A Matter of (Pitch) Perception

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Tim Brown, Ph.D., looked across his office, pressed “record” and cued Margie Orem.

“Laaaa,” Orem sang: A above middle C, precisely on pitch at 440 hertz.

Brown is a professor and researcher in the University of California San Diego School of Medicine Department of Neurosciences and the director of the Sentia Laboratory for Childhood Systems Neuroscience. He was working to assemble a set of audio files with Orem, director of the San Diego Children’s Choir, who Brown said “has excellent pitch.” The files were used in a study that showed pitch-matching is often an intellectual strength among young children who show lower academic performance.

The research revealed that an individual’s ability to produce pitch is not linked to long-standing socioeconomic predictors of early learning success, such as the mother’s education level, household income or language spoken at home, nor is the ability correlated with grades of reading and math ability.

The study, “Vocal pitch matching in early childhood is a relative cognitive strength among low academic performers,” published in the International Journal of Music in Early Childhood, has implications for the neuroscience of early childhood learning, specifically theories regarding the existence of multiple intelligences. The work also validates some long-standing classroom observations of young children by teachers.

Brown hopes the work will give educators some leverage in helping to close the persistent “achievement gap” among kids in the early years of their education. Brown’s work focuses on translational research — applying neuroscience theory toward educational practice. He has been working with school districts as a neuroscientist since 1991. For this study, he collaborated with the Vista Unified School District.

Brown and his colleagues asked educators for their input: “We went to teachers and said, ‘What's important to you? What do you want us to study that's going on in your classroom? What frustrates you? What's something that some brain scientists could help you with?’”

The overwhelming answer, he said, was the achievement gap.

Brown said he heard many variations of the same story: the kid who seems smart as a whip, but trails in both math and literacy skills. Slow development in both math and literacy cluster to a surprising degree, but Brown said,“We think music is special, because it crosses some of the sociodemographic boundaries that seem to be driving the correlations between these other abilities.”

He looked to music as an area of cognition that would generate some data to fill the gap between the psychologists’ “super theory-heavy” concepts of multiple intelligences and what teachers observe every day.

The methodology is simple: Brown and his team go into a transitional kindergarten classroom of four- and five-year-olds. A student puts on headphones, and a researcher plays one of Orem’s sung notes. “And we just ask the kids: ‘Sing exactly what you’ve heard,’” Brown said.

The students’ responses to the “laa’s,” “daa’s,” “gaa’s” and other vocalizations at varying pitches were recorded and analyzed for accuracy in reproducing the syllable as well as the pitch. A second series of tests was added as a check.

“We wanted to distinguish pitch perception versus pitch production,” Brown explained. “Maybe you can distinguish differences in pitch, but you just can’t sing very well.”

For the pitch perception test, the children heard two tones through headphones and were asked if the tones were the same or different. Brown said that the tabulated results of the pitch reproduction and recognition tests showed no connection to student levels of achievement in math or reading.

Brown said the pitch studies offer a peek into neuroscientists’ theories regarding cognitive development and the existence of multiple mechanisms of learning among academically struggling children, a concept that comes up often in conversations with teachers.

The implications, Brown said, may be that cognitive theory about general, unitary mechanisms of intelligence (or “g”) may need to be revised, and in lay terms, “there are multiple ways to be smart,” he added.

“We’ve basically demonstrated the existence of an area of alternative cognitive strength,” he said. “The teachers think this is really neat, because it validates what they’ve been talking about for 25 years.”

Brown said he hopes that educators could harness this alternative cognitive strength, exercising what neuroscientists call “cognitive mutualism,” the concept that a strong area of thinking can be leveraged to develop less-developed areas. He also said teachers could use positive reinforcement as a more immediate way to use a student’s high score in an area of alternative cognition.

“Imagine that you're a child, who shows up to transitional kindergarten,” he said. “You're not even five years old yet, and you're already behind on things. Children are very smart, and they probably very quickly started to develop an academic identity of being behind.”

He added that the development of a behind-everyone-else mentality might be eroded by the teacher reminding the student of the areas where they shine.

“To me, this information could be used to bolster the self-efficacy, the confidence, the sense of self worth in the classroom,” Brown said. “Maybe you can improve their enjoyment of school in general, by conveying to them a sense that, ‘Hey, all kids struggle with some things, but you're really good at this!’”

The study received support from: Sandra Timmons and Richard Sandstrom; Richard and Carol Hertzberg; San Diego Children’s Choir; and the National Endowment for the Arts Research Labs program.

In addition to Orem, Brown’s collaborators and co-authors on the paper include Sarah Dowling and Setu Shiroya, his colleagues at UC San Diego’s Sentia Laboratory for Childhood Systems Neuroscience. Other co-authors/collaborators are David Gonzalez-Maldonado, of the Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago; Naomi T. Lin, of the Sentia Laboratory for Childhood Systems Neuroscience and the Department of Education Studies, UC San Diego; Hilda Parra, of the Sentia Laboratory for Childhood Systems Neuroscience and the School of Speech, Hearing and Language Sciences, San Diego State University; Steven Davis and Matthew Doyle, of the Vista Unified School District; Terry L. Jernigan, of the Center for Human Development and Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego; and John R. Iversen, of the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University.