Making the Implicit Explicit: Music Listening, Blended Delivery and the Representational Redescription Model

Abstract

Close listening, perhaps the most important skill in music education is seldom practiced in the 21 st century. The ability to listen, understand, communicate, and interpret what you hear is central to education in general and transferable to many life situations and modes of communication. For this reason, listening is the primary focus of most first year post-secondary music history courses. It is also one of the most challenging skills to teach in large classroom formats. To address these challenges, we developed a blended delivery approach to support recognition, comprehension, and communication of musical materials. Based on the literature on music cognition and Karmiloff-Smith’s (1992) Representational Redescription Model (RR Model) of knowledge acquisition, we designed a cognitive framework to support the design of enhanced listening models. This paper describes the results of a pilot project which presented the students with selfpaced on-line listening activities followed by a virtual listening/discussion session with peers. Both activities were well-received by the students and level of music experience was not associated with students’ perceived value of the activities, indicating that students with varied backgrounds found the activities useful. The results support our cognitive framework as a foundation for technologicallyenhanced listening activities for postsecondary music courses.