Music Learning Theory Basics
This term describes the process of hearing and comprehending music in the mind with understanding.
What is Audiation?
When you copy a short pattern the teacher sings or chants, you are doing the very first step of this kind of learning.
What is Discrimination Learning?
In Gordon’s rhythm system, du-de belongs to this meter type.
What is Duple Meter?
In this early step, students just listen and echo patterns with no syllables or labels yet.
What is Aural/Oral?
This term describes a person’s potential to learn music, according to Gordon.
What is Aptitude?
Gordon’s first major type of learning, focused on finding sameness or difference between musical patterns.
What is Discrimination Learning?
During this stage, learners translate what they have heard and sung into verbal labels and concepts, connecting listening experience to musical understanding.
What is the generalization/verbal stage?
In tonal learning, students learned to label tonalities using this movable system with do as the resting tone.
What is Moveable Do?
In this stage, students start connecting what they hear with what they see in music notation.
What is Symbolic Association?
In Gordon’s Music Learning Theory, these are the smallest regular subdivisions of the beat, often felt as the “pulses within the beat.”
What are Microbeats?
This more advanced stage of learning involves using what you already know to making predictions and generalizations about music.
What is Inference Learning?
When you can name a pattern using syllables—like “do, re, mi” or “du, de”—you are doing this part of discrimination learning.
What is Verbal Association?
The rhythmic syllables du-da-di are used for patterns in this meter type.
What is Triple Meter?
When a student can say whether a melody is major or minor, or whether a rhythm is duple or triple, they are showing this stage of discrimination learning.
What is Partial Synthesis?
In Gordon’s MLT, during the acculturation stage, children do this with the music in their environment—taking it in naturally before they can reproduce it.
What is Absorption?
The idea that students learn a skill globally, then in parts, then return to the whole is summed up in this 3-word instructional cycle.
What is Whole-Part-Whole Learning?
When you make up your own tonal or rhythm patterns—your own musical ideas—you are using this higher stage of learning.
What is improvisation (or creativity), part of inference learning?
Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian are examples of these less-common tonalities briefly studied.
What are modes?
When a student recognizes a familiar tonal or rhythm pattern in a brand-new song, they are using this beginning step of inference learning.
What is Generalization?
In the acculturation stage, children show these types of behaviors—random, purposeful, and intentional—before imitating musical patterns.
What are preparatory audiation behaviors?
These short daily pattern activities form the skill-building backbone of MLT, guiding students from imitation to understanding to creativity by teaching tonal and rhythm patterns in a structured sequence.
What are Learning Sequence Activities?
When you understand why a pattern fits a song—such as “it belongs to tonic” or “this feels like triple meter”—you are reaching this part of inference learning.
What is Theoretical Understanding?
When teaching minor using Gordon’s approach, the resting tone starts on this syllable.
What is La?
Discrimination learning is about copying and identifying patterns. Inference learning is about doing something new with them.
This short phrase sums up the difference: copying vs. ________.
What is creating (or figuring out)?
Once students have practiced and internalized the patterns in a Learning Sequence Activity, this step assesses their understanding through performance or audiation tasks.
What is Evaluation Mode?