Music appreciation teachers are continuously seeking methods for increasing student involvement with music. In this study, three different music-involvement techniques were compared: visual representation, verbal description, and a control condition. In the visual condition, subjects drew an illustration of the musical activity of a short music selection. In the verbal condition, subjects wrote a paragraph describing the music. In the control condition, subjects listened to the music and mentally followed its movement. All subjects then answered a questionnaire measuring several aspects of responsiveness, such as enjoyment, attention, and understanding. Results were also analyzed on the basis of the subjects' right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere orientation. Overall, there were no differences among the three conditions. There were significant interactions, however, between activity and hemisphere orientation. Right-oriented subjects had the highest appreciation scores in the visual condition, while left-oriented subjects had the highest scores in the verbal condition. The visual condition interfered with mental imagery in left-oriented subjects. Right-hemisphere subjects drew more accurate visual representations than did lefts.
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