Howard Gardner's Musical Intelligence
Musical intelligence is that special ability to recognize tonal patterns, rhythm and beat. In other words, it is the ability to understand and express well numerous musical forms. Such learners are most sensitivite to environmental sounds, the human voice and musical instruments. In short, they possess a strong ear for music. Unlike the average person, rhythms, musical patterns, tones, and various sounds often have a more visible effect on them, in that you can easily detect a change in their facial expressions, emotional responses, and/or specific body movements. As a music teacher once said to me, they have music constantly 'swimming' in their heads. They are sensitive to rhythm, pitch and melody, including sounds in the environment such as rain on a roof, various traffic patterns, even the chirp of a cricket.
In Frames, Gardner perhaps best synthesizes the aforementioned when he commences Chapter 6 by commenting that "[o]f all the gifts with which individuals may be endowed, none emerges earlier than musical talent" (p. 99). This gift is indeed so evident in young children who can often be heard banging on pots and/or singing nonsense songs to themselves in the bathtub. Children with a dominant musical intelligence may enjoy a hum and easily turn sounds into rhythms; they retain melodies and lyrics well. As they grow older, they acquire good memories for lyrics, perhaps even emitting the odd wince here and there when their parents sing "Happy Birthday" off key. Such children often play an instrument quite well. They are often quite skilled at mimicking language accents, sounds, the speech patterns of others, and recognizing different musical instruments in a composition. As adults, they enjoy creating, singing and listening to a wide variety of music, in short, they love music and its various rhythmical patterns. They can often reproduce a melody or rhythmic pattern after hearing it only once.
To sum, a large part of music's power rests in its ability to make us feel. This viewpoints is perhaps best scribed by Gardner himself. As I cannot match his prose, I shall quote him directly: "[W]hen scientists finally unravel the neurological underpinnings of music -- the reasons for its effects, its appeal, its longevity -- they will be providing an explanation of how emotional and motivational factors are intertwined with purely, perceptual ones." (Gardner, 1993, p. 106).
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