Journal of Research in Music Education

This study compared the effects of male timbre, falsetto, and sine-wave models on pitch-matching skills of inaccurate boy versus girl singers in Grades K—8. Subjects were 216 inaccurate singers in Grades K-8 (n = 12 boys and 12 girls from each grade). They were presented descending minor thirds sung by a tenor and a bass in their regular octaves (G3—E3) and in falsetto (G4—E4), as well as two sine-wave stimuli in the same octaves. Subjects were recorded singing back the presented intervals. The recordings were digitized and analyzed for pitch and interval cent deviation. Responses to male stimuli were more accurate than were responses to sine waves. Girls responded more accurately to higher stimuli, and boys responded more accurately to lower stimuli. The octaves of the stimuli also affected the octaves of the responses, and the subjects had a tendency to sing intervals that were larger rather than smaller than the minor-third models.

From 1900 to 1916, the demographic makeup of the United States changed radically due to the heavy influx of people from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the schools, in particular, felt the impact of this immigration. Many music educators, like their colleagues in general education, found themselves facing an increasingly multicultural classroom for the first time. As a result of their efforts to help Americanize their immigrant students, music educators gradually came to know and accept folk songs and dances from many European countries and to make use of musics from these countries in music appreciation classes. Also during this period, some of the musics of Native Americans and African Americans were introduced into the music curriculum. Including these folk musics in the American school music curriculum resulted in an increased musical diversity that perhaps marked the beginnings of multicultural music education in the public schools.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of losing a visual (conductor) and/or aural (ensemble) stimulus on the ability of band members to perform a piece of music with an ensemble. Subjects were 120 undergraduate band members who individually played their instrument while viewing a videotape of a conductor and listening to a band via headphones. After the first 16 measures, experimental groups lost the sound of the band, the picture of the conductor, or both. The control group continued to view and hear the full stimulus tape and received the highest accuracy ratings. Subjects in the group that could only see the conductor were rated almost identically with those who could only hear the ensemble, and both were rated higher than the group that lost the entire stimulus. Videotapes of control-group subjects were analyzed for instances of eye contact with the conductor. These subjects looked up at the conductor nearly 28 % of the time, with glances that averaged just under 1 second each.

The purpose of this study was to compare the hearing acuity of three groups of music teachers: vocal, elementary instrumental, and high school instrumental. One hundred four music teachers were tested for evidence of hearing loss that could possibly be attributed to Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL). This type of hearing loss is a permanent loss of hearing acuity resulting from repeated exposure to intense sound levels. Results indicate that some risk of NIHL is involved in high school band directing but the degree of risk varies widely among individuals.

Undergraduate college music majors, high school musicians in performance groups, and sixth-grade students in eight sites across the United States listened to brief excerpts of music from early contemporary compositions, popular classics, selections in the Silver Burdett/Ginn elementary music education series, and current crossover jazz recordings. Each of the classical categories had a representative keyboard, band, choral, and orchestral excerpt. Self reports of knowledge and preference were recorded by the Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI) while subjects listened to excerpts.

Instrumental biases were found among high school and college musicians' preferences for relatively unfamiliar classical music. College music majors' preferences, in general, were less “own-instrument-based” than were those of high school musicians. In addition, the results suggest training broadens receptivity within and across music genres. There seems, however, to be no predictable connection between the degree to which one “knows ” an excerpt and preference for the excerpt.