Music Learning Theory and audiation explained for parents

Music Learning Theory is a set of ideas about how people learn music, built by the American researcher Edwin Gordon over more than 50 years. Its central idea is audiation, which means hearing and understanding music in the mind. Gordon held that children learn music the way they learn a language: they listen first, then babble, then speak, and only later read and write. Teachers shorten the name to MLT.

What audiation means

Audiation is thinking in music. A person who audiates can hear a tune inside their head when no sound is playing, and can make sense of it. They know where the tune is heading, where its home note is, and how its beat is grouped.

Gordon’s own comparison was to language. As he put it, “Audiation is to music as thinking is to language.”

It is more than memory. A child can copy a song without understanding it, as a parrot copies words. A child who audiates can do more.

• Sing the last note of a song when you stop before the end
• Tell whether two short patterns are the same or different
• Keep the beat going during a silence
• Make up a new ending that fits

Who Edwin Gordon was

Edwin Gordon lived from 1927 to 2015. He played the string bass in jazz bands before he became a researcher and professor of music education. He studied how children learn music and wrote tests of music aptitude that schools still use.

What he found about music aptitude

Music aptitude is a person’s potential to learn music. It is not the same as achievement, which is what a person has learned so far.

Gordon reported three things.

• Every child is born with some music aptitude
• Aptitude moves up and down with a child’s music surroundings from birth to about age nine
• After about nine, it settles and stays at that level

For parents, the point is simple. The years before nine matter. A home with singing, moving, and listening helps a child’s potential settle as high as it can. A child of ten can still learn a great deal of music. Aptitude describes potential, and what a child achieves still depends on teaching and practice.

Guidance before instruction

Gordon separated two stages.

Informal guidance comes first, from birth to about five. Adults sing, chant, and move with a child. They do not ask the child to perform or correct the child’s answers. Gordon called the child’s early tries “music babble,” like a baby’s speech babble.

Formal instruction comes after, when a child can sing in tune and keep a beat. Lessons, reading, and theory build on what the ear already knows.

What an MLT class looks like

Songs and chants with no words. The teacher sings on a neutral sound, such as “bah” or “bum.” With no words in the way, the child listens to the tune and the rhythm.

Many kinds of scales and beats. Most children’s songs are in a major key with beats in twos. An MLT teacher also sings in minor and in older scales, and chants in threes, fives, and sevens. A wide diet trains the ear.

Short patterns. The teacher sings two or three notes, and the child sings them back. The same goes for rhythm patterns. Gordon compared patterns to the words of a language.

Free, flowing movement. Children move their whole bodies with scarves and through space before they are asked to clap or march in time.

Silence. The teacher leaves gaps after a song. A child often fills the gap with a sound, and that sound shows what the child is hearing inside.

The home note. The teacher often stops and sings the resting tone, the note a tune comes home to. Children learn to find it.

Sound before sight

MLT teachers follow a fixed order.

1. Listen
2. Sing and chant
3. Give the patterns names, with syllables for pitch and for rhythm
4. Read
5. Write

Reading comes fourth. A child reads only patterns they can already sing. This is the same order as language: a child speaks for years before reading a word.

Where you may meet it

• Early childhood classes taught by teachers trained in MLT
• Music Together classes, whose founders drew on Gordon’s work for their tonal and rhythm patterns
• School music classes that use the Jump Right In series
• Piano studios that use Music Moves for Piano

What to do at home

Sing with no words. Sing a tune on “bah.” Then leave a silence and wait.

Sing in minor. Add a few songs in minor keys to the songs you sing.

Chant in threes. “ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three” while you rock or swing your child.

Echo patterns. Sing two notes. Wait for your child to sing them back. Do not correct a wrong answer. Sing the pattern again another day.

Stop before the end. Sing a song your child knows and stop before the last note. See whether your child sings it.

Move without a beat. Play a slow piece and move with scarves, as if moving through water.

Vary the music. Play music in many styles. See classical music for kids by age.

How it compares with other approaches

MLT shares ground with the Kodály method, which also puts singing and the ear before reading, and with the Suzuki method, which also models music on language. MLT differs in its stress on patterns, on many scales and meters from the start, and on testing aptitude.

Sources

Checked in November 2026.

• Wendy Valerio, Alliance for Active Music Making. The Gordon approach: Music Learning Theory.
• MakeMusic. Developing the skill of audiation.
• Gordon, E. E. (1989). Audiation, Music Learning Theory, music aptitude, and creativity.

Next steps

For classes for the youngest children, read early childhood music classes compared. For syllables for pitch, see solfege explained for parents. For all the approaches side by side, read music teaching methods for kids compared.