Do you hear what I hear?

This study focuses on the nature of students’ musical expressions as they make meaning while listening. Based on the students’ natural and valued use of enactive strategies and visual representations of musical sounds, lessons were designed to enable their musical understanding while listening, culminating in a student-created musical mapping experience. Throughout this process, data were collected through audio- and videotape, teacher-researcher logs and journals, and artifacts. Findings a) provided insight into the nature of student interaction with music, with each other, and with the maps as evolving representations of the music they heard, and b) furthered the notion of listening as creative with musical maps as a viable tool for developing “felt pathways” of feeling and knowing experienced while creating musical maps and relived during the sharing of maps.

By Deborah V. Blair, Ph.D.,Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, 2008

Keywords: music listening, musical maps, kinesthetic and visual strategies, felt pathways, embodied cognition

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Photo credit to Christian Brandt