Taking time off

I will be taking the next week or two off from blogging, as I have a few things on my plate:
1) finish my tenure file(s)
2) finish my article on cognition of musical articulation
3) compute final grades for my IU class
4) prepare my six(!) classes for DePauw
5) get my kids ready for school
6) go to the state fair
7) give a presentation on library use to new faculty
8) hire a part-time instructor in musicianship
9) torment the cats
10) there is no number 10.

In the meantime, there is a recent article in Memory Cognition (2007, 35(2):242-253) about how to learn song lyrics: "Learning lyrics: to sing or not to sing?" by Racette and Peretz.

According to common practice and oral tradition, learning verbal materials through song should facilitate word recall. In the present study, we provide evidence against this belief. In Experiment 1, 36 university students, half of them musicians, learned an unfamiliar song in three conditions. In the sung-sung condition, the song to be learned was sung, and the response was sung too. In the sung-spoken condition, the response was spoken. In the divided-spoken condition, the presented lyrics (accompanied by music) and the response were both spoken. Superior word recall in the sung-sung condition was predicted. However, fewer words were recalled when singing than when speaking. Furthermore, the mode of presentation, whether sung or spoken, had no influence on lyric recall, in either short- or long-term recall. In Experiment 2, singing was assessed with and without words. Altogether, the results indicate that the text and the melody of a song have separate representations in memory, making singing a dual task to perform, at least in the first steps of learning. Interestingly, musical training had little impact on performance, suggesting that vocal learning is a basic and widespread skill.

And you can go visit James Cook's post explaining why I'm wrong about Chopin. Related to that subject, see Scott Strader's analysis of Chopin's A minor prelude. Scott also just wrote a good post on Krenek and Sorabji.