
Singing in Your Brain
If your child's brain is hearing in tune, how will her teacher know? What test can we do to find out what she's hearing in her mind?
Singing is the best feedback. In order to sing in tune, the brain must first hear in tune. All ear training is actually brain training, and will help any musician rise to a higher level (even if you decide to be a guitarist or trombonist instead of a singer).
If singing in tune, singing on pitch, carrying a tune in a bucket, and Echoing Ed make you nervous, keep reading for tips on how to finally get on pitch.
The Echo Family
In every year of Let's Play Music, teachers will present a variety of ear-training games in class and will almost always request singing from the students as feedback to see what they have heard and internalized. Don't worry, it feels like a playful game, not an exam!
Teacher and her Echo Edie

In your first year, you'll meet Echo Ed and Echo Edie from Sound Beginnings. These puppets help children engage by making sounds and prompting them to echo back. For example, Ed might sing "loo loo," and you'll try to distinguish the pitches, which refer to whether notes are high, low, identical, or different. Even if you can't name the exact notes, recognizing differences in pitch is key. Echoing correctly shows you're hearing the right intervals, while mistakes might indicate a need for more ear or voice training. Both skills naturally develop together for most LPM students.
Built to Sing
Singing is an innate human ability that can be developed over time—never give up! Children have a broad vocal range from birth and begin imitating pitch by 3-4 months, with purposeful singing starting around 12 months. However, as they focus on spoken language, their vocal range can narrow unless encouraged. Sound Beginnings classes nurture children's auditory skills, helping them explore sound before vocal habits form.
Practice and repeated exposure improves tonal perception, just as students develop musical understanding through repetition and echoing in class. Zoltan Kodaly emphasized singing's role in enhancing musicality, reinforcing its importance in our teaching approach.
Can you sing it in your mind?
The first step in teaching music is developing "inner hearing" or audiation—the ability to hear music in the mind. This skill deepens as students read and mentally comprehend notated music. The second step is training the voice to sing accurately.
Children progress from simple to complex auditory skills, starting with the minor third interval, like "sol-mi." Using vocalizations like "loo-loo" helps them master pitch distinctions. Once sol and mi are mastered, la is added, and children naturally use these intervals in songs like:
Nana-nana boo-boo! (sol-sol mi-la sol-mi)
Trick-or-treat, this is neat! (sol sol mi, sol sol mi.)
Ring around the rosy (sol sol-mi la sol-mi)
Singing in tune is easy to teach to a child younger than 7 when their auditory cortices are sharp and active.

For more hands-on help, including using the ideas above, check out our "How to Sing in Tune" series on YouTube
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