Listening and Thinking: A Pilot Study

The two purposes of this pilot study were: to classify fifth-grade students’ verbal responses as either Musical Term or Affective/Associative, and to determine if there was a significant difference between subjects’ verbal responses in written and spoken forms. Fifth-grade subjects (n = 40) completed the “Listening and Thinking” measure, consisting of six open-ended questions based on two pairs of instrumental musical examples. Half the subjects responded in written form while the other half responded in oral form. In a Two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), a disordinal interaction was found (p = 0.01) such that there were more spoken responses referring to musical terms, and more written responses referring to affective/associative responses. The subjects provided significantly (p = 0.00 1) more musical term than affective/associative responses. There were, however, no significant differences found in the subjects’ responses by musical example, by order of musical examples, or by form of data. For affective and associative responses, written data may prove to be more useful than spoken data, and written responses to music listening appear to be as effective as spoken data. These results have implications for future investigations