Musical Intelligences

Do you love music? Musical Intelligence is the ability to discern meaning in or to communicate with tonal patterns, sounds, rhythms and beats. Musical/rhythmic intelligence calls for students to display auditory skills, which basically includes hearing and producing sounds. So, students would have to produce sounds with their vocal chords and the body (e.g. clapping using their hands or tapping with their feet). They can also produce sounds using a variety of musical instruments or produce sounds occurring in the environment like a bird sounds, the wind or sounds produced by a train using their imagination and creativity.

Through music, students can be taught the structure of music, schema for hearing music and sensitivity to the quality of various sounds. Activities which require students to create melody and rhythm as well as expression of thoughts through song or music are integral to the development of musical/rhythmic intelligence.

To incorporate the musical intelligence, instructors can play mood and background music, linking tunes with class concepts and giving students musical options for their projects or assignments (Armstrong,1994). Campbell, Campbell, Dickinson(1996) suggest that background and mood music helps set an engaging climate for students to work in, as well as providing supportive technology. Even having a portable compact disc player in class gives students options.