https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog daily 0.75 2026-07-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/2f117893-8900-424b-b4ae-3b486a016191/MMM-QuoteMarks-Blue_handdrawn.png https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/you-cant-unhear-the-words monthly 0.5 2026-07-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/8400be00-96c9-4223-a8ca-e2ca2187a267/1080x1350_MT-SocialTiles-KAZOO-Illustration-10.png mister mike's blog - 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. https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/mr-mikes-family-notes-meet-the-winslow-family monthly 0.5 2026-07-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/313565d9-f0d1-423b-a3cc-7d60244bf8b5/Winslow+-+Brenna%2C+Thomas%2C+and+Perry.JPEG mister mike's blog - Mr. Mike’s Family Notes: Meet the Winslow Family The Winslow family joined us when Perry was little. Brenna came from a house where people sang, and she wanted that for her own family too. Brenna signed up for Deborah's class for the same reason a lot of parents do: she needed things to do with a baby. Not baby-tolerating things but baby-friendly things. A mom in her PACE group rallied a few parents to sign up together and they joined as a group. What she didn't mention at the time, and maybe didn't even realize yet, was that she hadn't had a place to sing out loud since college. Brenna grew up singing. Church, musical theater, a band with her sisters in high school. Music wasn't something she watched other people do. It was something she participated in. And the baby? He made it his own immediately. He took his first steps in one of Brenna's classes. Said "Mama" for the first time in one of Deb's. Two milestones that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with what happens when a child feels safe and alive in a room full of people making sounds and moving together. https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/songs-without-words-part-2 monthly 0.5 2026-06-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/ab060971-8f1a-4e1e-9f51-803dfae53a77/SWOW+2+-+FIDDLE_Illustration-11.png mister mike's blog - Songs Without Words, Part 2 In an earlier post I wrote about why our song collections include songs without words — songs sung on vocables instead of language. The short version: when you remove words, you reduce cognitive overload and give a young brain more room to focus on pitch and rhythm. But there's a bigger idea that goes beyond simplification. The idea of emotional depth by understanding music as something without language. A lot of the music children encounter in school and in daily life is being used to deliver words or understand concepts. Songs that teach the alphabet. Songs that help kids remember the days of the week. Songs that make a task more fun. That's fine. But it's not really music. It's fun with words. And it reduces music to something that only exists to serve language. But really, those things that have nothing to do with music at all. If that's all children experience, they learn something limiting: that music needs words to have a purpose. They learn that music on its own isn't enough. Think about how much of the music the world has produced is instrumental. 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