The effects of harmonic accompaniment on the music achievement, aptitude, and musical effectiveness of first grade children

The purpose of this research was to determine how harmonic accompaniments affect first grade children. The specific problems of the study were to understand how harmonic accompaniments affect children in their 1) tonal development, 2) use of their voice, and 3) interest in singing. Furthermore, a fourth problem was to determine the relationships among interest in singing, use of singing voice, and tonal development. One hundred and six first grade students in five classes were randomly selected to participate in this study. There were three treatment groups; one received song instruction with the accompaniment of piano/guitar, the second used CD recordings and the third group received song instruction a cappella. The PMMA test was administered to all students as a pretest and posttest. The researcher audio-taped each child singing a criterion song individually which was then evaluated by two judges using the Singing Voice Development Measure. A motivation questionnaire was administered to all students. The data were organized into designs for differences. For problem four, a one dimensional design for relationships was used. The researcher failed to find statistically significant differences for the first three problems. For problem four, the correlation between interest and singing voice development was statistically significant