Aren the melodies in the first couple of levels of Melodic Dictation awfully long for beginning students?
Too often, beginning students concentrate so intently on listening for individual intervals that they fail to hear the melody as a whole. In order to encourage them to recognize and remember longer phrases, some melodies in those early levels are characterized by repeated patterns. While the longer melodies may be frustrating to students at first, as they learn to hear and remember melodic patterns rather than thinking of a melody only as a succession of discrete and isolated intervals, their dictation skills will develop rapidly as they “stretch their ears.” You might want to check out “Editing tools as music theory and ear-training tools” in the Instructional Considerations section of the Instructor Guide 6 (on both Instructor Disks and Instructor Demo Disks, or click here to see it now) for more info. If, however, you still find the beginning melodies too long for your purposes, you might want to change the presets, using the Set Params program from your Instructor Disk, to permit s
