Rethinking Aural Skills Instruction through Cognitive Research

Abstract

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.