Music Classroom Research Articles

Be Intentional: Anti-Racist Music, SEL, and DEI Alignments

A general music classroom alignment with social & emotional learning (SEL) and diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) can, if implemented with commitment and purpose, help promote student success in important ways by acknowledging systemic inequities, identifying personal bias, and actively interrupting obstacles to equity. SEL alone will not solve long-standing, deep-seated inequities in the education system or society. This column shares insight as to how SEL & DEI alignments in the music classroom have the potential to cultivate knowledge, beliefs, practices, and relationships that can improve lives in communities. The piece encourages music teachers to steadily work to improve practices and ensure that efforts are equitable and connect to larger, more universal goals in education.

Supporting Students With Specific Learning Disabilities: Strategies for the General Music Classroom

Of the more than 6 million students with disabilities ages 6 through 21 receiving services under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 37.1% (more than 2 million) of students have specific learning disabilities. Given the large number of students with specific learning disabilities, it is likely that these students are attending music classes alongside their same-aged peers. This article provides general information about specific learning disabilities, as well as strategies teachers can use when including students with specific learning disabilities in their inclusive classrooms.

Singing World Music: Issues and Ideas for Culturally Responsive Teaching

Implementing culturally responsive teaching is helpful when singing songs in different languages in the general music classroom. Two main hurdles exist when planning music lessons that include songs in different languages—maintaining musical authenticity and overcoming language barriers. One must then find a way to balance an aim for authenticity while also meeting instructional objectives. To help with the planning and execution of culturally responsive lessons that use songs from different countries, the author has included lesson plan examples and music notations for two types of songs in different languages—traditional and translated. There is also a table with online sources for world music.

The Concept of Cultural Humility as It Relates to Instructional Practices in the General Music Classroom

A framework of cultural humility includes three main tenets: (a) commitment to lifelong, critical self-reflection; (b) recognition and mitigation of power imbalances; and (c) accountability to individuals and institutions. In this article, I aim at applying the concept of cultural humility to frame my analysis of musical diversity in music education. Through a cultural humility lens, music teachers may acknowledge their own beliefs, values, biases, and prejudices in relation to diverse musics. A commitment to lifelong introspection through self-reflection and critique may help teachers continue to investigate new ways to redress power imbalances inherent in music education, as well as build their relationships with students and communities bidirectionally.

Application of Internet of Things Audio Technology Based on Parallel Storage System in Music Classroom

In order to improve the effect of music classroom teaching, this paper combines the parallel storage system and the Internet of Things audio technology to construct a music education system to improve the effect of music education in colleges and universities. Moreover, this paper expounds a grid-free method for sparsity and parameter estimation from the model and mathematical principles and proposes a grid-free DOA method based on fast reconstruction of the T-matrix. This method is guaranteed to produce sparse parameter estimates. At the same time, the numerical simulation shows that the method has stable estimation performance as sparse and parameter estimation methods. In addition, this paper constructs a music classroom teaching system based on parallel storage system and Internet of Things audio technology. Through the experimental research, it can be seen that the parallel storage system and the Internet of Things audio technology has obvious application effect in the music classroom, which can effectively improve the teaching effect of the music classroom.

Equity in Music Education: Avoiding Cultural Appropriation in the Music Classroom

Equity in Music Education: Avoiding Cultural Appropriation in the Music Classroom

Groove and Percussion in the Music Classroom

In this article, I explain how percussion and groove are at the core of many musics created and enjoyed today, yet they can be overlooked in music teaching and learning. A pervasive culture of pitched-instrument prejudice makes it difficult to take rhythm and groove seriously, although these can be at the core of meaningful music-making experiences in schools. I provide an original, flexible composition for nonpitched percussion, with easy-to-follow instructions and video demonstration. The article invites teachers to consider embracing an engaging, Afrological approach to making music that emphasizes feel and groove.

Implementing Universal Design Principles in Music Teaching

Students with disabilities (SWDs) in the United States have a right to the least restrictive learning environment as enshrined in federal law. Until recently, conceptions about educating SWDs have drawn from medical models of disability (i.e., that the student must be accommodated to interact with the environment) rather than a social model of disability (i.e., that the environment can be cultivated for all kinds of individual needs). Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an educational framework that music educators can use to shift their planning and instructional practices surrounding SWDs to encompass a social model of disability. Here, we define UDL principles, describe UDL implementation in music classroom contexts, and provide resources for further reading.

Giving Students the Power: Rehearsal Strategies for General Music

Who is in charge of rehearsing music? Traditionally, it has been teachers who guide the music learning, but the National Core Arts Standards ask that students be the ones who identify and select rehearsal strategies to refine musical performances. However, these standards do not define what rehearsal strategies are, so this article digs into research on practicing and rehearsing to create a set of rehearsal strategies applicable to a general music classroom.

Soundtrapped? Socio-material perspectives on collaborative teaching within the music classroom

This article draws on a classroom project to explore the complexities of collaborative teaching within the music classroom, where a professional team collaborated to facilitate digital music-making at a lower secondary school in Norway during a student teacher practicum placement. The collaborative team, including in-service and pre-service teachers, researchers, and a professional musician, facilitated a composing project by means of the digital audio workstation (DAW) Soundtrap. The purpose was to shed light on the complexity and emergence of the collaborative music project; how material, structural, and educational conditions impacted the process; and the pre-service music teachers’ ways of handling a complex situation. The study was theoretically guided by a socio-material perspective, more specifically by complexity theory, and an abductive analysis was performed. In keeping with the nonlinearity and complex causality of socio-materialism and complexity theory, the researchers created three reflexive viewpoints: emergence, enabling constraints, and entanglements. The results show that technological and technical issues permeated the classroom work, making it difficult to separate social and material aspects of the project. Awareness of the entanglement of social, institutional, historical, and material dimensions of education thus can provide a useful framework for emerging music teachers’ professional development. In this way, our findings support the claim that music teacher education should aim at helping pre-service teachers prepare for encounters with complex and versatile educational situations.

Behavioral Strategies for Trauma-Informed Elementary General Music Education for Students With Emotional/Behavioral Disorders: A Review of the Literature

Elementary general music teachers encounter challenging behaviors in the music classroom when teaching students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD), which require prevention and response. In this article, I reviewed literature on pedagogical strategies and interventions for students with EBD in the elementary general music classroom. The review is organized as follows: (a) introduction and process, (b) overview of trauma, (c) overview of EBD, (d) principles of trauma-informed care, and (e) summary and recommendations. Through this review, I present current knowledge on best practices for understanding and framing the unique behavioral needs of special learners with EBD through a trauma-informed lens.

Exploratory and Creative Practices in Undergraduate Brass Techniques Coursework

Coursework across the music education curriculum provides teacher educators an opportunity to introduce and reinforce a range of instructional practices (i.e., creating, performing, responding to, and connecting with music) into the music classroom. Although instrument techniques courses are a foundational part of an undergraduate music education curriculum, previous research suggests that preservice music educators perceive these courses to be less impactful on their future careers than other courses in the curriculum. To create meaningful and transferable learning experiences, music teacher educators can include elements of experimentation, mistake-making, and creativity in brass techniques courses to provide preservice music educators with opportunities for independent learning and problem-solving. By offering these pedagogical techniques, music teacher educators can also model constructivist practices for students to use in their future classrooms.

Voice Load in a Music Student Teacher: A Quantitative Case Study in Voice Dosimetry

ABSTRACT The authors examined the voice use of a student teacher in vocal music in the initial 20 instructional meetings of a choir class over two months in a high school choir class. The purpose was to explore voice load during one daily period in the music classroom at the beginning of the student teaching placement to evaluate how and whether voice use changes in the early stage of teacher preparation. Results indicated that measures of fundamental frequency (F0), phonation time, phonation volume, and background noise level varied across measurement periods and according to student teacher activities. As a percentage of the instructional period, phonation time ranged 1.9% to 42%, and was largest in measurement periods beyond the initial days of student teaching. Teacher volume increased modestly across the data collection. Implications are suggested including increased confidence in the student teacher or increased voice misuse by the student teacher.

Teaching songs from diverse cultures to pre-service teachers using a “Four Step Flipped” method

As music educators around the globe continue to work in blended environments, it is important to explore how pedagogical approaches can be adapted and reimagined in ways that enhance teaching and learning in this changing educational landscape. In this study, the authors drew on elements of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) to teach three culturally diverse songs to pre-service teachers at a Spanish university. Acting as culture bearers and tertiary music educators, they selected and taught songs from three different geographic locations (South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States). Utilizing a descriptive case study design, the authors discuss their pedagogical approach and argue a Four Step Flip method (Asynchronous, Synchronous, Face-to-Face, and Hybrid Feedback) can be effectively applied and adopted in online music teaching and learning settings. This model prioritizes the culture bearers’ involvement in the learning process from start to finish while allowing students ample space to merge unfamiliar cultural perspectives with their own. The authors also contend building collaborative networks that extend beyond national borders can enhance understanding and appreciation of different genres, cultures, and languages in music classrooms.

“I relate everything in my life to music”: How music pre-service teachers make sense of and envision using English language development standards

Content area teachers need specialized knowledge about language to teach a growing population of multilingual learners (MLs). This includes knowledge of English language development standards and how they can be applied to classroom instruction in each teacher's content area. Traditionally, the preparation of pre-service teachers (PSTs) for teaching MLs has revolved around core content areas (e.g., science, math). However, MLs’ learning takes places across a range of settings in K-12 schools, including in non-core content areas (e.g., music, art). This study investigated how music PSTs made sense of language, as represented in the latest English language development standards in U.S. K-12 education, by making connections to music. It also investigated how PSTs envisioned using the standards in their future music classrooms with MLs. Findings highlight the need to adopt an asset-based view of non-core PSTs as bringing rich disciplinary knowledge and experiences to their preparation for teaching MLs.

Optimization of Vocal Singing Training Methods Using Intelligent Big Data Technology.

The development of art education and information technology has led to the importance of computer technology and multimedia technology in the development of students' independent inquiry and research skills. In the context of “Internet+,” new modes of teaching phonics have emerged, reconfiguring the spatial and temporal relationship of phonics education. The use of Internet resources is not only a simple collection and sharing of educational resources, but also a new way of teaching voice, which has the magic charm of becoming one of the resources for the majority of voice enthusiasts. However, in practice, there are very few assistive software suitable for music classroom teaching. It is important to research and implement teaching aids suitable for music classroom teaching. Based on intelligent big data technology to optimize the phonetic training methods, the teaching methods are more specific, scientific, and diverse, and improve the self-learning ability and learning interest of Chinese phonetic learners. The experimental results show that the weight of the phonetic teaching optimization process is 0.154 higher than the weight before processing, which is expressed as the value of the control reliability fuzzy quantifier in this test. In other words, the reliability is “absolutely reliable.” Therefore, this study is expected to promote the modernization and scientific process of Chinese vocal education and propose a new way of thinking for Chinese vocal education.

Construction and Application of Music Teaching Resources Based on Recurrent Neural Network

Along with the rapid development of informational techniques, educational techniques are becoming increasingly important in the field of education, encouraging the reform and innovation of traditional educational concepts and teaching methods. Various music teaching aids have also become widely available. However, there is a scarcity of assistive software that is truly appropriate for music classroom instruction. A neural network is an artificial model that models and connects neurons, which are the basic units of the animal or human brain, to stimulate the nervous system’s learning, association, memory, and pattern recognition functions. We propose a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based music teaching resource construction, method, and application in this paper, focusing on the needs of music distance learning, analysing the user role needs of teachers, students, and system administrators involved in teaching and learning, and designing a mobile teaching platform in line with music teaching based on the characteristics of music teaching. The experimental results show that the system’s accuracy increases steadily with the number of iterations, and the accuracy fluctuation is stable, with an average accuracy of 72 percent and good system stability. As a result, research into this topic has significant implications for improving the quality and efficiency of music education in China, reforming the current school music education model, developing social music education, and realising music education for all and lifelong music education.

Women sounding out: Listening for queerness in folk and popular music of the United States

Folk music and other popular styles associated with rural regions of the United States appear to be unlikely places to find lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other gender/sexual minorities (LGBTQ+). Consequently, teaching folk music of the United States with attention to diversity, equity and inclusion can be challenging for music educators. In this article, I use Yves Bonenfant’s notion of ‘queer listening’ to discuss queer genders and sexualities in folk and popular music, applying the framework to three songs by women artists: Tracy Chapman’s ‘For My Lover’, the Indigo Girls’ ‘Closer to Fine’ and Amythyst Kiah’s version of ‘Black Myself’. By treating queerness as a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’, queer narratives of oppression, survival, resilience and triumph in folk music can be discussed in the music classroom with greater nuance in relation to history, performance and reception.

Research on Innovative Practice of Midi Music Production in Music Class of Primary and Secondary Schools

Under the new curriculum reform, there are higher requirements for music teaching in primary and secondary schools in information technology based teaching, which also provides channels and platforms for the application and practice of Midi and music software in classroom teaching, and thus becoming one of the important content of music classroom reform in primary and secondary schools. In this study, the Midi music based theory knowledge is introduced with probes into the concrete methods for Midi music production. Through the computer music works creation practice, students can understand the Midi music production process so as to independently make a relatively complete works of music, improving primary and secondary school music classroom teaching effect.

Interactive Music Teaching Method Based on Big Data and Cloud Computing

With the development of contemporary technology and education, there are more and more innovative teaching methods that are helpful to the education and teaching procedure. Interactive teaching method is one of them. Interactive teaching is a teaching modus based on developed on the scaffolding teaching theory that attaches importance to the communication between teachers and learners. Its biggest goal is to develop learner-specific and specific autonomous learning strategies through the communication and collaboration between the teacher and the learner. The advanced nature and effectiveness of interactive teaching methods make it more and more widely used in education, such as in the field of music teaching. Music teaching is a kind of teaching that pays more attention to the communication between teachers and Teachees. This paper aims to study the interactive music teaching method based on BD and CC, that is to design an interactive music teaching method based on big data and cloud computing technology, and conduct practical application experiments on it. The experiment concluded that the interactive music teaching method based on BD and CC has made the students’ participation rate in music teaching classrooms reach 88%, and the excellent rate of in-class test scores has reached 90%.