Musicians’ use of harmonic cognitive strategies when playing by ear

Past research has shown that musicians who are skilled at playing by ear use harmonically oriented integrated cognitive strategies, whereas beginning ear players tend to use more simplistic and fragmented approaches. In this study, I explored whether developing ear players can be moved toward more advanced cognition by directing their attention to the underlying harmonic properties of a melody they are learning. In this mixed-methods study, 28 university music majors participated in an experiment in which they learned a melody in two conditions: (1) exclusively by ear, unaided by any visual stimuli, and (2) by ear but with a chord chart representation of the melody’s phrase structure and chord progression. Upon completion of the experimental task, I interviewed each participant, prompting them to report their thought processes while learning the melodies. Transcripts of participants’ verbally reported thoughts were analyzed qualitatively for emergent themes. Quantitative results showed that the presence of the printed chord changes led to greater facility in ear playing among participants who measured in the middle range of vernacular musicianship, but not those in the low or high ranges. Qualitative analysis indicated that greater facility in ear playing came as musicians incorporated clues from the printed changes into their goal image of the melody they were learning to make their mental representation more harmonically substantive and instrumentally useful.

Group Playing by Ear in Higher Education: the processes that support imitation, invention and group improvisation

This article explores how group playing by ear (GEP) through imitation of recorded material and opportunities for inventive work during peer interaction was used to support first year undergraduate western classical music students’ aural, group creativity and improvisation skills. The framework that emerged from the analysis of the data describes two routes taken by the students, whilst progressing from GEP to group improvisation and it is compared to Priest's (1989) model on playing by ear through imitation and invention. The article concludes with suggestion on how these two routes could be used to scaffold the development of western classical musicians’ improvisation skills.

Teaching guitar: a comparison of two methods

Musical performers have typically been categorized as either “classical” (reading music), or “playing by ear,” (usually popular or folk music). The two groups of musicians were seen at polar opposite ends of a spectrum. The intent of this study was to explore a comparison between traditional teaching from notation (reading group), and another method that focused on ear playing, and imitation of a model (hearing/modeling group), with an intact class of music education majors learning to play the guitar (N=22). A panel four of judges who evaluated each student’s final performance of a mandatory prepared piece without knowledge of their treatment group, scored each individual in five categories: note correctness, rhythmic precision, confidence, expression, relaxation and posture, tone quality, and synchronization between the hands. There was a significant difference in the final performance assessment between the hearing/modeling and reading groups. The hearing/modeling group had higher average scores (M=3.07) than the reading group (M=2.50), as well as higher scores on the specific sub-categories. Training “by ear” seems to have positive effects for accuracy and fluency of performance in beginning guitarists. Keywords: Guitar pedagogy, Guitar teaching methodology, Playing by ear, Reading music.

Sleep Consolidation of Musical Competence

Previous research has shown that sleep facilitates skill acquisition by consolidating recent memories into a stabilized form. The way in which sleep benefits the acquisition of a musical skill, however, is unclear. This is because previous studies have not dissociated the extent to which sleep consolidates learned motoric patterns from the conceptual structure of the music. We thus designed two experiments in which pianists performed short pieces – designed to separate conceptual from motoric errors – over the course of a day. In Experiment 1, participants were trained in the morning and tested immediately, 12 hours, and 24 hours after training. While both motor and conceptual errors increased over a waking retention interval, only conceptual errors were significantly reduced after sleep. Moreover, individuals who reported spending more time “playing by ear” showed greater reductions of conceptual errors after sleep. A second control experiment, in which participants were trained in the evening and tested immediately – as well as 12 hours – after training, confirmed that the results from Experiment 1 could not be attributed solely to circadian confounds or to elapsed time since training. Together, these results suggest that conceptual and motor errors consolidate differently and interact with differences in practice style.