Without further ado, we'll pass the word
to the next presenter,
who is a dear colleague of mine with whom
I have
learned a lot.
Professor Graham Welsh,
are you there
for Yes.
So, Professor Graham Welsh
holds the Institute of Education.
University of London is an established share of music education
and is head of Institutes Dept of Early Childhood
and Primary Education since 2001.
He is elected Chair of Society of for Education, Music
and Psychology Research.
The first UK President of the International Society
for Music Education Awards and has held visiting professorships
within the UK and overseas and is a former member of the UK
Arts and Humanities Research Council Review College for Music.
He's the editor of a series of books in Music Education, published
by Oxford University Press, among which the Oxford Handbook
of Singing and holds more than 400 scientific publications.
Welcome, Prof. Graham Welsh.
Thank you so much
for accepting our invitation and being here today with us.
Right
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
I said this is working.
Okay.
Just for a moment
and just minimize the speakers
that can
write. Great.
Okay. So
my brief today from Philip up
was to talk about singing and children's development
and also to touch on singing and special
needs education.
So I mentioned Research Focus, International
is on the wider benefits of music, which are linked to research
into arts in general and music
and health
So questions on what my why might singing and other kinds
of musical activity enable nonmusical benefits in children's lives?
And this is because of the brain's architecture,
which includes its integrated neurological modularity
that links special communities of cells.
And you can see that from an early study by Boris Kleber
and colleagues of how
singing some aria antico,
some 18th century songs.
How different parts of the brain are lit up, not related to lyrics,
related to musical features,
related to emotional senses and performance
It also has
core properties such as Neuromodulation.
Well, one part of the brain being able
to impact on the function of another
and also neuroplasticity, that is to say, the brain's ability
to change and adapt in the light of experience.
And we know that music is both an individual and a social behavior.
So our interest is not just in singing and singing,
but also singing in terms of potentially why it benefits
the singing, experience, behavior and development.
Again, three best
when we can see here and this image on the left
is of features inside the womb in the ninth months of street life.
And you can see the features is surrounded by the amniotic fluid,
which is quite a good transducer of sound. But
speech sounds
in terms of consonants do not travel very well.
So the acoustics of this kind of experience.
Priebus The prosodic and melodic features
of the mother's voice, whether she was speaking, will sing.
And at the same time
the mother's emotional state when she's vocalizing,
whether she's speaking or singing, is encoded hormonally in
the filtered interface of the mother's and fetuses, but bloodstreams.
So this means that the fetus in this final trimester of fetal life
the last three months, free births when the auditory cortex
for the majority is
functioning is getting two kinds of messages.
First of all, they're getting messages that relate to sound,
which come through the mother's body and also bounce off
the white surfaces.
In the wider environment and also from anybody else
that is near the mouth, such as the mother's
partner, for example, or other catalysts.
And at the same time, the sound is being tied emotionally
depending on how the mother is feeling.
And this means that we enter the world already
with an experience of sound and vocal sounds
and also an expansive vocal sound which has an emotional component.
And that's why as us humans sound is an emotion
and experience and particularly vocal sound is an emotional experience.
We can't switch off emotion.
It's just part of the body's integration.
So what we discovered is that the music itself
is audible in the womb.
Of man.
We have to allow
what he's hearing is the rhythmic, gentle
sound of the blood rushing through the uterus, an artery.
And this is that, you know, the way
nature just allows us to involve which rhythm all around us.
And only that we heard
the sound of the external female voice,
which was actually myself singing next,
standing next to the mother in a normal volume of voice.
This is exactly what the fetus hears
recorded by the microphone in the womb.
And studies
show the fetus reacts to music.
Which
particularly
reacts to the mother's voice.
Now, this is another example.
This is just post-birth.
This is me ten years ago with young Alex,
who was slightly premature
and was in a neonatal unit.
And this is me experiencing kangaroo time.
Kangaroo care is a method of the adult carer,
which is the mother or the father holding the baby to their chest.
That involves skin to skin contact.
Lullabies presented during kangaroo care are shown to enhance
pre-term infant behavioral state stability.
That is to say you get more quiet sleep, less crying,
and also to significantly lower maternal anxiety.
I don't know whether I was less anxious.
It just seemed to me a rather strange thing to do
when this nurse said to me, Please, let's just shut up.
Nevertheless, it was
a wonderful initial bonding experience between me
and the young Alex, now aged ten.
So mothers are also seen
as singing mentors to their infants, mothers singing expressively
and distinctively while caring, for instance, in the earliest months.
This kind of singing is for emotional regulation.
However, the infant's positive response encourages mothers
to send more The mother's singing is initially intuitive.
You don't go off to a special school
or even in class on how to sing to your infant
But this intuitive singing contains didactic elements to pitch
and also temporal structure and the face to face context.
Enables a combination of visual and vertical gestures.
And then surely the infants make single syllable contributions.
In these mother infants duets
and this breast is to whole phrases and then whole samples.
So here's a couple of Canadian examples.
Girl.
Twin girl.
Flip to how I wonder what you
are far above the world.
So like good diamond in the
three girl twin girl.
With the power.
I wonder what you.
And as one example of fun,
as a pedagogical technique that we use with children in school, giving
children an opportunity as the song unfolds
to make contributions.
Here's another example.
Can you sing Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star, Radical Twinkle
in her
eye to make for
your cool personal world?
Folks
like us follow me all.
Well,
all for her will cook
for Alex
for me.
Yay, girls.
Umbrella.
And that was another example from a family
context.
Is the two sisters.
The little one is nine weeks old,
lying on the floor with seven year old older sister.
To deal me
such as
00000.
I will
So you can see that
there's already a musical conversation going on,
even though this infant is only nine weeks old.
And you can see the kind of reciprocity
between these two
in terms of the exchanges of sounds with the older sister, encouraging,
but also mimicking what the infant is doing.
Now, here's another example of
of two sisters.
This video you've just seen was recorded by a father on his mobile
phone.
This is a recording by mom as part of the study.
We were looking at music and singing, in particular
in Young Children, preschool in the Chinese diaspora
in London.
And making their own music musical.
By John John
This was.
So then you have a wonderful example of the integration of singing
with lots of other things.
You can say there's social interaction, there's drama, there's movement,
there's lots of
integrated activity
that's the child is just creating.
I'm beginning to master some of these musical elements
So what do we know about singing behavior?
Well, it derives from this interface of our neuro psycho
biological potential with experience
shaped by what counts as music and singing in our culture.
So we are all musical.
We all have that potential now.
But how that potential is realized relates
to our immediate experiences.
Musical behaviors both develop in a nurturing environment.
And this may be by intention, by the organization, or just by accident.
Serendipity and in this
growth, particular musical behaviors
will become more or less developed
depending on our little experiences.
And learning happens within a social process.
So one of the first major studies of children's singing
was a project that I led.
As you can see, a few years ago now, and in this particular study,
we looked at children in their first
term in primary school in London and across ten schools.
And then we followed those children over the next three years.
So the children were eight, five and eight, six and eight, seven.
And each year we gave them a couple of songs.
They all had to learn to sing in the two weeks before we came in.
And then we went into school and we recorded these children
individually singing the two target songs.
And you can see on the left in terms of the lyrics
that on a seven point scale, these five year olds in their first term,
having been taught to target songs, were remarkably accurate
in their ability to imitate the lyrics.
The same age six and the same age seven.
When you take the musical elements of the song and cut them out
and look at them separately, you can see that the same children
were slightly less accurate at matching individual pictures,
but nevertheless they did get better each year
as five to six to seven.
We looked at their ability to sing simple lines,
simple melodic shapes, And again, you can see that
they got better each five to six to seven.
We looked too simple.
Little fragments of melody.
Da da dee da da dum.
For example.
And you can see again that they got better each year.
Moving towards the relative accuracy
with the lyrics that they demonstrated at the youngest age.
However, when you put all of these elements together,
the words and the musical elements into this thing called a song
And you then write the song itself
in terms of its musical features when it's not the words attached.
You see the children were much less accurate,
which five, six and seven.
So there's something about singing,
certainly in a Western context,
where so many children, the focus on the lyrics means that
they may not be focusing in a school setting on the musical features.
So of course,
pedagogically the obvious implication is
that you need to take the song apart and get the children to play
with all the elements before you put them together.
And the other strange thing was that when we looked
at the longitudinal data of children aged five, six and seven
and we looked at the song pictures without the words
compared with the same song, which is when the lyrics were attached,
we should see that there was a real differentiated impact, not by sex.
So on the left hand side, if we look at the boys and girls age
five and six and seven, just looking at their ability to match pitch
in the target songs, you can see that the boys and girls
are totally identical and they get different.
Yeah.
Now, the same children when we look
at the same pictures, but this time with the lyrics attached you can see
not only are they less competent,
but the boys actually get worse.
Quite extraordinary.
And that got aged seven between boys and girls in picture to some future
accuracy is reported in the literature and has been for the last 90 years.
But that gap, if you like, in song singing isn't necessarily
a measure
of whether the children can actually match pitch.
It's only when you start attaching the lyrics that you get this issue.
And then just over a decade ago, I was asked to help evaluate
the national singing program to sing up in England,
which was a new initiative to encourage all the children
in England to sing in the period leading up to the 2012 Olympics.
And we undertook assessments over a period of four years,
hundred 84 schools, 11,258 children, all assessed individually.
And some of them we saw more than one.
So we ended up with 13,000 individual assessments.
We also seven teachers and community musicians about singing.
And we also had some micro analysis.
48 classroom based singing lessons.
And this is the latest data
that we've been playing that I was playing with this earlier today.
You can see that the children within the program,
those in the range triangles, these are
decentralized
ages and industrialization start.
So for those 13,000 individual modest assessments
and you can see that the blue elements of children
outside of the sing out program
that is to say at the moment they were assessed
they had had an experience of of the program itself.
The first thing that strikes you is in general terms the red line
is higher than the blue line.
So that is to say that the children taking part in the program were more
advanced in their singing development than children outside the program.
And looking at the standard deviations which is the dotted lines,
you can see that the red standard deviations are much narrower
than the blue ones.
So there's much more variation in singing competency
in these children across the country
outside the program.
You can see that the sing out children, the red line
continues to move upwards
in its trend with increasing age,
whereas the blue line
seems to get to about the age of eight and a half
and then the singing competency plateaus.
And that's quite interesting because that matches the data
that we have on adults singing in terms of a general kind of competence.
But without that specific
overall competency, in the general public, compared
with those that have much more singing experienced,
and overall, the difference between those inside and outside
the program is approximately two years advantage.
So you can accelerate singing competence.
And if children have a rich singing experience
in terms of their comfortable singing range,
well, this is not set against the keyboard for you
with middle C, which is indicated that with the circle, the lighter
lines
for children in year three, four, five and six And essentially
this is a seven, eight, nine, ten plus
you can see that the range extremes are similar.
So you have some children aged seven that can get weighed down
into a kind of ten arranged and up towards Mozart's Queen of the Night.
You see this in all of these groups.
But if we take
75% of the children
of the pitches they have in common, you can see that
these are the dark descendants and the age children.
This is approximately one and a half octaves from G three
that up to sing five in the middle of the stage.
Now that is also of interest because most of the published music
doesn't touch any of those lower pitches at all.
It tends to be focused on music
or notation, which is on the musical stage.
Which begins to fall apart from.
But you can't see that with age.
These common pictures do open up
and so that by the age of ten, it's almost too optimistic
which children have us as comfortable ranges
In a recent study
that we're just in the process of publishing at the moment,
one of my doctoral students has been applying this methodology
from London to children's singing in China.
So there are nearly a thousand children and we've managed 13,000.
So 1300 assessments,
six schools in urban and rural locations.
This time we've had three songs.
Surprisingly, to me, all these Chinese children, No Twinkle,
Twinkle and Happy Birthday in their own language.
And there's also a favorite children's song called Little Donkey
that we
put in the Christmas Carol that we know in English.
But that's a children's folk song to make sure that we had
a kind of Chinese song task,
and we assessed it as in the UK study
by a combination of different measurements points
into what we call normal line singing score out of 100.
As you might expect, older participants had more about singing
development comparatively, and longitudinally
girls were more advanced than boys, and they sang behaviors.
Urban participants were more advanced and urban
children from higher income families were more advanced.
And there was an age and income interaction.
Younger children from poorer families were less developed in this instance.
And these are general findings that that are relatively common
in many different communities across the world.
In Western Europe, Australia and North America.
Just looking at the longitudinal data,
you can just see here that
between
the ages of great two degree three, which which is a seven to eight,
that the children did improve in their second
but there was a strong sex difference,
as we found in in the UK, the interval
between boys and girls.
So what about development in and through singing
in terms of singing and social development?
This is aside from a piece of video
of an English rock star
and you can see lying in a brain scanner
with a neuroscientist, Larry Parsons, and Jarvis Cocker.
There was having his brain scanned whether when
he was singing on his own,
when he was singing with his partner on a guitar, Richard Dawkins
and you can see the two images on the right hand side.
He's singing with someone else on the left hand side, singing alone.
So you can see there's a kind of
social
brain, if you like, in the full brain being switched on.
When you're making music, when you're singing with someone else,
you have to be in time, in sync with them.
And therefore, that is part of the front room
and begins to be active
and in terms of our signals.
Then we asked the children to complete questionnaires
that relating to their self-conscious sense of social inclusion
and they'd been matched against their singing behavior.
And this is for 6000 children.
In essence, what we found is that those children
with the most competent singing behavior
tended to also see themselves as most socially included.
And conversely, those children that saw themselves as being more on
the margins socially excluded, if you like.
These children
had lower social inclusion scores,
and they also had less competent singing lessons
So we saw this.
And so whether the children were in the sing up program or outside,
which is the Green Line and the Blue Line, then
other examples of music
and singing in the wider impacts.
So speech, language, communication
and reading
well a study that we completed a couple of years ago,
we looked at the Australian Research Council
investigation of child sort of music-making
in the national database of 3000 children.
This longitudinal study,
of course, growing up in Australia.
But what we discovered was that the Australian parent
child music activities in the early eighties included
joint unsupported singing action songs, counting songs,
nursery rhymes and children's songs,
or generating original songs to accompany routine activities
There was reported dancing, playing with basic musical instruments,
listening to music in a variety of different media.
What we found was that the
higher frequency of these four music making activities, ages two and three,
contributed significantly to children's vocabulary.
Numeracy, attention and emotional regulation,
and also their pro-social skills.
When they entered school at the ages of four and five
and this significance was over and above
whether or not the parents were reading to the children
A study I completed about 18 months ago
in some London schools, there were three primary schools
looking for classes in East London,
and they were being supported in their singing develop
and their teachers by a professional organization
which has two sets of international singers to the world
back towards Arches and Apollo five.
And we looked at these children in terms of a program that the
foundation ran
over a
period of six months, and we looked at singing in relation
to the children's reading and also aspects of executive function.
Did some of the images of the children taking part?
And what we found was that there was an increasing close
correlation between children's
singing development and their reading competence
and also between the singing
and aspects of the executive function,
such as related to working
memory or inhibition
which executive function is something
which has become of great interest, particularly in early
childhood studies across different disciplines,
because children who have
more advanced executive function are more able to kind of
focused on their work, to remember things better,
to be less distracted,
What about children and young people who are not neurotypical?
So thinking about special needs and disabilities.
This is one particular study that we looked at.
This was a mainstream primary school in London
with a hearing impaired unit in every school year.
So a large primary school, but which was actually catering from
hearing impaired children that came in from over different parts
of North London.
Initial this was an externally funded two week
pilot program of music, mainly singing for these hearing impaired children.
And the evidence in part led to follow up repeats,
and that's now ongoing.
It was evaluated by myself and colleagues in the education
team at the Institute of Education and also at UCLA.
The Institute.
There was evidence of a positive impact, both musically
and also in terms of their hearing acuity
and the longitudinal and comparative data indicate
that singing competency improves with nurturing experience.
Even if you have a hearing impairment
and these children were wearing them for clear
influence or digital hearing aids.
And you can see here in terms of the sort of graph
the children were assessed after ten weeks and 20 weeks
in terms of their hearing acuity
And you can see in the first instance, a baseline of the normally
hearing group on the right hand side could make some sense of this test.
Whereas by and large, and me, two children that were hearing
impaired could make any sense of this hearing assessment.
And then after ten weeks of hearing, their children
began to make an improvement.
And after 20 weeks, you can see that this particular dramatic change,
some children still couldn't make any sense of it.
And on the opposite side,
you can see in the normally hearing, children
many of them have kind of reached
a ceiling effect because of the nature of the test.
And when we look at the singing development across two cohorts,
measuring the singing competency on the same
with the same tools that I've used
in the other studies not reported, including in China,
you can see that these children were relatively
not competent at all in their singing at baseline.
But after six months, there was an improvement.
So the first cohort
and which is the triangles
and also that was maintained over a period of 18 months,
whereas the second cohort didn't make much change over
six months but then improved dramatically
towards after 18 months.
But when we looked at
the age of the children and compared whether they were
six, seven or eight
you could see that the older the children were,
the more that they seemed to improve in terms of their singing
in relation to this particular experience.
So having a hearing disability is not necessarily
going to mean that the children can't
develop their voice about singing.
What might be the wider benefits of singing?
Well, in one sense this links
with actually those diamond
that if you look at the research attention, you can see that
there are a wide range of different benefits being reported
which I've kind of clustered here for you related to whether it's physical
or psychological, musical, social or educational
What we need to think about singing, whether we're thinking about children
or adults at almost any age, really is,
is that if we look at singing as a continuum of open ability,
and what we hope is that with experience, with appropriate pedagogy,
that we move on that red line, we move towards the Right-Hand side.
Most of us are in that kind of normal grouping in the middle
the attached boxes, just reminding us that the boundaries between normal,
super normal, fantastic singers or abnormal, atypical,
these boundaries are somewhat
fuzzy.
And also in our data that if we look at children
and young people with specific learning difficulties,
we can also find some who are in this
super normal category
that's we mentioned this
The Oxford Handbook of Singing, which is now out in
paperback version 53 chapters.
And you could also find these individually
at Oxford Handbooks dot com
and that's me that's that's young Alex.
That was the day that that was a baptism
And my special thanks to lots and lots of different people
that would have been involved
in this smattering of research of those two things you.
So which is Proust. Yes.
I think the first question mark thank you and my congratulations
to the voice lab.
Well done on all this amazing work that you've managed
to do so far and being with volunteers.
Thank you.
Professor Graham rest
thanks for being so punctual.
Just a quick question from my partner, if you don't mind.
And how important do you see for these children
that have high abilities in singing to have
school teachers, kindergarten,
teachers and primary school teachers who have good voices to sing?
And also, what is the role of voice education to those teachers?
And also to the young children that to start to sing?
Yeah.
Well, and one of the interesting
almost paradoxical things is that
primary school teachers have younger children,
whether these in the first years or kindergarten, they assume
that they can't sing, but it doesn't matter very much
because the repertoire that they're using
is is just for fun.
And so we've seen some wonderful teaching
by people that regard themselves as non-specialists.
However, as the children get older, so which will be about eight, nine,
ten and 11, the assumption is because the children are more advanced
and everything else reading mathematics or whatever
that they teach us has to be much better at singing.
Of course, that's not necessarily the case at all.
And two studies, one in the UK
and one in Australia, which has looked at mentoring.
We found that if we put professional singers such as yourselves and provide
a simple program for these teachers working with them and the children,
you find that they become much more confident
in leading the singing and the kids get better at singing as well.
So there's a virtuous circle so they're encouraged to do it more.
Thank you once again very much.
This is very important to us because the next year we will have
these a degree in the magisterial, so we will be preparing
as school teachers to teach at kindergarten
so that will be great to read your studies.
Thank you for your contribution.