This article presents some of the views of Barry Polisar, a singer and a songwriter of children's music. (DB)

Adults and children (aged 5 years 1 month to 10 years 8 months) were tested in a masking-level difference (MLD) paradigm in which detection of brief signals was contrasted for signal placement in masker envelope maxima versus masker envelope minima. Maskers were 50-Hz-wide noise bands centered on 500 Hz, and the signals were So or S[pi] 30-ms,…

Detecting distinctions between the styles of classical music (e.g. Baroque and Romantic) is often viewed as the privilege of musicians. However, this elite perspective underestimates the abilities of non-musicians. We report that Western musicians and non-musicians, and non-Westerners (i.e. Chinese participants) rated pairs of excerpts presented…

This study was designed to (a) gather band directors' opinions of skills and characteristics important to teaching and (b) examine the relative effectiveness of electronic versus paper survey methods. Survey respondents ranked lists of music, teaching, and personal skills or characteristics in order of importance and answered open-ended items…

An Auditory Ambiguity Test (AAT) was taken twice by nonmusicians, musical amateurs, and professional musicians. The AAT comprised different tone pairs, presented in both within-pair orders, in which overtone spectra rising in pitch were associated with missing fundamental frequencies (F0) falling in pitch, and vice versa. The F0 interval ranged…

A number of studies suggest a link between musical training and general cognitive abilities. Despite some positive results, there is disagreement about which abilities are improved. One line of research leads to the hypothesis that verbal abilities in general, and verbal memory in particular, are related to musical training. In the present…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the domain specificity (or otherwise) of motivation and engagement across academic, sport, and music domains using a survey-based methodology with parallel forms of the Motivation and Engagement Scale. The secondary purpose of the study was a methodological one seeking to test the most appropriate…

This paper explores ideas of language as a cognitive tool and the role of gesture in expressing children's interests and levels of knowledge. The context is a group of three-year-old children who participate in a weekly music session with a trained musician. The authors present drawings from photographs of children's hands and interpret them,…

An influential hypothesis regarding the neural basis of the mental lexicon is that semantic representations are neurally implemented as distributed networks carrying sensory, motor and/or more abstract functional information. This work investigates whether the semantic properties of words partly determine the topography of such networks. Subjects…

Ceilidh is an important part of both Scottish and Irish cultures, and its role within the traditions is central to the onward transmission of music, poetry and lore. There has been a renaissance in Scottish traditional music in recent years, and this article examines the learning processes and means of transmission in traditional music that have…

This article explores the use of lyric writing in elementary science. It details an exploratory project in which elementary students and a professional musician collaborated to write and record lyrics at the conclusion of an inquiry-based science unit. What we found was that lyric writing when used as a summary reflection activity in science…

Lucy Green's latest book, "Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy" (Green, 2008) posits that the learning taking place among popular musicians, developed out of a need to create and perform pieces of music, and found "everywhere in everyday life" rather than in the formalised settings of the majority…

Semester assessment of college wind band members is an issue that conductors would probably agree falls within their academic freedom. Institutions may award as little as no credit or even a percentage of a credit for ensemble participation, although the time and effort required of the students and their conductor is undoubtedly equivalent to, or…

A common desire among music educators is to help students develop the ability to reflect on and evaluate their own music making. To achieve this goal, music educators often provide their students with a variety of instructional activities, such as watching their ensemble's latest concert performance and writing a critical review of it, allowing…