Learning Music Composers’ Styles: To Block or to Interleave?

Abstract

The ability to recognize and distinguish among varying musical styles is essential to developing aural skills and musicianship. Yet, this task can be difficult for music learners, particularly nonexperts. To address this challenge and guide music education practice, this study drew on cognitive psychological principles to investigate the effect of interleaved presentation of music pieces by various classical music composers on learning to identify these composers’ styles. Participants with 4 or fewer years of musical experience were presented with music pieces from six composers in an interleaved manner (alternating between listening to different composers’ works) and music pieces from another six composers in a blocked fashion (listening to works by one composer at a time before moving on to the next). A later test in which participants had to classify novel pieces by the same 12 composers revealed the superiority of interleaved over blocked presentation, although most participants misjudged blocking to be more effective than interleaving. This finding provides evidence for the utility of interleaving in teaching music composers’ styles and extends the literature on the interleaving effect in category induction to the auditory domain. Practical implications and future directions for the use of interleaving in music education are discussed.

Learning melodic musical intervals: To block or to interleave?

“…Whereas previous studies on the interleaving effect in category induction have focused primarily on the visual domain (e.g., Birnbaum et al, 2013;Kornell & Bjork, 2008), our findings contribute to an emerging area of research that has further demonstrated the benefits of interleaving in the auditory domain (e.g., Wong et al, 2020;Zulkiply et al, 2012). While cognitive psychology studies have often endorsed interleaving (for a review, see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013), this learning technique has received comparatively less attention in extant research and classroom practices in musical interval learning (see the Introduction).…”

“…Here, we consider a couple of explanations related to the inclusion of reference songs and singing. First, experimental studies demonstrating an advantage of interleaving in musical learning have often investigated this effect without integrating other learning aids or techniques (e.g., Stambaugh, 2011;Wong et al, 2020). In contrast, learners' attention in the present study may have been diverted to the reference songs and singing elements.…”

“…Considered in tandem with Experiment 1's findings, it appears that some elements of musical sophistication may be associated with musical interval learning within the context of additional elements such as reference songs and singing, but not when these elements are removed. Presumably, this may be because interleaving is a general cognitive-based learning strategy and does not predicate on learners' musical training or sophistication (see also Wong et al, 2020).…”

“…More recently, interleaving has also been found to outperform blocking in musical category learning. In a study by Wong, Low, Kang, and Lim (2020), novices learnt various classical music composers' styles by listening to their respective music pieces in a blocked (i.e., listening to works by one composer at a time before going on to the next) or interleaved (i.e., alternating between listening to different composers' works) manner. In a final test, learners were more accurate at classifying novel music pieces by composers whose works had earlier been presented interleaved, as opposed to blocked.…”

Samani and Pan (2021) Interleaving enhances memory and problem-solving skills in physics

“…Initial efforts to address these questions have focused involved interleaving in such domains as mathematics, 21,26,27 second language instruction, 2,28,29 and other areas. 30 To date, the emerging literature on such uses of interleaving has yielded promising results and especially in the domain of middle-school mathematics. For example, in a 2014 classroom study, the use of interleaved homework assignments to practice algebra and graphing problems (e.g., solving for x in an equation; graphing an equation in the form of y = mx + b) yielded subsequent surprise test performance that was nearly double that relative to a condition using blocked homework assignments.…”