What if timing could play a more central role in the way we learn? This article explores how making rhythm visible through musical notation can transform reading from a solitary decoding task into a shared embodied experience. Drawing on research in neuroscience and in education, it shows how rhythm acts as a cognitive scaffold, easing cognitive load, strengthening attention, and nurturing fluency. When children learn through rhythm, they don’t just read words, but connect with meaning and grammatical structure, thus understanding in time.

Why musical notation works when text does not

Musical notation carries a surprising amount of cultural baggage. For some, it evokes elitism, tradition or a narrow definition of music making and musical ability. For others, it raises understandable questions about relevance, transfer and evidence.

These concerns are not misplaced. Much of the research in this area has been poorly controlled, and too many classroom interventions have reduced notation to isolated drills that strip it of meaning. Today, I’m not advocating for ‘more music’ in the timetable, nor is this a claim that musical notation is a shortcut to literacy. Instead, I’m asking a more modest, and I think a more useful question. What happens when timing, patterns and structure are made visible? And why does this sometimes support learning when text alone does not?

Reading as a timing problem - not just a decoding problem

Recent research suggests that rhythm-based training can be associated with improvements in reading fluency, particularly when timing skills are enhanced (e.g. Zanto et al., 2024). However, the mechanisms involved are not fully understood, a growing body of evidence shows that musical experiences correlate with the expressive aspects of reading (prosody and sensitivity to timing - see Jansen et al., 2023). Rhythm processing deficits are observed among children with reading difficulties (Rossi et al., 2025).

Many studies have been exploratory and have not controlled adequately for participant characteristics or the delivery of the intervention. ‘Real world research’ that is carried out in school settings is difficult to control and even the most beautifully designed studies suffer from limitations and confounds.

The idea of having a control group in this kind of study is less straight forward that you might expect. When I arrived for the first time at a secondary school, about to introduce Rhythm for Reading to a group of 12 year olds, they already knew what was involved, having heard about it through friends and family attending other schools. They had also heard that ‘it worked’. From a research perspective, the participants had ‘expectancy effects’. I was surprised that this had happened and even though this was part of a RCT, the design had been compromised even before we got started.

Another ‘real world research’ confound in a school setting concerns unexpected events. If Ofsted, decide to conduct a full inspection, then a well-controlled study will be affected at multiple levels simultaneously.

Over time I have observed mechanisms that play out when working with a rhythm-based intervention. The Processing Rhythm in Speech and Music (PRISM) framework (Fiveash et al., 2021), links precise auditory processing, neural entrainment and sensorimotor coupling to propose why practicing activities involving structured timing may support language and reading, but without implying a simple cause and effect from musical notation to literacy. This balance of evidence and mechanism points toward rhythm as a cognitive scaffold rather than a curriculum fad.

Having developed rhythm-based intervention in real schools by working with pupils targeted by teachers for intervention, a clear pattern has emerged, prompting me to ask this question. If pupils can build sensitivity to rhythm and make rapid progress in reading through a rhythm-based intervention in only ten minutes per week, was there a reading deficit or a timing disorder?

Although I do not see huge shifts in all children, there is a distinct pattern that shows that weak sensitivity to rhythm might not necessarily denote a disorder or a deficit for a large proportion of the pupils targeted for intervention. Many of these children make statistically significant gains in reading comprehension (when compared to standardised data), and once again this prompts me to question whether the so-called reading comprehension deficit should be so easily remediated.

Pattern before symbol: What the brain needs first

Children arrive at school with sounds in their heads, consisting of songs, jingles, rhymes, stories, admonishments, affirmations, jokes, advertising slogans and so on. All of these are socially situated, meaning that they are imbued with context and and emotional value. We already know that children are very impressionable and absorb whatever they are exposed to. The problems with learning to read often begin when we isolate individual sounds from a pattern - whether a single phoneme or a musical tone. This decontextualized approach to the teaching of reading (text or music) works for most but not all children and points to a potential ‘deficit’.

When children (targeted for intervention) work with patterns rather than individual sounds, they are relaxed, at ease, even playful. A rhythmic pattern, written as musical notes does not present a barrier to them, because the pattern anchors them in their natural range of auditory processing. For these children the barrier arises when they are taught to read in decontextualized single units of information. Here is an example of using a pattern without losing the context for auditory processing.

Imagine I have introduced two notes (beamed together) like this 🎵 and tell the children these notes are faster than the main beat and say, ‘quick-quick’. Without me making the association for them, they might associate this pattern with familiar patterns from early childhood:

• Hearing ‘quack-quack’ in visits to their local duck pond.

• Their own experience of a quicker pace as they first started to run.

‘Quick quick’ is memorable and relatable, and the subdivision of the main beat into two equal parts is never an issue, because they already have experienced this pattern not only in their auditory processing and speech processing but also motor processing.

So, by trusting the children already have these patterns in their heads, and then building clear and relatable associations with symbols, we can establish for these children (targeted for intervention) a simple way to access the rewarding and motivating experience of fluent reading.

Cognitive load, prediction and the limits of print

Most but not all children are able to learn to read using conventional phonics-based approaches. Phonemic awareness is, however, weaker in some children as their perception of certain phonemes is incomplete. If we ask children with an incomplete perception of the smallest sounds of language to synthesize sounds to make a word, it is as if we are asking them to construct a Lego® model with key pieces omitted from the pack.

When children read musical notation, phonemic awareness is unnecessary. The children targeted for intervention are relieved of their struggle with phonemes.Similarly, there is no need to recall the shape of each and every letter of the alphabet, as well as the blends and digraphs that add to the complexity of learning to read. There are only seven letters to remember in the musical alphabet and in our programme we only focus on three of these at any one time. This vast reduction in cognitive load offers capacity to focus on building fluency.

Rhythm as a predictive scaffold

Having lifted the cognitive load experienced by children targeted for intervention, we can focus on the aspect of timing. Using an analogy of traffic flow, imagine the stop-start experience of driving in sticky congested traffic, and finally, building and sustaining momentum through a real sense of flow in reading. These are the stages that children experience as their reading fluency builds in just a few weeks.

At the stop-start stage, they are limited by the amount of information that they are processing. There is little automaticity and every word is painstakingly built out of its smallest components. When reading musical notation, the same child is reading for half a minute at a time without a single hesitation. This sense of flow builds the feelings of anticipation, reward and motivation that characterize fluent reading. Most important of all, by building anticipation into reading, the child is able to use top down processes to forecast candidate words, and to predict the likely trajectory of a phrase or sentence.

Musical notation as a visible timing framework

When we build fluency by reading musical notation, the standard length of each musical phrase provides the children with a visible, audible and kinesthetically experienced cognitive scaffold. This structure acts as a placeholder in time and space. This means that the children are better able to maintain information in mind and to use this same capacity to predict what is coming up next in their reading.

Maintaining information in mind creates a context for the next word, phrase or sentence and provides an opportunity to decode words based on phonological knowledge, word shape and contextual cues. Musical notation provides a regular phrase structure built on simple and reliable patterns. This alone is enough to enrich the children’s learning and to provide them with the tools they need to fill in the gaps in their reading through top down processing.

Making rhythm concrete, shareable and external

One of the main benefits of reading musical notation is that this can be a group task. Once fluency has been established, the group can read in time with a backing track, which deepens engagement and the level of reward that the children experience. The backing track provides the context for reading notation and when this is a group endeavour, the added benefits of group bonding and being able to move together in time can also deepen the experience of reading as socially rewarding.

Group synchrony and the social nature of fluency

As the children read aloud and move in time with the backing track as a group, they become entrained. Entrainment is a natural phenomenon seen in the natural world. From fireflies to orcas we see all forms of life synchronized to each other, to the light-dark cycle and to patterns of seasonality. Moving in time is an adaptation which enables many species to:

• cover larger distances efficiently - for example when migrating,

• coordinate their efforts so as to appear larger and more threatening to a potential predator.

The collective effort to sustain these patterns of movement requires minimal conscious attention and much of the effort is managed subconsciously, what we might refer to as ‘autopilot’, the most stable form of attention at our disposal.

Entrainment, attention, and shared timing

Of course, adaptations which have evolved to enable the seasonal movement of species, or innate defenses to keep us safe do not seem to apply to reading, but if we pause for a moment to think about that state we enter when the we enjoy a book, or when get absorbed by a social media platform, we have actually become entrained to the rhythm of the language or the rhythm of digital scrolling.

The 'safety in numbers' rule still applies. If we look at football fans and people demanding political change, we see that synchrony, rhythmic chanting and the principle of staying together in time matter in such situations.

Although there would be social rewards, including a sense of belonging, the main components of rhythm-based intervention: anticipating phrase lengths, decoding within a rich and rewarding social context, and minimizing the cognitive load would not have been met.

Executive functions in action: Working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility

Let’s remind ourselves of the three core executive functions: cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control and working memory. Many people devise rhythm-based interventions in a reductive way. They assume that repetition, patterns and a steady beat might be sufficient to engage executive functions and effect change in learning or reading.

When we are rhythmically in sync in a conversation, ‘glued’ to a screen or ‘lost’ in a book, our subjective sense of time changes because we are not effortfully engaged. Rather, we are in a flow state, in which effort is minimized and external distractions have been eliminated by inhibitory control. This frees us up to think more strategically about what we are doing, to apply discernment to decisions or to infer what might be about to happen in a more nuanced way. This higher level of reasoning enables us to engage even more deeply with what we are doing, anchoring the flow state, dilating time and amplifying precision.

External structures support executive functions of inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and working memory. A environment featuring consistent routines and social behaviour is known to support healthy child development. However, when children are targeted for an intervention, an external structure can become a cognitive scaffold if the children engage with it socially, physically and rhythmically through entrainment.

Why rhythm stabilizes attention before accuracy improves

When children read musical notation under these conditions, they are immersed within a structure that is designed to induce a flow state and to support them in anticipating what is about to happen next. This ebbing and flowing of the ‘given’ and the ‘new’ allows children to experience reading fluency, leading to anticipation, motivation and reward whilst reading. The external structure that they experience whilst reading musical notation, is sufficient to engage top down contextual processing as they discover that they can read text fluently for the first time.

Summary - When rhythm is made visible, fluency can emerge

When rhythm is made visible, learning becomes something children can feel, hear, see and share. Musical notation transforms from a set of abstract symbols into a living structure that connects sound, movement and meaning. Within this framework, reading shifts from a solitary act of decoding to a rhythmic social experience that nurtures attention, anticipation and joy. Perhaps this is what true fluency really is, not just in reading, but in learning itself.

REFERENCES

Fiveash, Anna, et al. "Processing rhythm in speech and music: Shared mechanisms and implications for developmental speech and language disorders." Neuropsychology 35.8 (2021): 771.

Jansen, Nelleke, et al. "The relation between musical abilities and speech prosody perception: A meta-analysis." Journal of Phonetics 101 (2023): 101278.

Rossi, M., Smit, E.A. & Rathcke, T. Testing the dyslexic rhythm deficit in Italian: evidence from sensorimotor synchronization with connected speech. Read Writ (2025).

Zanto, Theodore P., et al. "Digital rhythm training improves reading fluency in children." Developmental Science 27.3 (2024): e13473.