Development of Perceptive Listening

The auditory sense develops remarkably early in children.  Infants can differentiate pitches and identify their mother's voice at birth.  During the babbling phase, babies demonstrate their ability to hear pitches by matching them to a certain extent.  Children as young as three months can match and sustain pitches, and gain a sense of musical phrase as young as six or seven months.  By eight months, they generally have the sense of a melody.  By preschool ages, children have a vocabulary to describe what they hear.  The concepts that develop early include tone color, dynamics, tempo, and style, and later comes pitch, rhythm, and form around the age of four.  

Anyone can identify hundreds of pieces and describe details about them, even attaching personal meaning to them.  Our task as music educators is to help students understand and appreciate what they are hearing.