Pitch internalization strategies of professional musicians.

Abstract

Music educators agree that the internalization of pitch from music notation is essential for music literacy, but college music theory teachers often find that students' aural comprehension lags behind their visual comprehension of musical notation. Teachers may find pitch skills difficult to teach because their own cognition has become intuitive through musical experience. Research in aural skills pedagogy has produced neither comprehensive curricular requirements nor an ideal sequence of experiences for pitch internalization. Furthermore, teachers with absolute pitch (AP) cannot know from personal experience how to teach necessary relative pitch (RP) skills.

Results of the Aural Skills Questionnaire were analyzed to determine the types of experience and deliberate practice that led to effective RP skills among 100 professional musicians. Music instruction and ensembles before and during college were considered along with training and experience after college. Participants also compared their own strategies with six metaphors for pitch perception proposed in the author's earlier study, Thinking in sound: A qualitative study of metaphors for pitch perception---Follower, Contour-singer, Button-pusher, Builder, Tonal-thinker and Pitcher. Three music educators also analyzed participants' strategies through their scripts for aural tasks and compared them with the metaphors. One additional metaphor was proposed---the Chunker---to describe the pattern-seeking strategy found in many scripts and definitions of other metaphors were revised. Individual interviews with RP experts, chosen on the basis of accuracy in aural tasks and self-assessed confidence, provided additional insights for aural skills pedagogy.