A hypermedia listening station for the college music literature class.

Abstract

A common task facing college freshman and sophomore music majors is the acquisition of recognition ability for a core repertoire of music literature. It seems plausible that interactive computer technology holds great promise for the development of this particular skill. To test this premise, students from an undergraduate music literature class of approximately 80 members were chosen to participate in a study. Students in the experimental group (n = 17) utilized a computerized listening station (employing researcher-designed instructional programming) to determine if such use would augment the ability of those Ss to identify selected works in a subsequent recognition task, while students in a control group utilized a typical repeated hearing strategy. A Likert-scale questionnaire administered prior to the study served as a pretest and assessed the students' knowledge of composers and works included in the study. No significant difference between the groups was found. At the conclusion of the study, a recognition test was administered which required students to identify composers, works, movements of works, and theme groups of the works included in the study. Ss in the experimental group had a significantly higher score (p < .001) on the posttest than the control group. The results of the study suggest that use of such a listening station improves the ability of undergraduate music majors to develop a recognition ability for basic music repertoire, and possibly decreases the amount of time needed for the process. Recommendations include: (1) expanding study sample sizes in subsequent studies, (2) widening the music example pool, (3) expanding the study to include more dependent variables in the analysis, and (4) including more detailed time analysis in subsequent studies.