What Are the Truly Aural Skills?

Abstract

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.

Learning and Recalling Melodies

“…But, so long as the participant adds new notes and improves on the earlier parts of their recall in subsequent attempts, remembering better the melodic structure they already tried to recall in previous attempts, and the attempt length does not exceed those in the target melody, the overall similarity to the target melody will increase across attempts. Formal musical experience and training should aid memory and help to learn melodies quickly, presumably because of mental templates that help structure the melody and more efficiently integrate it into memory (Chenette, 2021). This may be similar to the notion of long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).…”

“…In the nonmusical literature on verbal recall exists some relevant nonmusical analogues to the observations that Sloboda and Parker (1985) made, that the attempt length increases across attempts (Anderson, 1972;Chikhaoui et al, 2009). The so-called list length effect is the finding that recognition performance is superior for items that are part of a short list than for items that were part of a long list (Kinnell & Dennis, 2012).…”

“…In general, it is thought to comprise components for manipulating phonic and visual stimuli separately. Music scholars have long recognized the important role of working memory in musical behaviors, particularly those involving aural skills (Chenette, 2021;Cornelius & Brown, 2020;Gates, 2021;Karpinski, 2000). Indeed, those with formal music training have widely been documented to have better general working memory capacities (Talamini et al, 2016(Talamini et al, , 2017, but note, it is not clear that musical training causally influences general working memory (Silas et al, 2022).…”

“…Lastly, since effects around item length are modeled and described well in the ACT-R framework, which has several models of serial recall (e.g., Anderson, 1972) relevant to the attempt length, and emphasizes modeling produced events, we intend to more thoroughly explore modeling that integrates the ACT-R framework (Ritter et al, 2019) alongside melodic feature modeling. We note that integrations of musicological considerations with ACT-R seem to be scarce (Chikhaoui et al, 2009;Reiter-Haas et al, 2021), yet such a modeling framework that is primarily concerned with explaining musical production seems highly relevant to investigate musical abilities in a comprehensive way and beyond perceptual paradigms in the future (Okada & Slevc, 2021).…”

Dos aspectos poco discutidos en la percepción de progresiones armónicas

“…Este tipo de crítica asume que las funciones armónicas son cualidades sonoras que se pueden utilizar para identificar los acordes de una progresión porque esas cualidades son claras y distintivas -no cambian mucho a pesar de las características armónicas y extra-armónicas específicas del pasaje-. Sin embargo, esto no parece ser completamente cierto porque incluso muchos oyentes con formación musical avanzada utilizan el bajo, no la función tonal, como estrategia principal para descifrar los acordes de un pasaje (Chenette 2021). De aquí se infiere que surgen problemas cuando se intentan identificar las funciones armónicas en un pasaje atendiendo exclusivamente a la cualidad sonora holística de esas funciones.…”