A = 440

This chapter discusses the music theory and aural skills practiced daily by an important and influential segment of the public: the session musicians, engineers, songwriters, and producers in the recording studios and publishing houses of Nashville’s Music Row. Through interviews with leading engineers and studio musicians, the chapter reveals that particular kinds of music theoretical knowledge and aural skills are valued in these contexts. Efficiency and accuracy are prized during recording sessions, and there are high expectations for the fluid and immediate application of practical knowledge and skills to writing, recording, producing, and performing music. While some in these situations have had formal, academic training in music theory, that is not true of everyone. Some terminology from academic music theory is valuable, but there is also the need for additional terminology and systems in order to develop a common language for all participants. This chapter provides detailed information about an important aspect of this common language, the Nashville Number System, a musical shorthand developed within the studios of Music Row that now has currency among musicians around the world, bringing music theory to an ever-expanding public.

Exploring Effective Teacher-Student Interpersonal Interaction Strategies in English as a Foreign Language Listening and Speaking Class

The main purpose of English learning is to communicate and interact in global contexts. However, in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts as in China, most of the students have limited interactional competence in contrast to their grammatical and structural competence. The reason is that Chinese classrooms mostly lack an interactional climate. This calls for an urgent need to develop interpersonal interaction skills by EFL teachers via appropriate strategies. To this end, this article presents an overview of nine interpersonal communication skills/strategies which are pivotal in L2 education. It also describes their definitions and related theories. Moreover, the outcomes of such strategies in aural skills are also explained. Finally, implications, research gaps, and future avenues for research are provided.

Rethinking Aural Skills Instruction through Cognitive Research

This essay responds to three papers appearing in this issue that relate music-cognitive research to aural skills pedagogy. Gary S. Karpinski focuses on tonic inference as support for do-based minor solfège pedagogy. My discussion supports this position, with evidence from key-profile experiments and corpus analyses. Timothy Chenette proposes a perceptually based learning sequence for aural skills instruction. He sketches a model curriculum, to which I propose a staffing solution and offer a research-based challenge: the high-voice superiority principle. Finally, Sarah Gates considers what the cognitive sciences can tell us about auditory imagery. I offer classroom strategies that take advantage of motor-area activation in the brain.

What Are the Truly Aural Skills?

I argue that current models of aural skills instruction are too strongly linked to music theory curricula. I examine harmonic dictation as a case study, demonstrating that the system of roman-numeral/inversion-symbol labels can interfere with our ability to determine what exactly students are hearing and can distract students from more directly perceptual goals. A pilot study suggests that focusing on bass lines and schemata may make our harmonic dictation training more relevant to perception. I propose that a skill is “truly aural” to the extent that it engages working memory with minimal knowledge-based mediation. Finally, I consider the current state of aural skills instruction and suggest a number of curricular revisions. The more radical proposals call for redesigning aural skills classes to focus on perceptual skills and relocating knowledge-mediated listening to the music theory classroom. Other proposals take a more measured approach to integrating perceptual skills with otherwise traditional curricula.

Developing Musical Imagery

Research into the development of musical imagery ability has remained stagnant in both the fields of aural skills pedagogy and cognitive science. This article integrates scholarship from both disciplines to provide a way forward for both the study and practice of imagery development. Analysis of North American pedagogical practices provides a foundation for the types and functions of activities used to affect imagery ability, while newly designed measurement techniques in the cognitive sciences are shown to have promising implications for assessing change in imagery ability over time. Following consideration of insights from both fields, this article consolidates them by developing a model of imagery development. Framed through the lens of expertise acquisition and skilled memory performance, this model has implications for approaches to imagery in the aural skills classroom and for empirical studies of imagery development in music cognition.

The effects of sensory deprivations during the initial practice of short piano pieces: An experiment with four students at different academic levels

This article discusses the effects of sensory deprivations during the initial practice of four short piano compositions in both deprivation and postdeprivation situations. Four different experimental conditions were employed: (A) deprivation of the piano, with visual decoding of the score; (B) deprivation of the piano and score, with auditory decoding of a commercial recording of the practiced composition; (C) deprivation of the sound response, with the score being decoded in a turned-off digital piano; and (D) deprivation of the score, with the recording being decoded on an acoustic piano. Four participants, all piano students, were part of the research sample: one who was taking piano classes in the university’s extension program; two undergraduate participants, a sophomore and a senior; and a student in the graduate program. Three participants managed to recreate the auditory information they did not have as a function of the condition of deprivation based on their own manipulations and aural skills. The effects of the deprivations on the four participants while practicing raised their awareness of how to use their personal skills to extract information from their practice sessions and affected their aims regarding the pieces they practiced.

Improving Students’ Aural Skills on the AP Music Theory Exam

In the past six years, more than 40,000 students have failed the AP Music Theory Exam. Students have struggled especially when sight-singing or taking melodic dictation in compound meter and minor tonality. Research has shown that students can improve these specific aural skills through learning pitch and rhythm patterns, improvisation activities, and learning from musical literature. This article includes research-based practical applications for helping students improve their aural skills for the AP Music Theory Exam.