Perspectives on Music Education Research

Abstract

In music education many approaches to learning are developed and practiced. In this paper the phenomenon of music learning will be discussed in general. Thereby, learning is understood as the process by which musical representations are developed in mind. Here it is distinguished between different types of representation: figural and formal. The basis for this distinction is founded in recent neurobiological research of music learning. The text refers to three EEG studies which all focus on the phenomenon of mental representation. By this, it can be shown that there are different types of representation reflected by different cortical activation patterns, depending on the ways of teaching and learning. The results of the neurobiological measurements call for a change of our understanding of music learning.