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1.4.7Making a Song: How Children Learn Music and Language Spontaneously
Competence in both language and music develops in all normal children spontaneously. No conscious effort necessary. No formal training.
Both music and language function in accordance with rule-based brain systems comprised of elemental units (words, pitches, intervals) that group into larger structures (musical and lyrical phrases, sentences, choruses).
Children learn both music and language without any conscious awareness of what they’re doing. They effortlessly combine musical elements to make entirely original songs. With equal ease, they learn words and combine them to create entirely original sentences.
In both cases, they don’t realize that they’re applying combinatorial rules, already in their brains from birth, to word-vocabularies and pitch-vocabularies.