Fifty participants who had never learned how to read music completed a questionnaire about their interpretations of standard western musical notation. Some common assumptions were that a note must consist of a circle plus a line, symbols with unfilled spaces denote silence, the value of notes and rests increases with the size and number of features of a symbol, pitch is denoted by both note-head and stem, and tempo is determined by horizontal spacing. These assumptions are not consistent with the conventions of standard musical notation, thus the findings of the study suggest that many fundamental aspects of notation are not intuitive to beginners. Implications of the findings are discussed with respect to music pedagogy.
Abeles, H.F., Hoffer, C.R., & Klotman, R.H. (1994). Foundations of music education. New York: Schirmer.
2.
Auh, M-S., & Walker, R. (1999). Compositional strategies and musical creativity when composing with staff notations versus graphic notations among Korean students. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education , 141(Summer), 2-9.
3.
Bamberger, J. (1991). The mind behind the musical ear. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4.
Bamberger, J. (1994). Coming to hear in a new way. In R. Aiello and J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), Musical perceptions (pp. 131-151). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5.
Bamberger, J., & Brody, M. (1984). Perceptual problem solving in music: Some proposals for future research. Psychomusicology, 4(1-2), 33-58.
6.
Bent, M., Chew, G., Hiley, D., Payne, T.B., Rastall, R., & Szendrei, J. (2006) Notation. In L. Macy (Ed.), Grove music online. Retrieved 30 January 2006 from www.grovemusic.com
7.
Berger, A.M.B. (1993). Mensuration and proportion signs: Origins and evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
8.
Biel, G.A., & Carswell, C.M. (1993). Musical notation for the keyboard: An examination of stimulus-response compatibility. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 7(5), 433-452.
9.
Boorman, S. (1999). The musical text. In N. Cook & M. Everist (Eds.), Rethinking music (pp. 403-423). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
10.
Bukspan, Y. (1979). Introduction of musical literacy to children by means of a binary system of music notation: An experimental study. Council for Research in Music Education, 59(Summer), 13-17.
11.
Campbell, P.S. (1991). Lessons from the world. New York: Schirmer.
12.
Champagne, A.B., Gunstone, R.F., & Klopfer, L.E. (1983). Naïve knowledge and science learning. Research in Science and Technological Education, 1(2), 173-183.
13.
Chanan, M. (1994). Musica practica: The social practice of western music from Gregorian chant to postmodernism. London: Verso.
14.
Cook, N. (1990). Music, imagination, and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
15.
Cope, D. (1976). New music notation. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt.
16.
Davidson, L., & Scripp, L. (1988). Young children's musical representations: Windows on music cognition. In J. Sloboda (Ed.), Generative processes in music (pp. 195-230). New York: Oxford University Press.
17.
Davidson, L., & Scripp, L. (1992). Surveying the coordinates of cognitive skills in music. In R. Colwell (Ed.), Handbook of research on music teaching and learning (pp. 392-413). New York: Schirmer.
18.
Eastlund-Gromko, J. (1995). Invented iconographic and verbal representations of musical sound: Their information content and usefulness in retrieval tasks . The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, 45(4), 32-43.
19.
Gaare, M. (1997). Alternatives to traditional notation. Music Educators Journal, 83(5), 17-23.
20.
Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind. New York : Basic Books.
21.
Gellrich, M., and Parncutt, R. (1998). Piano technique and fingering in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Bringing a forgotten method back to life. British Journal of Music Education15(1), 5-24.
22.
Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of art: An approach to a theory of symbols (2nd edn). Indianapolis, IN : Hackett.
23.
Grout, D.J., & Palisca, C.V. (2001). A history of western music Sixth edition. New York: W. W. Norton.
24.
Hultberg, C. (2000). The printed score as a mediator of musical meaning approaches to music notation in western tonal music. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Lund University, Sweden.
25.
Hultberg, C. (2002). Approaches to music notation: The printed score as a mediator of meaning in western tonal tradition. Music Education Research, 4(2), 185-197.
26.
Karkoschka, D. (1972). Notation in new music. London : Universal Edition.
27.
Kyme, G.H. (1960). An experiment in teaching children to read music with shape notes. Journal of Research in Music Education, 8(1), 3-8.
28.
Lester, J. (1995). Performance and analysis: Interaction and interpretation . In J. Rink (Ed.), The practice of performance (pp. 197-216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29.
Mainwaring, J. (1941). The meaning of musicianship: A problem in the teaching of music. British Journal of Educational Psychology , 11(3), 205-214.
30.
Mainwaring, J. (1951a). Psychological factors in the teaching of music: Part I: Conceptual musicianship. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 21, 105-121.
31.
Mainwaring, J. (1951b). Psychological factors in the teaching of music: Part II: Applied musicianship. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 21(3), 199-213.
32.
McPherson, G.E. (2005). From child to musician: Skill development during the beginning stages of learning an instrument. Psychology of Music, 33(1), 5-35.
33.
Mintzes, J.J., Trowbridge, J.E., Arnaudin, M.W., & Wandersee, J.J. (1991). Children's biology: Studies on conceptual development in the life sciences. In S. M. Glynn, R. H. Yeany, & B. K. Britton, B. K. (Eds.), The psychology of learning science (pp. 179-202). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
34.
National Research Council (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
35.
Randel, D.M. (1999). Notation. In D. M. Randel (Ed.), Harvard concise dictionary of music and musicians (pp. 455-458). Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
36.
Read, G. (1974). Music notation. London: Victor Gollanz.
37.
Rogers, G.L. (1991). Effect of color-coded notation on music achievement of elementary instrumental students. Journal of Research in Music Education, 39(1), 64-73.
38.
Rothstein, W. (1995). Performance and analysis: Interaction and interpretation . In J. Rink (Ed.), The practice of performance (pp. 217-240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
39.
Sloboda, J.A. (1985). The musical mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
40.
Sloboda, J.A. (2005). Exploring the musical mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
41.
Stone, K. (1980). Music notation in the twentieth century. New York: Norton.
42.
Tan, S.L. (2002). Beginners' intuitions about musical notation. College Music Symposium, 42, 131-41.
43.
Tan, S.L., & Kelly, M.E. (2004). Graphic representations of short musical compositions . Psychology of Music, 32(2), 191-212.
44.
Tanay, D. (1999). Noting music, marking culture: The intellectual context of rhythmic notation, 1250-1400. Hozgerlingen: American Institute of Musicology, Hanssler-Verlag.
45.
The big book of classical music: Piano solo. (1999). Milwaukee: Hal Leonard.
46.
Upitis, R. (1990). Children's invented notations of familiar and unfamiliar melodies. Psychomusicology, 9(1), 89-106.
47.
Upitis, R. (1992). Can I play you my song? The compositions and invented notations of children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
48.
Vosniadou, S. (2007). Conceptual change and education. Human Development, 50(1), 47-54.
49.
Walker, R. (1978). Perception and music notation. Psychology of Music, 6(1), 21-46.
50.
Walker, A.R. (1981). The presence of internalised images of musical sounds. Council for Research in Music Education, 66-67, 107-12.
51.
Walker, A.R. (1987). The effects of culture, environment, age, and musical training on choices of visual metaphors for sound. Perception and Psychophysics, 42(5), 491-502.
52.
Walker, R. (1992). Auditory-visual perception and musical behavior . In R. Colwell (Ed.), Handbook of research on music teaching and learning (pp. 344-359). New York: Schirmer.
