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Abstract

The purpose of the study was to gain insight into how children in the fourth and fifth grade acquire singing ability. The question to be pursued in the course of this study is as follows: What differences are found in children's singing accuracy relative to tonal music aptitude and gender? The students in the sample comprised the entire fourth and fifth grades in a suburban middleclass school. There were 174 students with gender almost evenly distributed; specifically 86 males and 88 females. Students were audio taped singing three separate tasks: 1) patterns from the Singing Voice Development Measure (SVDM), 2) a long-familiar song of 12 measures (America, in the key of F), and 3) a newly-learned song (Path to the Moon, in the key of G) also consisting of 12 measures. Finally, students were administered the Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (IMMA). Results of a two-factor ANOVA investigating differences in children's singing accuracy relative to tonal music aptitude and gender found that the singing of high-aptitude children and moderate-aptitude children was significantly more accurate than the singing of lowaptitude children (p < .0001) and the singing of female children was significantly more accurate than the singing of male children (p = .0008).

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