Effects of Soundpainting Training on Attention

Sonat Coşkuner,Jostein Stalheim

doi:10.7596/taksad.v9i1.2307

Abstract

In particular, the relationship between music and brain, which is the subject of research by neurologists and neuropsychologists, has started to attract the attention of musicians and educators in recent years. Musicians try to make sense of the music they do instinctively, while educators try to clarify how the relationship between music and brain reflects on education. In this study, the effects of Soundpainting education, which is a multi-disciplinary, live composing sign language for musicians, dancers, actors and visual artists, has been investigated. The study is an experimental study based on pretest-posttest model with experimental-control group. The study group is comprised of 3rd grade students studying in the Department of Music at the University of Norway Applied Science (Bergen). Sentences consisting of soundpainting syntax can be short and sometimes long. The long sentences pointed out by the Soundpainter require the performers to receive a high level of visual attention. As the visual attention was measured in this study, Victoria Stroop Attention Test was applied as a data collection tool. In the light of the data obtained in the study, it was concluded that there was no significant difference between the post-test results of the experimental and control groups, but that there was a significant difference between the results of the pre-test and post-tests of the experimental group.

Highlights

Cognitive developmentMore than a century of such neuropsychological investigation has allowed us to make maps of the brain’s areas of function, and to localize particular cognitive operations
According to the results for the first sub-problem; the experimental and control groups were not equal in number at the beginning of the study [7-5], it was observed that the readiness was homogeneous
Pre-test results were similar in both groups

Summary

Introduction

More than a century of such neuropsychological investigation has allowed us to make maps of the brain’s areas of function, and to localize particular cognitive operations. The prevailing view of the brain is that it is a computational system, and we think of the brain as a type of computer. Different subsystems are responsible for different aspects of cognition (Levitin, 2006: 84). Musical activity involves nearly nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystems. Different aspects of the music are handled by different neural regions- the brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal, such as pitch, tempo, timbre ans so on (Levitin, 2006: 85-86)

Methods

Results

Conclusion