club has snacks. So, it was 90 minutes long. And we met six times that summer and we finished the book together. 

 

00:53:06 Sarah Boyd

And on our last, at the, you know, the sixth meeting when we finished the book and we were finishing with a really fun composing activity at the back of the book, everything we did together. So, we composed together. You know, you write the first two measures and you write the second. 

 

00:53:23 Sarah Boyd

Give us the rhythm pattern for the second two measures. It became a complete collaborative effort. You know, we celebrated and we had ice cream that final meeting. So, it's something that I've grown and so for me it's the summertime. Just because that's the way it fits into my schedule. Maybe in the future it will be a school year activity as well. 

 

00:53:44 Sarah Boyd

But I do find that my students have a little bit more time in the summer. I don't teach lessons in the summer like regular, like our year-round lessons. So, I switch my focus to book club. It's still 90 minutes because we need that time. It allows us to go in depth with the projects and get a lot done. 

 

00:54:05 Sarah Boyd

And this summer I'll have a book two, reading and writing. Book two, book club. I'll have book one, book club. And then I'm also. So, students, if you're listening to this, I'm adding an emergent music literacy book club, which we don't have a book to go along with that. Right. Because we're starting before reading and writing book technically. 

 

00:54:26 Sarah Boyd

But we will be doing all the activities that we've discussed in a book club setting. 

 

00:54:33 Krista Jadro

I'd be really interested in hearing how this emergent literacy book club goes because I just have a feeling that those kids are going to come out with some things that surprise you. Just with their knowledge and their creativity and kind of putting all the pieces together. 

 

00:54:50 Sarah Boyd

I'm excited, I'm excited to use, you know, basically Keyboard Games, folk tunes, a lot of what we said, find, build, match, copy, a lot of those activities. And it will be my first time trying. So, I'll have more to share with you. 

 

00:55:07 Hannah Mayo

Are there any other just final resources that you want to share with our listeners. 

 

00:55:14 Sarah Boyd

Well, you know what, I am so grateful first of all for this opportunity. So, thank you for having me on and having me back. I would love to share a couple things. I think we've mentioned Thinking and Playing Music by Sheryl Iott, but I'm also wanting to mention Piano Patterns, which is a brand new book hot off the presses by Andy Mullen. 

 

00:55:39 Sarah Boyd

I actually recently got my spiral bound copy in the mail, which I definitely used my MTNA discount to print because it's very large. But Andy Mullen brought his ability to really clearly define the steps of the skill learning sequence. He brought it to the piano world and I'm really grateful. I actually, worked on, you know, I gave him some feedback during the process along with some other teachers, Celeste Watson and Scarlette and Abby. 

 

00:56:15 Sarah Boyd

We all looked at it with him and he really did take into account what would supplement well with Marilyn's reading and writing book. So, the idea of his book is not to replace at all the Reading and Writing book that Marilyn wrote for Music Moves for Piano, but it is meant to support it. 

 

00:56:33 Sarah Boyd

And so, he has reading benchmarks in this book that even if you just flip to one of the pages and give your students some extra material to read with their familiar patterns, I really do think it can supplement well with what we're doing. 

 

00:56:50 Hannah Mayo

And we were just taking a little peek at Sarah's copy of that book and Krista and I both said we are very interested in these reading benchmarks marks. So, thank you for sharing that with us. And let's not forget, this isn't so much for the students, but let's not forget that Sarah has quite a few webinars on the Music Learning Academy webinar library dedicated to emergent music literacy, notational audiation, and showing teachers how to practically apply all of this research that you have done. 

 

00:57:32 Hannah Mayo

So, we definitely want you teachers who might be interested in this, if you haven't seen those webinars yet, go to Music Learning Academy and check out the webinar library and look for Sarah's lovely face and you'll see her webinar offerings there. 

 

00:57:48 Krista Jadro

And also, if you can share your Instagram handle, Sarah is one of the… I don't go on Instagram very often, but I love following all these wonderful audiation-based piano instruction teachers. And Sarah, you always have such wonderful posts on there. So, can you share that as well with the listeners? 

 

00:58:05 Sarah Boyd

Yes. So, I'm over there having fun on Instagram sharing clips of my students. I actually have a series called MLT Monday where I try to answer question an MLT question every Monday. So actually, my most recent one was what is Music Moves for Piano? But you'll find me at Piano Vine Studio. Vine like Grapevine. 

 

00:58:30 Sarah Boyd

Because in my studio we are always growing and learning, myself included. So that's why it's Piano Vine Studio. 

 

00:58:37 Hannah Mayo

And you always offer really thorough, thoughtful responses whenever I see you answering questions in the intro group. So, on behalf of the Introduction to Audiation-Based Music Instruction Facebook group, we would like to say thank you for always being so thoughtful and thorough in your responses as well. 

 

00:59:04 Sarah Boyd

Oh man. Thank you. It is a community effort. We are all here to learn and grow together. So, I'm really grateful to be in community with both you and the teachers who are listening and beyond. 

 

00:59:18 Krista Jadro

We covered a lot in today's episode so we will be sure to put every resource that Sarah talked about in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you soon.