Making Music Visible – Students’ Voices In A Listening Task

Abstract

Research on music listening provided various framework to conceive, realise and analyse music listening tasks (Beach & Bolden, 2018; Kratus, 2017; Peterson, 2006). Listening combined with visual arts can contribute to creative music listening and musical understanding, but the teacher needs to guide student’s reflection to make learning outcomes explicit (Chatelain, Giglio & Moor, 2019; Mosch, 2015; Steincke, 2007). Theoretical framework developed in reference to embodied cognition and interartistic relations (Spampinato, 2015) can be used to analyse music listening activities linked to visual arts. Starting from this, the distinction between analogic and homologic interpretation becomes a tool to identify potentials and obstacles for student’s musical understanding (Chatelain, 2019). While analogic interpretation refers to superficial links between musical and visual elements, homologic interpretation refers to bodily sensations to establish relations between musical experience and visual representation. The purpose of this study is to show how music listening can be enhanced or not by a numeric tool for visual animation in the music classroom by using the concepts of analogic and homologic interpretation. According to a lesson study methodology (Maiwald & Rauscher, 2019), a teaching sequence was planned and realised in three classes (students 11-17 years old) in Switzerland. Students created visual animations on a given music by using an online platform in small groups of 3 to 4. A qualitative content analysis of the transcribed verbatims of the videotaped classroom interactions was based on theory-led and emerging categories (Gebauer, 2013). The results show that most of the pupils are able to identify specific moments of the music as they listened repeatedly while creating their visual animation. Nevertheless, the visualization process can hinder musical understanding when students only use analogic interpretations and mostly refer to the final visual animation. The teacher plays an important role to reorient students’ attention to musical aspects during the process and reflective phase where musical knowledge is shared. The theoretical framework used in the study sheds a light on the importance of bodily sensations as a key for musical understanding when music listening is related to visual animations. Teacher’s role is essential to make student’s musical experience sharable. The concept of homologic interpretation bears a potential to explore in arts integration projects in order to make musical understanding explicit. Further research could explore the use of this concept to foster musical understanding and creativity when students compose or improvise inspired by pictures or videos.