Why Can't Students Match Pitch?

Have you tried all the tricks you have up your music teacher sleeve and your students are still not matching pitch? When will it click? How do those other music teachers get their students to sing like angels? 

What do your assessments tell you?

Many of our general music assessments are formative and performance-based.

Some singing assessments need to be purposeful and the score recorded. We use these scores as information to drive instruction. 

Isolate one criteria at a time during vocal assessments

We often make our assessments too general and those assessments don’t give us the specific information we need to make purposeful changes. Decide if you are assessing singing voice, matching the teacher, singing in the correct key and sustaining that throughout the excerpt, matching the pitch of accompaniment, or matching the class. The answers to these assessments give you the information you need to remediate skills or to move on.

Back to Basics

The basics of learning to sing are:

• Recognizing the difference between singing, talking, whisper, yelling, mouse, monster voices (you may have other voices that you use).

  
  

• Vocal exploration

  • Sirens

  • Vocal exploration stories

  • Drawing shapes in the air and following with your voice

  • Animal sounds in head voice/chest voice

  • Voice following a slide whistle, scarf or other props

    
    

• Chants and known songs 

  • Go to sleep, sit up and sing

    • Students pretend to sleep while teacher sings/chants in talking voice

    • Students wake up and sing along when teacher uses singing voice

    • Students take turns leading this activity. This activity often reveals students who think they are singing but are still using their talking voice.

      
      

• Pointing out students who are using their singing voice.

  • “I love it when you use your singing voice.”

  • “Your voice matches mine! High five!”

  • “I appreciate how you started talking but changed it to your singing voice! Nice work!”

    
    

• Offering specific, kind, and safe feedback

  • When involved in solo singing throughout the classroom in front of their peers, make it feel like a game.

  • When this is a new activity, respond to every attempt with a “Thank you.” This makes each student feel like their attempt is valued and creates a safe environment for trying.

  •  If a student refuses to sing, respond with

    • “Maybe next time”

    • “Would you like to sing with me?”

    • “Would you like to sing with a friend?”

    • “Everybody, let’s sing along with Sally”

    • Try to avoid making a big deal about a student not singing.

      
      

After a safe environment has been established you can offer more specific feedback. This could sound like:

• “Thanks for using your singing voice”

• “That sounds like your talking voice. Would you try again?”

• Ask the class to do a quick siren going up, then ask the student to try again.

• Sing with the student then ask “Do our voices sound the same or different? Will you make your voice sound like mine?”

• “That’s still your talking voice but you’ve almost got it!”

• “Almost!”

• Specific feedback is not mean, it is crucial to improvement. Corrective feedback should be given quickly and quietly and should end with encouragement.

  
  

I’ve already tried all of those things!

I believe you. What you need now is patience and perseverance. Students need a lot of repetitive practice and remediation. Students may be matching pitch one week and return to using their talking voices the next week. Treat that as information and back track to the basics. Not all students will discover their singing voices at the same time. Keep encouraging the students who are working towards improvement and remember that they just don’t have it YET! During the last half of my career it was a reasonable goal to have at least 50% of my kindergarten students matching pitch by January. 85% of them were matching pitch by the end of the school year. Those same students would return in first grade and I felt like we were starting all over again. But their progress came faster than the year before. When you get impatient remember that baby steps are still steps closer to the goal.

What if I am an elementary music teacher whose voice is an octave lower than the students?  

I am so glad you are working with young students! You guessed it - you need to do a lot of singing in your falsetto. There is no way around it. Here are some tips:

• Use students who are already using their singing voice as leaders.

• Sing for students, not with them

• Use the piano or xylophone to give students a starting pitch in the correct octave.

• Ask a colleague to record themselves singing the song in the correct octave.

• After a while (I’m talking 2nd grade-ish) students may be able to understand that your voice is lower and they will still sing higher.

Progress, Not Perfection

Isn’t it wonderful when Timmy, who has been singing in the basement for years, learns to sing in his singing voice? It’s like giving him a gift he will use for the rest of his life! When this happens the class will often recognize it and start cheering for Timmy. What a great feeling.! Not all of your students will be able to consistently sing in their singing voices by the time they leave elementary school. But so many will! Progress, not perfection, is our measure of success.