Correlating Methods of Teaching Aural Skills with Individual Learning Styles

Abstract

For the musician, aural skills mean training our ears to identify the basic elements of music. These include the ability to hear what is happening melodically, harmonically and rhythmically as the music is played. As music educators, we instruct our students on how to hear the grammar of this medium we call music. It is arguably this process of active listening that is the most important part of being a musician. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult skills to acquire and subsequently, the teaching of aural skills is generally acknowledged to be demanding, laborious, and downright punishing for faculty and students alike. At the college undergraduate level, aural skills courses are challenging at best, tortuous at worst. Surprisingly, pedagogy in this area is hugely underdeveloped. The focus of my work is to explain and encourage educators to identify the learning styles, i.e. visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinesthetic, of students in their classroom at the beginning of the semester and then correlate their teaching methodology, e.g., solfeggio, rote, song list, playing keyboard, etc., to each learning style. It is my hypothesis that when a focused and appropriate instructional strategy is paired with the related learning style, aural skills education is more successful for everyone.