You Can’t Unhear the Words

I've written a couple of posts about the importance of songs without words in our collections. Here's an important distinction. A song without words is not the same thing as a song with the words removed.

If I asked you to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" but only on "La la la," you could do it, but your brain would still be processing the words. Try it. You would be hearing them in your head even though you weren't singing them. You associate them so much with the melody that it's almost impossible to not hear them as you sing. They're built into that melody for you. Every time the tune moves, your mind fills in the language whether you sing it out loud or not.

Musicians and music educators call this audiation. It's the ability to hear and process music in your mind, even when it's not being played out loud. It's the musical equivalent of thinking in words. And once your brain has attached language to a melody, it's very difficult to separate them.

That's why the songs without words in our Music Together collections are so valuable. Songs like Bim Bam, Doodle, and Su La Li were never written with words. There are no words to audiate. When your child sings along, their brain is processing pure music. Pitch. Rhythm. Melody. Phrasing. The feel of a song. Nothing is competing for space.

Now think about what happens when a well-meaning children's program takes a familiar tune and strips the words out as a musical exercise. The adults in the room are still hearing the words in their heads. And if the child already knows the words, they're processing them too. It's not a song without words. It's a song with invisible words.

A true song without words was born that way. The melody exists on its own. The vocables are the song. When your child latches onto Dee Da Dum and sings it in the bathtub, they're not suppressing language. There is no language to suppress. They're living inside the music itself.

That's a different experience. And for a developing brain, it matters.

So the next time one of those wordless songs comes on and your toddler starts humming along, know that their brain is doing something it can't do with a song that has words. It's processing music as music. Not as a vehicle for language. Just sound, melody, and rhythm, doing what they were designed to do.

This is what musical families do.

There's a spot for your family. Come see what a class sounds like.