Intrapersonal skills and music performance in elementary piano students in Spanish conservatories: Three case studies

Abstract

This study is based on the premise that emotional skills—comprised of an intrapersonal dimension and an interpersonal dimension—help to achieve personal balance, which in turn can enhance performance. Following from this premise, the improvement of music students’ emotional skills might have a positive effect on their musical performance. The recognized relationship between music and emotion therefore suggests that music education is a suitable context for developing emotional skills. The article examines the relationship between intrapersonal skills and the musical performance of elementary students studying the piano in a Spanish conservatory. The research was developed as an action research process and involved the study of three 10-year-old students. A set of activities were designed specifically for students attending the third course of piano studies; these activities were intended to develop students’ intrapersonal skills throughout the school year and were implemented in the subjects of piano and ensemble playing in parallel with the musical tasks. The relationship between intrapersonal skills and musical performance is investigated and discussed for each of the three cases.

Effects of the Educational Use of Music on 3- to 12-Year-Old Children’s Emotional Development: A Systematic Review

“…Improving emotional skills can improve the results of music practice. A research study addressed the relationship between emotional skills and instrumental piano practice [ 80 ], obtained several results. Firstly, they found that identifying emotions helped students to integrate emotional expression into their piano playing and to play more fluently.…”

“…Fourteen studies used musical training as the independent variable and obtained evidence that it improved diverse socio-emotional competencies, including: identifying emotions in images and/or texts [ 68 ]; a greater capacity to regulate emotions [ 63 ]; concentration and creativity [ 82 ]; students’ ability to recognise emotions [ 73 ]; improved learning and mathematics [ 76 ]; a positive effect on children’s self-expression, self-efficacy, and social skills [ 78 ]; improved the feelings experienced when attending class [ 69 ]; greater emotional awareness and motivation from singing [ 66 ]; increased empathy and positive feelings for learning [ 67 ]; influenced the effects of emotional understanding [ 64 ]; influenced emotional awareness, regulation and autonomy [ 80 ]; increased pro-social behavior in neurotypical children in relation to the social exclusion of autistic children [ 74 ]; promoted the development of pro-social skills [ 81 ]; improved behaviors such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, inattention and some defiant attitudes [ 83 ]; and increased children’s motivation and thus their learning capacity [ 66 ].…”

“…It can also reduce the occurrence of negative emotional states such as anxiety and depression [ 86 ]. These benefits have been observed in relation to different school contents, such as improving deductive reasoning [ 77 ], creativity [ 75 ], graphic representation [ 76 ], reading [ 86 ], education in values [ 70 ], orthography [ 72 ], or instrumental practice [ 80 ].…”

A Deep Learning-Based Piano Music Notation Recognition Method

“…The model is based on an extended causal convolutional neural network (DC-CNN), and the reduction features are introduced by controlling the gate activation unit of each neuron in the neural network to achieve the reduction of electronic artifacts. The DC-CNN adopted in the model exists in causal convolution and expanded convolution, and the DC-CNN has achieved good results in the speech synthesis model WaveNet [ 25 , 26 ].…”

Multimedia Recognition of Piano Music Based on the Hidden Markov Model

“…e characteristics of the piano music are used to process the filter samples, and the piano music is separated according to the frame. In order to blindly process the cell matching, the hidden Markov model can be used to smooth the signal transmission between adjacent frames of the piano music [15]. e multimedia recognition system based on the hidden Markov model to play music on the piano automatically selects the window function form according to the characteristics of the music played by the user on the piano.…”