Article

The terms aural skills and analysis often conjure a range of memories and perspectives among music educators and their students. Music educators often address aural skills and analysis in ways that echo their experiences in undergraduate music programs, drawing on strategies designed for the realm of Western classical music. When translated in K-12 contexts this may take the form of using Curwen hand signs and having students identify aspects of standard notation in elementary general music classes or conducting Roman numeral analysis and iden-tifying chord qualities or intervallic relationships in prep-aration for an Advanced Placement (AP) music theory exam in high school music classes. Focusing solely on aural skills and analysis within para-digms of Western music, however, can limit students’ musical learning and engagement to particular ways of knowing music. To diversify and broaden the types of aural skills and analysis that students learn and engage with, music educators might consider contexts beyond Western classical music. This includes having students reflect on their experiences, asking questions, and highlighting aspects of their engagement to make what they are learn-ing, explicit. In this article, I outline several ways that music teachers might situate aural skills and analysis in the context of musical engagement related to popular music and culture. While the specific examples are designed with middle school or high school students in mind, the approaches can be applied in any music learning context if adjusted for developmental appropriateness. Along with broadening the types of aural skills and analysis we include in music programs, the forms of engagement addressed throughout this article might expand popular music peda-gogies that sometimes focus primarily on performing.1 Engaging as Musical Detectives or Forensic Musicologists Throughout popular culture we can find instances where people identify similarities between two or more songs and wonder if one might have borrowed heavily or per-haps even copied the original song. In popular discourse people might debate over whether someone indeed stole another musician’s music. Searching the Internet usin