Learning melodic musical intervals: To block or to interleave?

Abstract

Musical interval identification is a valuable skill for holistic and sophisticated musicianship. Yet, discriminating and identifying intervals is often challenging, especially for musical novices. Drawing on cognitive psychological principles, we built two experiments that investigated the utility of interleaving in enhancing novices’ aural identification of melodic ascending intervals. Specifically, we designed a novel programmed intervention during which novices learnt six interval types in an interleaved schedule (different interval types learnt interspersed) and six interval types in a blocked schedule (each interval type drilled several times before proceeding to the next) within a single session. When implemented in combination with familiar reference songs and singing as supplementary learning aids, interleaving and blocking yielded comparable performance on a test requiring participants to classify novel instances of the studied interval types (Experiment 1). However, in the absence of reference songs and singing, a robust interleaving effect emerged—interleaving produced superior musical interval identification than blocking (Experiment 2). Yet, most participants were unaware of the benefits of interleaving, and misjudged blocking to be more effective. These findings highlight the potential influence of context under which interleaving is a beneficial technique for learning melodic musical intervals.