THINQon : Spelling and singing

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ted berryman

Spelling and singing

Latest Post: September 13, 2010 at 1:39 AM

23 followers

Spelling and Singing

To show you just how bad a speller I am I won’t use Spellcheck. You would be equally amused if I sang to you. Is there a connection between spelling and singing?

After hearing me say that I am a bad singer, my six year old Grandaughter said, “No, you’re not bad Grampy. You just have to be… (pause) more musical.”

What spelling ability I have comes from sight. Sometimes I can see if a word is spelled wrong. The fact that I can’t sound a word out in my head would suggest a deficient ear, but it seems that I listen to music, singing, and other sounds in a nuanced way. I try to sing all the time. Once in a great while something I sing sounds great, just a phrase. But two seconds later I’m unable to repeat the performance.

I’m working toward an interesting question.

The best explaination I’ve had for my bad singing is that I lack coordination of my vocal cords. If you’ve ever tried to teach a sport to an uncoordinated person you know how impossible that handicap is to overcome. Even the most uncoordinated baseball player hits the ball on occasion and is as surprised as I am when I hit a note correctly.

If you’d like to speculate along with me: Does spelling, even sounding a word out in your head, depend on muscle memory?

My body, lets suppose, is unable to store and catalogue the manuvers to physically produce a repoitore of sounds. Language resides in the mind, but not in the body. No action the vocal cords are called upon to perform has a history. Therefore there is no ear in the throat. It’s the ear alright, but not the ones on the side of the head that receive vibrations of air. The lacking one would sense, or hear, vibrations of muscle.

Did I spell everything right?

Reply to:

Not really me (alias)

September 13, 2010 at 1:39 AM

1 follower

The brain is a very complex thing. Everything is connected, but I am hard pressed to think of two things that are more distantly connected than spelling and singing. Seeing as you brought up baseball, I would say that hitting a baseball is quite a bit more connected to singing than is spelling.

Hitting a ball requires you to “visualize” which direction you are trying to hit it in, how hard to swing, compensating for where the ball is thrown by the pitcher, and practicing this until you can hit the ball dead on.

Singing requires hearing the pitch, “visualizing” how to get your vocal chords to match that pitch, choose the right vowel, and compensating as the pitch drifts until you can sing the note dead on.

One requires a coordination of body and eye, the other ..body and ear.

Yes, there is muscle memory involved, and like learning to hit a ball, the process is one that requires feedback. You say that every once in a while, something you sing sounds great. This means that you are listening to what you are singing. This is the critical feedback component of singing ..or playing any instrument for that matter.

Spelling has little to do with muscle memory, unless I suppose one gets use to typing certain words reflexively ..but I don't think that's the kind of muscle memory we're talking about here.