Comparative audiation difficulty of tonal, rhythm, and melodic patterns among grade 4 students

The purpose of this research was to investigate the audiation difficulty of melodic patterns. The specific research problems of this study were to: (a) examine the relationships between the audiation difficulty of melodic patterns compared to the audiation difficulty of their embedded tonal patterns and embedded rhythm patterns, (b) determine if tonal pattern difficulty and/or rhythm pattern difficulty may be used to predict melodic pattern difficulty, (c) examine the mean differences between the audiation difficulty of melodic patterns compared to the audiation difficulty of their embedded tonal patterns and embedded rhythm patterns, and (d) examine the mean differences between the audiation difficulty of 3:3, 4:4, and 5:5 proportioned melodic patterns. Grade 4 students (N = 58) in Albany, New York were administered three versions of the researcher-developed Melodic Pattern Audiation Test (MPAT-A, MPAT-B, & MPAT-C) (Danahy, 2013). Using 6,790 item responses to conduct item analysis, Pearson product-moment correlations, and a one-way analysis of variance, the researcher determined that for this population: (a) the audiation difficulty of melodic patterns was weakly correlated to the audiation difficulty of their embedded tonal patterns (r = -.28, p = .029) and embedded rhythm patterns ( r = .36, p = .005), (b) tonal pattern difficulty and/or rhythm pattern difficulty cannot be used to predict melodic pattern difficulty, (c) Grade 4 students were able to audiate proportioned melodic patterns more easily than tonal patterns and rhythm patterns, and (d) the complexity of a proportioned melodic pattern, with respect to the number of pitches and rhythmic durations, may not affect audiation difficulty