I am always looking for new ways to use music to optimize articulation and fluency skills with my students. I have always found drumming to be a great place to start because of the rhythmic connections one can make with the body and speech production. See a previous post, “Drumming to Foster Fluency in Speech” for more details. Another approach I have been exploring lately is creating melodic singing exercises to practice emphasizing or accenting targeted words within a sentence. These exercises can also be designed to work on the individual’s prosody (the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech).
First, I create a simple sentence for the exercise. Let’s use: Let’s take a trip to the beach. Then, I select one pitch that will be used as the accent note for the emphasized word. (In this example, let’s make the accent note a G.) Next, I create a simple melody around that accent note, taking care not to use the same pitch anywhere else in the line. In the sentence example, Let’s take a trip to the beach., I start out by placing the accent note (or G) on the first word- “let’s”. The next time, I adjust the melody (sometimes the time signature as well) and move the accent note (or G) to the word “take”. Here is how I would type out the singing example for the student, capitalizing one word in each sentence as the word to emphasize.
LET’S take a trip to the beach.
Let’s TAKE a trip to the beach.
Let’s take a TRIP to the beach.
Let’s take a trip to the BEACH.
Here are some other sentence examples and sample scoring:
Free download: Singing Exercises to EMPHASIZE Speech Skills
Free download: Singing Exercises to EMPHASIZE Speech Skills SCORE
I have found that this specific exercise works well for many individuals because it:
- systemically brings emphasis and focus to each word
- pairs a specific pitch with the emphasized word
- encourages the student to target their singing toward a specific word
- reduces emphasis on the connecting words or less important words like: a, to, the, by, in, etc.
- allows for repetition of all the words in the sentence (usually sung 4 times)
Wade is a board-certified music therapist and one of the directors at Spectrum Creative Arts. He completed additional training programs in Orff-Schulwerk, Neurologic Music Therapy, and Performance Wellness. As a songwriter and creative writer, Wade has authored several music resource books for music therapy and music education.