Abstract :
This article tries to answer two related questions: (i) what do children hear while listening
to and making sense of music? and (ii) what kind of representational tools can be used to
assess this sense-making? To answer these questions, we set up two empirical studies in
which 89 children – 8–9-year-olds and 11–12-year-olds (first study) – and 331 children –
8–10-year-olds and 11–13-year-olds, with and without extra music training (second study) –
were exposed to a music listening task. The aim of the studies was to get an overall picture
of the variety of children’s musical representations by means of their graphical notations,
and to investigate the impact of age, formal musical training and the characteristics of the
musical fragment on these notations. A major finding of the first study was the emergence
of two main categories of notations, namely ‘global’ and ‘differentiated’ notations, with
a very strong dominance of global over differentiated ones and a negligible impact of
subject and task variables. The second study, in which we presented researcher-generated
instead of existing musical fragments, yielded a larger number of differentiated notations,
and a considerable impact of age and formal musical education as well as of the musical
characteristics on these notations. Both studies were ascertaining studies with the aim
to describe and analyse the development of children’s graphical notations under given
instructional conditions. To account for some of the limitations of these studies, some
additional design-based research is suggested. Extensive findings/exemplars of both studies
can be found on the Cambridge University Press website.
