Review: Music Cognition and Aural Skills: A Review Essay on George Pratt's "Aural

Awareness"
Author(s): Matthew S. Royal
Review by: Matthew S. Royal
Source: Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Fall, 1999), pp. 127-
144
Published by: University of California Press
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Music Perception © 1999 by the regents of the
Fall 1999, Vol. 17, No. 1, 127-144 university of California

Music Cognition and Aural Skills: A Review Essay on

George Pratt's Aural Awareness

George Pratt, Aural Awareness: Principles and Practice. 2nd ed. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. 154 + x pp. ISBN 0-19-879022-8,
$65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-879022-X, $24.95 (paper).

Introduction

To listen to music too hard - to hear it in terms of its component sounds,

and to co-ordinate these with some production-oriented scheme of rep-
resentation [notation] - is to risk not hearing music at all; and con-
versely, to hear music aesthetically may be to hear hardly anything in
production-oriented terms. (Cook, 1990, p. 159)

Much of the discourse in Nicholas Cook's Music, Imagination, and Cul-

ture turns on the distinction between what he calls "musicological" (ana-
lytical) and "musical" (aesthetic) listening. Whether or not the dichotomy
is as marked as Cook suggests, music educators must from time to time
defend their teaching against charges of overanalyzing music at the ex-
pense of holistic aesthetic enjoyment. Such objections are perhaps most
raucous in the theory and aural-skills classrooms where music students are
called upon to reify, classify, and abstract musical structures with a de-
manding degree of rigor. Often, the requirement to engage in the intellec-
tual contemplation of musical experience is a strange and difficult one for
those students whose motivation to do music is simply the emotional "buzz"
that they get from playing or listening. Nor might this rejection of the cere-
bral side of music be something that is easy to overcome. For instance,
research on cognitive style and listening attitudes suggests that some people
are temperamentally better suited than others to perform analytical listen-
ing tasks (Ellis, 1995; Ellis & McCoy, 1990). Nonetheless, the notion of
music as an object of intellectual inquiry, musica speculativa, has a vener-
able history in academe. Indeed, in universities today, one of the implicit
justifications for most courses in music history or music theory seems to be
that historical or theoretical knowledge can feed into and influence the
activities of listening, playing, and composing in a positive way. Intellectu-
alizing about music, then, contra Cook, is intended to complement and
enrich purely aesthetic modes of listening rather than to replace them.
127

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 128 Book Reviews

The subject of this review, George Pratt's recently republished book Au-
ral Awareness: Principles and Practice, is a pragmatic attempt to address
the aforementioned negative reaction to analytic listening in the aural-skills
classroom. The impetus for the first edition of this book in 1990 was the
research carried out in ear-training curriculum design at the Research in
Applied Musical Perception (RAMP) Unit at the then Huddersfield Poly-
technic in England (Pratt & Henson, 1987). Having identified a number of
problems with traditional ear training, at least as it was usually presented
in Britain, Pratt and his associates set about a total rethinking of their au-
ral-skills courses. Their avowed objectives were to make ear training both
more enjoyable for and more useful to their students. Since that first edi-
tion, the approach advocated by the RAMP researchers has, according to
Pratt, been adopted by both the National Curriculum in Music in England
and Wales (p. ix) as well as by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of
Music (p. 3). In view of the genesis of Aural Awareness, it is worth noting
that the subtitle to this volume is "Principles and Practice." The book's
strength lies in the variety of excellent suggestions it makes for workable
ear-training exercises in the class, lesson, or private-study context. It is, in
essence, an ideas book, and thus the "practice" side of aural training is well
represented. Unfortunately, however, the "principles" behind Pratt's sug-
gestions are given regrettably short shrift in the present volume. Readers
interested in a more thorough-going exposition of the philosophy of the
RAMP unit must refer to earlier papers by Pratt and his associates (Cargill
&C Pratt, 1991; Pratt &c Henson, 1987). Given the lack of balance between
theory and practice in Aural Awareness, the second half of this review es-
say will attempt to identify some of the central issues raised by Pratt and
bring them together in a preliminary model of ear training. As will be seen,
Pratt's suggestions provide a stimulus for further discussion of the philoso-
phy of ear-training pedagogy and, in particular, its relationship to music
cognition.

Pratt's Aural Awareness

Pratt raises the question of student motivation for ear training at the
very outset. He starts by stating that "an alarmingly large proportion of
musicians, questioned about their own experiences of aural training, admit
that they disliked it, thought they were bad at it, and have found it largely
irrelevant to their subsequent engagement in music" (p. 1). The author lays
the blame for this dismal state of affairs squarely on traditional aural-dic-
tation programs that have concentrated exclusively on the pitch and rhythm
elements of music. Given this, the aims of Pratt's book are twofold: first,
"to redress the balance, to focus attention sharply on the neglected ele-

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 Book Reviews 129

ments of musical expression" (p. 4); second, to complement dictation with

other musical activities, for example "to play and sing by ear; to improvise
and to memorize" (back cover). The first of these goals is highly laudable,
although as I shall argue, Pratt's discussion of musical elements other than
pitch and rhythm is only partly successful. The second goal, to move away
from a purely dictation-based aural-skills pedagogy, is also desirable. How-
ever, a number of musicians and pedagogues have for decades now been
advocating alternative, more active approaches to musicianship training,
including rhythmic reading, imaging, and improvisation (Bradshaw, 1980;
Konowitz, 1973; Miessner, 1963; Schafer, 1976; Tallmadge, 1960). Admit-
tedly, university music schools have by and large been slow to heed writers
such as these, however, in light of this earlier work, Pratt's ideas are not
quite as revolutionary as they might at first appear.
A further impetus for Pratt's reform of ear-training pedagogy is couched
in the following provocative claim: "to meet the demand for assessment,
much aural training is directed towards testing of what is right or wrong,
and the most convenient material for this is the pitch and duration of notes"
(pp. 1-2). Pitch and rhythm responses are more easily graded than those
for other elements of sound, so the argument goes. While there is a kernel
of truth to Pratt's assertion, it surely overlooks a variety of other motiva-
tions for curriculum design and imputes to music educators an undeserved
shallowness. In fact there are good reasons other than the mere logistics of
assessment why ear-training has concentrated on pitch and rhythm. In most
Western music (and all observations in this review are limited to Western
music) pitch and rhythm are by far the most structured parameters, both in
terms of music theory and in terms of music cognition. For instance, musi-
cians and musicologists are able to notate pitch and rhythm most fully of
all parameters of music, and correspondingly, are able to marshall a far
richer technical vocabulary to discuss these two parameters than is avail-
able for, say, timbre, loudness, or spatial location. Also, because pitch and
rhythm tend to be perceived categorically and because they invoke richer
cognitive schémas than other dimensions of sound, they make greater de-
mands on cognition (Krumhansl, 1992). Given these greater demands, both
for perception and performance, musicians in training need to spend more
time learning to negotiate the exigencies of pitch and rhythm than they do for
other parameters. This is not to say that a musician may not spend years of
practice trying to achieve the right timbre, but it is surely the case that for
every new piece that musicians encounter a basic requirement of performance
would be an awareness of the correct pitches and rhythms. Having said all of
the above, I should stress that I applaud Pratt's long overdue refocusing of our
attention on parameters other than pitch and rhythm. My point is simply that
it is difficult to discuss perception or performance of, say, timbre, dynamics, or
spatial distribution with the same degree of richness as pitch or rhythm.

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 130 Book Reviews

The (rather obvious) primacy of pitch and rhythm is born out, ironically
enough, by the weighting of subjects in Pratt's book. In Chapter 2, the
author lists all the elements of music that he wishes to highlight: meter/
rhythm; pitch; texture; timbre; compass/range/density; dynamics; articula-
tion; space; pace; and structure. Of these 10 items, only 3 receive a chapter
dedicated solely to them, meter/rhythm, pitch, and timbre, 2 of these 3
being the very parameters the author wishes to deemphasize. The other
elements are discussed briefly as they are introduced in Chapter 2 and are
reintroduced as components of an overall aural synthesis in Pratt's later
chapters on criticism, structure, and imaging (more of these later). More-
over, it might be argued that some of the other 7 items of the list are simply
pitch and rhythm in disguise, or combinations of these basic parameters.
For example, texture, defined by Pratt as "the way in which lines of music
relate to each other both vertically and horizontally" (p. 18), depends on
the type of pitch-to-pitch motion among voices (contrary versus similar
motion) as well as the degree to which voices are rhythmically coordinated
(counterpoint vs homophony). Likewise, compass, range, and density (p.
21 ) all have to do with the distribution of tones over the dimension of pitch
height, and articulation (p. 25) is partly determined by the performed du-
ration (onset-offset) of a note, again arguably an aspect of rhythm.
Although it is debatable whether Pratt really does redress the balance
with regard to parameters other than pitch and rhythm, some of the ideas
he proposes for class exercises are nonetheless extremely thought-provok-
ing in a positive sense. The purpose of the listing in Chapter 2 is simply to
make listeners aware of some of the other parameters of sound, to turn
their attention to these previously ignored elements. For example, Pratt
neatly and concisely underlines the importance of spatial separation by
inviting readers to listen to an orchestral recording with the balance con-
trol fully to the left or the right (p. 27). He then proceeds to propose some
activities to sharpen directional hearing as well as making the welcome and
novel suggestion that spatial separation should be a vital component of
any imaging exercises. Chapters 4 and 5, which focus respectively on meter/
rhythm and pitch, also contain many useful ideas for classroom or studio
activities for all levels of musical expertise. Those activities that struck me
as particularly enjoyable or instructive included rhythmic imitation (clap-
ping back rhythms of various complexities, pp. 48-49 ), judging metro-
nome tempos (p. 56), and singing atonal chords - constructed, say, from
stacked fifths - and experimenting with different octave-spacing and voice-
leading possibilities (p. 68).
Chapter 6 is a brave attempt to address the topic of timbre. The exer-
cises suggested by Pratt in this chapter seem to be designed primarily to
increase students' sensitivity to minute subtleties of timbre. As Pratt puts it,
"at the crudest level, we are all blessed with 'perfect timbre,' that is to say,

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 Book Reviews 131

we can identify ... a brass band without the need for some reference ..."
(p. 71). However, as he goes on to observe, timbrai acuity is limited in that
we are unlikely to retain sufficient acoustic detail to be able to distinguish
between a chord played on a Steinway and one played on a Bechstein piano
a week later. One route towards such fine timbrai sensitivity, so Pratt con-
tends, is to devise one's own timbrai notation for a particular performance
(p. 72), and, in effect, to take down a timbrai dictation. As an example,
Pratt compares four performances of an excerpt from Benjamin Britten's
Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for solo oboe. The result is a timbre score
remarkably similar to the performance scores produced by Carl Seashore
(Seashore, 1938/1967). In his timbre score, Pratt captures information re-
garding vibrato, sharpness of attack and decay, and what he calls "density
of tone" (p. 74), which I take to mean richness of tone color. Pratt's use of
this label illustrates a potential though not insurmountable obstacle to any
discussion of timbre, namely the lack of consensus on a technical terminol-
ogy for psychological attributes of timbre. Pratt also indirectly addresses
the thornier problems of the multidimensionality of timbre and the relative
perceptual salience of its different parameters. On the basis of what I as-
sume to be intuition (for there is not a single reference to any perceptual
studies of timbre), Pratt's discussion does in fact highlight some of the more
salient components of timbre (Grey, 1977; Grey &C Gordon, 1978; Kendall,
1986; McAdams, 1993). Doubtless his list is incomplete, and other ele-
ments such as roughness or portamento might would have to be consid-
ered if another instrument were under the microscope. However the very
provisional nature of the list of identified elements can be viewed as an
advantage because it encourages further discussion of timbre and invites
students to complete the list themselves.
A further praiseworthy feature of Pratt's book is the emphasis laid on
the need to synthesize the elements of sound into a holistic aural picture.
Following the element-by-element discussion of Chapter 2, in Chapter 3,
the author suggests listening exercises that focus on the interaction of ele-
ments in two contrasting pieces by Mozart (pp. 33-35) and Penderecki
(pp. 39-40). Part of aural synthesis, so Pratt argues, is the consideration of
"effectors" and "effects" (p. 31). The word "effectors" is simply used by
Pratt as a collective term for the elements of sound outlined in Chapter 2,
and the interactions among these elements. "Effects," on the other hand,
seem to be the psychological results of attending to the effectors and their
interactions. As Pratt puts it, "Expansion and contraction are EFFEC-
TORS - they make effects happen. Tension and release are EFFECTS -
stimulating human responses to what is happening" (p. 32). Now the ebb
and flow of tension and release throughout a musical passage is potentially
an extremely interesting topic both for musicians and psychologists (Bigand,
Parncutt, &C Lerdahl, 1996; Frederickson & Johnson, 1996; Krumhansl,

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 132 Book Reviews

1996, 1997; Lerdahl, 1996). Unfortunately, however, Pratt's discussion of

effects is hamstrung by the fact that he never provides an unequivocal defi-
nition of tension and release and offers only a few ad hoc examples. The
following quotation is typical of Pratt's illustration of these concepts: "An
EFFECTOR, like the contraction of note values from minims through crotch-
ets to quavers and beyond, might have the EFFECT of increasing tension.
Yet a long note with a pause, an expanding note value, can equally create
tension" (p. 33 [capitals and italics are the author's]). Pratt's presentation
of tension and release might be contrasted with Lerdahl and Jackendoff 's
much less equivocal definition of similar concepts in their Generative Theory
of Tonal Music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983). As readers will be aware,
Lerdahl and Jackendoff treat tension and release as primarily harmonically
derived phenomena that generate prolongational reduction. Admittedly,
the type of formalization of prolongational reduction presented by Lerdahl
and Jackendoff, redolent as it is of psycholinguistic theory, would have
been decidedly out of tune with the informal style of Aural Awareness. In
addition, Pratt seems not to want to limit his discussion of tension and
release to purely pitch-based elements such as harmony. Nonetheless, Pratt's
definitions of tension and release seem so nebulous (apparently any change
along any dimension could result in tension or release) as to reduce consid-
erably the usefulness of these concepts in the present volume.
The synthetic (as opposed to analytic) approach is taken up again in
Chapter 7, which explores the musical knowledge and aural attention re-
quired to make critical judgments about a performance. Encouraging mu-
sic students not only to increase their awareness of musical elements, but
also to reflect on their aesthetic reaction to what is heard, is highly laud-
able. Instead of legislating a "correct" aesthetic response to a passage, Pratt
sensibly outlines what he sees to be the processes on which a sound critical
judgment might be based. These processes with respect to a particular pas-
sage of music are (1) identification of the individual musical elements, (2)
exploration of the way these elements act and interact, (3) a synthesis in-
volving the identification of tension and release (effects), (4) a judgment as
to whether the effects are desirable given certain knowledge about the music,
and (5) a recognition of the factors that limit the reliability of the judg-
ment. Indeed, one might view this list of processes as a viable inventory of
general goals for an ear-training course, if not a whole set of courses in
music theory and music history too. What is striking about these processes
is that they address the very objection to aural-skills pedagogy that is im-
plied by the quotation from Nicholas Cook given at the beginning of this
review. By reintegrating the elements of music and then encouraging an
aesthetic, critical judgment of a passage, one should be able to demonstrate
that "musicological" and "musical" listening, to use Cook's terms, are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, however, Pratt's theory is

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 Book Reviews 133

only a qualified success in this regard because the process that bridges the
gap between perception and aesthetic reaction, the identification of tension
and release, is regrettably ill-defined. Here we see the ramifications of Pratt's
lack of clarity in Chapter 3, and what could have been an impressive theo-
retical edifice, the central achievement of this book in fact, is undermined
even as it is erected.
Chapters 8 through 12 rely less on the concepts of tension and release
and the aesthetic judgments that supposedly follow from recognition of
these effects. Thus, having proposed these overtly affective/aesthetic pro-
cesses as part of his overall vision of aural awareness, Pratt subsequently
retreats somewhat from this position and concentrates more on aspects of
perception, cognition, performance, and imagination. A case in point is
Chapter 8, in which Pratt examines the role of the various elements of
music in defining structural markers but largely eschews the concepts of
tension and release. Instead he discusses at some length different ways to
approach aural analysis, an exercise that has traditionally been carried out
in ear-training classes to develop students' awareness of structure and form
of a piece without recourse to the score. One of the problems with this type
of exercise is that, in order to give a set of events a particular music-theo-
retical label, students need to communicate when and in what order those
events occurred, in other words give bar numbers. In my own experience,
this has meant that aural-analysis exercises actually inculcate a bar-count-
ing listening strategy (1-2-3, 2-2-3, 3-2-3, 4-2-3, etc.), which, although in-
valuable to orchestral percussionists, is not the type of multifaceted, criti-
cally aware listening that ear-training programs are supposed to propagate.
To circumvent this problem, Pratt suggests the simple expedient of having
a participant call out the bar numbers as the performance progresses (p.
98). This is certainly an improvement on making the students count as they
listen, but calling out a bar number every three or four beats is likely to
ruin any chances of an aesthetic response resulting from the listening expe-
rience! A better solution would surely be to count off the bar numbers
through some visual medium (blackboard, projected computer screen)
thereby minimizing interference with the auditory stimulus of the music.
Similar pragmatic matters are treated in the ensuing chapters on imag-
ing, playing by ear, improvisation, and playing from memory. Again the
author presents some excellent ideas for enjoyable musical activities where
the different elements of musical sound are brought together. For example,
Pratt's exercises for training auditory imagery are particularly felicitous,
working as they do progressively from imaging the timbrai detail of one
note (pp. 108-109) up to imaging a full orchestral score (pp. 116-122).
Also worthy of mention are the numerous musical variations that Pratt
proposes on the game of "Chinese whispers" (pp. 124-126). Here a musi-
cal idea is passed around the room, performed by each participant in turn,

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 134 Book Reviews

and varied either by chance through minor performance variations or de-

liberately as a means of musical expression. The participants then discuss
the variations among the performances.
The foregoing examples illustrate why I identified Aural Awareness as
an ideas book, a practical handbook for the classroom or studio. As such,
the material is presented in an engaging and unpretentious manner and
enlivened with the occasional dash of humor. Unfortunately, however, those
readers looking for a rigorous and scholarly overview of the issues pertain-
ing to aural skills are apt to be disappointed with this publication. More-
over, in what I assume to be an attempt to keep the text uncluttered and
accessible to the layperson, Pratt pays insufficient attention to a couple of
aspects of standard scholarly presentation. First, and most irritatingly, even
in its second edition, Aural Awareness still contains no index. A subject
index is surely a vital component of any book that proclaims itself as a
source for teaching ideas. This lack of index is all the more sorely felt where,
as is the case here, discussion of certain subjects is dispersed throughout
the volume. Second, although the author provides adequate references to a
few sources (both printed matter and sound recordings) a single, unified
bibliography would have been very helpful. As it is, the reader returning to
Aural Awareness for a bibliographical reference must flip through many
pages, again without an index to aid the search. It should be added at this
juncture that readers of Music Perception will look in vain for a single
bibliographical reference to a scientific study in music psychology. Perhaps
the author deemed experimental psychological research to be outside his
purview, for he makes no mention of the cognitive sciences of music other
than naming a leading British music psychologist in the acknowledgment
section (p. viii). Yet this omission is a little baffling, especially in view of
Pratt's implicit reliance on such concepts as working memory or attention,
and given his often insightful discussions of imaging (pp. 107-122) and
different types of performance memory (pp. 139-144). Such topics are
clearly central to music perception and cognition. In fact, it should be evi-
dent from the issues raised in reviewing Aural Awareness that ear-training
pedagogy generally may be regarded as a fertile area of "applied music
psychology." It is to this intersection of the two disciplines that I shall now
turn.

A Preliminary Model of Music Cognition and Aural-Skills

Pedagogy

The purpose of the second half of this review essay is to highlight areas
of perceptual and cognitive psychology that have a direct bearing on aural-
skills pedagogy. In promoting the connection between music cognition and

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 Book Reviews 135

ear training for readers of Music Perception, I shall, to some extent, be

reiterating appeals that have already been issued by others to the music-
education and music-theory communities (Butler, 1997; Butler &
Lochstampfor, 1993; Marvin, 1995). However, this review essay differs
from previous papers on the topic in that it proposes a number of specific
research questions that exploit the connection between music cognition
and aural-skills pedagogy. Moreover, the benefits of stronger links between
these disciplines, both for music educators and experimental psychologists,
are explicitly outlined in the conclusion.
The first step in developing a model of music cognition and aural-skills
pedagogy is to identify the general cognitive processes that might lie be-
hind different types of aural-skills exercises. A suitably wide-ranging list of
aural-skills exercises may be gleaned from the volume under review here,
Pratt's Aural Awareness: rhythmic performance (passim), rhythmic echo-
ing (pp. 47-48, 126), imagining a rhythm (pp. 49-50, 57-58), ensemble
performance (pp. 50-51), rhythmic improvisation and composition (pp.
51-54), tempo production and recognition ( pp. 55-56), aesthetic response
to tempo (p. 56), perception and production of correct tuning (p. 61), de-
velopment of absolute pitch (p. 62), performance and improvisation of
harmonic progressions (pp. 63-70), perception of the elements of timbre
both in individual notes and in a melodic line (pp. 72-76), aesthetic re-
sponse to timbre variation (p. 76), timbrai performance (p. 78), timbrai
imitation (p. 79), aural analysis (pp. 98-106), timbrai imaging (pp. 108-
111), single-note imaging concentrating of different parameters (pp. 113-
114), melody imaging (p. 114), chordal imaging (pp. 114-116), imaging
from an orchestral score (pp. 116-122), passing a musical idea around the
room allowing for creative or accidental alterations of the idea (pp. 124-
126), playing back before notating (p. 128), improvising on one pitch (p.
132), duet and trio improvisations with various degrees of constraint (p.
133), and exercises in aural, visual, kinesthetic, and analytical memory
(pp. 139-144). From these activities one can abstract six general overarching
perceptual/cognitive/mental processes: aural acuity (perception), memory,
imagery, musical knowledge, kinesthetic processes, and aesthetic judgments.
I shall discuss each of these in turn presently, but first a few general com-
ments are in order.
None of these systems/processes are particularly novel or surprising. Each
is commonly given in the psychological literature as a convenient tag for a
cohort of mental processes or behaviors. No process is necessarily identifi-
able with a particular single structure in brain anatomy, and there is doubt-
less some overlap among them. While the strong presence of all six capaci-
ties is not an absolute necessity in every type of musician, it seems reasonable
to claim that each is highly beneficial for any individual who wishes to
function as an active participant in the Western art-music tradition (and

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 136 Book Reviews

probably other traditions as well). Therefore, an active musician is likely to

evince an above-average capacity in each of these functions. How one would
measure each capacity I shall leave deliberately vague. In addition, it is not
clear how many standard deviations from the general-population mean
one would have to lie with respect to each capacity to qualify for the hon-
orific of "musician." For instance, it seems a matter of common sense that
different types of musicians would excel at different items on my list. How-
ever, the advantage of drawing up this list is simply that it renders concrete
those aspects of mental activity that need to be trained and developed to
improve general musicianship. In effect, then, these items comprise a working
definition of "general musicianship." Implicit in this assertion, of course, is
the assumption that the training of general musicianship should in fact be
the goal of aural-skills pedagogy - alternative goals for ear-training pro-
grams are given good coverage by Butler (1997). It should also be stressed
here that training is envisaged not only as the strengthening of one's capac-
ity in each of the six items, but also increasing the number and speed of the
connections among these mental systems.

AURAL ACUITY

Aural acuity describes the capacity to parse out the component sounds
of a simultaneous complex sound or rapid succession of sounds. This aural
filtering capacity is necessary for the critical listener who wishes to identify
the pitches in a chord, the conductor who needs to verify the pitches played
or sung by her ensemble, or the composer who hopes to check that the
chord that he is writing down is what he hears in his head. Aural acuity is
traditionally developed in ear-training programs through chordal dictation,
either of individual chords or chord sequences. These exercises might now
be complemented by Pratt's suggestions for increasing listeners' sensitivity
to the minutiae of performance expression and timbrai complexes.
Aural acuity would seem to be limited by the physiological properties of
the inner ear and the auditory cortex as well as certain top-down cognitive
processes that aid and abet in the recognition of components of complexes.
Large and well-established bodies of literature on auditory stream segrega-
tion and selective attention already provide us with a wealth of informa-
tion on the limiting factors of aural acuity (Bregman, 1990). For instance,
McAdams's (1982) work on timbre suggests that, among other things, on-
set asynchrony, inharmonicity, and contrasting rates of vibrato cause par-
tials to be perceptually separated from a timbre. Analogous acoustical con-
ditions can serve to separate a tone from a chord complex (Rasch, 1981). It
would seem reasonable that the sorts of cues identified in this research
could be used in sequencing exercises in ear-training. For example, onset
asynchrony between components of a chord could steadily be decreased as

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 Book Reviews 137

one progresses through a series of chordal-dictation exercises, thus gradu-

ally weaning the student off a useful acoustic cue. More importantly, though,
from the point of view of the experimental psychologist, other equally en-
gaging questions remain to be answered. For example, how pronounced
do acoustic cues have to be to reverse the apparently natural tendency to
attend to the highest-pitched component (the soprano line) in a chord pro-
gression? Can aural acuity be improved through training? If so, does this
represent a continued strengthening of certain neural connections in the
auditory cortex or is it simply that one learns what type of components to
expect in particular contexts (a top-down process)? Is there an age beyond
which no significant gain in aural acuity is possible? And so forth.

MEMORY

The conventional textbook division of memory into working (short-term)

and long-term varieties serves quite adequately for our purposes here.
Musical working memory is required by the listener to store and process
just-past stimulus patterns, to permit the process of pattern comparison
(Fiske, 1990), and to make possible the very sense of continuity that is so
fragile yet vital in a temporal art like music. Auditory working memory
impinges on the activities of performers and composers, too, insofar as
they must necessarily engage in listening. In aural-skills programs, working
memory is typically trained through dictation or echoing (performing back)
exercises (Karpinski, 1990). Whether one regards musical working memory
as a specialized storehouse for tonal-rhythmic stimuli (Berz, 1995) or as
the lingering residue of generalized cognitive processes (Crowder, 1993), it
comes into play in every single study on melody or pitch-progression per-
ception. Indeed, in much research on melody perception, the contents of
working memory are taken as the dependent variable, the measure of how
completely or accurately a stimulus has been perceived (Berz, 1995; Marvin,
1995). Again, despite the impressive breadth of research to date, some fun-
damental questions remain with respect to musical working memory. What
features in a musical pattern, beyond a general tonality and sense of meter,
aid retention in working memory? For example, is it really the case that a
preponderance of wide melodic intervals makes a melody difficult to en-
code? Under what types of conditions might the capacity of musical work-
ing memory be expanded? What are the most salient cues for chunking
with melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic patterns, and to what extent can the
ability to chunk be improved through training? Again, is there an optimum
age for the development of working memory? Does expanded working
memory equal an expanded capacity or more efficient chunking strategies?
Is there a dedicated musical working memory? If not, can working memory
be expanded using other types of auditory stimulus?

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 138 Book Reviews

Long-term memory is also used by the listener to compare temporally

separate sections of a single piece, to compare different performances of
the same piece, or to compare different pieces. In addition, as Pratt points
out in his Chapter 12, performers must make use of at least four types of
long-term memory in presenting a recital without the score: aural memory,
visual memory, kinesthetic memory, and analytical memory. Pratt suggests
exercises to strengthen these memory types, yet some of his claims need
empirical testing. Do different modalities of memory operate simultaneously
or do performers switch among them as the need arises? Are certain types
of performance memory consistently more reliable than others? If so, are
any of these types of memory redundant?

IMAGERY

Imagery is the capacity to hear musical patterns in one's head in the

absence of any physically measurable acoustic signal. Musical imagery may
be conjured up in response to notation, the name of a known piece (e.g.,
'Beethoven's Fifth'), the name of a particular music-theoretical structure
(e.g., "dominant-seventh" chord), or simply as the private tonal meanderings
of the musical mind. Moreover, musical imagery might be invoked imme-
diately following an external auditory stimulus, in which case it becomes
more difficult to draw a definite distinction between imagery and echoic or
working memory (Hubbard & Stoeckig, 1988; Pitt & Crowder, 1992). A
strong sense of imagery is vital to composers who works with what their
musical imagination dictates. Imagery is also used by performers who need
to gain some idea of how a passage is supposed to sound before they launch
into a performance of that passage. Third, from the point of view of the
music historian or theorist, one might argue that a prerequisite for any
scholarly analysis should be a clear aural image of the work in question.
Traditional exercises that are used to train and assess imagery in response
to notation are sight singing and rhythmic reading. To these can be added
the type of purely internalized, nonnotationally based imagery exercises
proposed by Pratt.
Because it is difficult to measure through external behaviors, imagery
has in the past received less empirical attention than its musical importance
warrants. Seashore recognized its centrality to musicianship when he stated,
"Take out the image from the musical mind and you take out its very es-
sence" (Seashore, 1938/1967, p. 6). However, with the technology of his
time, Seashore could do little more than speculate on the nature of imag-
ery. More recently, mainly thanks to the advent of new brain-scanning tech-
niques, musical imagery has now become an object of empirical psycho-
logical inquiry (Carroll-Phelan & Hampson, 1996; Reisberg, 1992). Again,
some fascinating questions beg the attention of experimenters. Is imagery a

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 Book Reviews 139

raw stimulus sounding in the head, or is it more propositional in nature?

For instance, I find it easier to image a dominant-seventh chord than a
four-pitch atonal chord built up of stacked major sevenths. Does this dis-
crepancy arise because the sound of the dominant seventh is much more
familiar to me (raw-sound hypothesis), or because the dominant seventh
makes sense syntactically within a tonal grammar (propositional hypoth-
esis)? In addition, can the different lines in a polyphonic piece be imaged
simultaneously or is each successive simultaneity (chord) imaged as a unique
"vertical" texture? Are tones most easily imaged when they lie in one's
singing range? What are the most effective means of training imagery? And
so on.

MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE

I follow Dowling (1993) in dividing musical knowledge into two types:

(1) "procedural" or "implicit" knowledge and (2) "declarative" or "ex-
plicit" knowledge. Implicit musical knowledge is a collective term for the
music-specific schémas that are developed as a result of enculturation, which,
in perception, generate expectancies as well as a sense of closure. An ex-
ample of implicit musical knowledge is tonality, or sense of key: Probe-
tone experiments suggest that listeners who are enculturated in the West
(but not necessarily musically literate) are able to recognize when a short
melodic passage ends on the tonic note (Krumhansl, 1992). On the other
hand, explicit musical knowledge, knowledge that one can talk about, in-
cludes the technical terms used by trained musicians to reify and identify
particular elements and structures of sound. Examples of such knowledge
are knowledge of notation, acquaintance with chord names, or a familiar-
ity with the model of sonata form. Mastering a set of technical terms is
vital to composers, performers, and critical listeners if they are to commu-
nicate with other literate musicians about their experiences, or if they are
to reach some consensus on the way in which a passage is to be performed.
The training of students' mental agility with declarative musical knowl-
edge has been one of the avowed aims of much traditional ear training.
Indeed, the strengthening of the connection between notation and sound
(either perceived or imaged) is cited as the justification for such activities as
sight singing, rhythmic reading, and dictation (Karpinski, 1990). More-
over, virtually all the exercises posited by Pratt involve the deployment of
some type of musical knowledge, whether it be music-theoretical, music-
historical, or acoustical knowledge.
Experimental studies on implicit musical knowledge and its influence on
perception and performance are legion (Dowling, 1993; Krumhansl, 1992).
In addition, the acquisition of implicit musical knowledge, the process of
enculturation into a particular tonal-rhythmic language, has been modeled

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 140 Book Reviews

using neural nets (Bharucha, 1987; Gjerdingen, 1990). On the other hand,
the influence on perception and cognition of explicit, declarative knowl-
edge has received less attention (see, however, Catân, 1989; Deliège, Mélen,
Stammers, & Cross, 1996; Wright &c Ashman, 1991). Again, many cen-
trally important questions concerning the relationship between these two
categories of musical knowledge remain to be answered. For example, un-
der what conditions are schémas open to conscious introspection (for the
purposes of notation, for instance)? What is the relationship between
schémas and bottom-up-processed stimuli? Is a given pitch schema, say,
equally accessible if other parameters such as rhythm or timbre are varied
(would one still recognize the opening of a well-known melody if it were
played as a Klangfarbenmelodie in 7/8 at 35 beats per minute)? What types
of schémas are easier to learn? Again, are there certain developmental win-
dows for the learning of particular types of schémas?

KINESTHETIC PROCESSES

The sense of bodily movement is perhaps the most specialized of the

capacities that I have identified. First, a good kinesthetic sense is required
by performers to a much greater extent than it is required by listeners or
composers. Second, each type of musical performer will possess his or her
own set of overlearned motoric patterns, depending on the type of instru-
ment played or the type of singer the performer is. Nevertheless, the ability
to perform patterns rhythmically, or to have a clear idea of how notated
rhythms should sound, would seem to be useful for all types of musicians,
and some research suggests that kinesthetic training correlates with rhyth-
mic performance (Behrens, 1984; Rohwer, 1998). Traditionally, rhythmic
reading or rhythmic echoing have been used to train the kinesthetic sense,
particularly where those exercises involve the coordination of several limbs
or digits at once. To these might be added any of Pratt's exercises entailing
performance or improvisation.
Beyond simple rhythmic performance, however, a further implicit rea-
son for including kinesthetic processes in general musicianship training is
the assumption that motoric programs form strong connections with
schémas in other types of cognitive systems. Thus, bodily movements are
often thought to reinforce mental imagery or strengthen the connection
between the contents of working memory and musical declarative knowl-
edge. For example, one common strategy used by students in aural dicta-
tion or sight singing is to try to "finger" a melody silently on an imaginary
instrument in an effort to discern the pitches better. The whole pivotal issue
of intermodal imagery and the integration of different cognitive systems in
skill acquisition, while proposed by music educators (Larson, 1995), is
largely unexplored by experimental psychologists.

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 Book Reviews 141

AESTHETIC RESPONSE

The aesthetic sense is the capacity to respond with a critical judgment to

a musical passage. Musicians of all stripes should feel able to pass judg-
ment on a composition or on a particular performance or improvisation.
As listeners we all habitually decide to a greater or lesser degree whether
we like something or not. Performers in rehearsal or practice must be able
to evaluate which of two readings of a passage is most successful, given
certain stylistic constraints. Likewise, in choosing to employ a musical idea
one way or another, composers continually exercise critical judgment in
the composition process.
The extant literature in experimental aesthetics is large and varied, ex-
amining the likes and dislikes of different populations of subjects for differ-
ent musical styles (North &c Hargreaves, 1997). However, it is more diffi-
cult to scrutinize experimentally the type of aesthetic or "musical" listening
that Cook posits in the quotation that began this review. The reason for the
difficulty is that Cook's musical or aesthetic listening involves a special
mode of attention that cannot necessarily be summoned at will and there-
fore is not amenable to replication. Yet the recurrence of the "aesthetic
attitude" in much of the literature on musical aesthetics suggests that the
concept deserves serious scientific attention (Scruton, 1997). One initial
approach might be the use of questionnaires to gauge the variety of listen-
ing modes prevalent in different populations, or the use of more open-
ended autobiographical accounts such as have been employed in research
on emotional response (Sloboda, 1992). As regards the division between
Cook's musical and musicological modes of listening, research in music
education might be directed to discover if this gulf is really that unbridge-
able. Might not an ear-training program, such as that outlined by Pratt, be
used to integrate analytic and holistic listening rather than to set them apart
as polar opposites? Again the efficacy of such a program would have to be
empirically tested.

Conclusion

To conclude, one might ask why the second half of this review essay has
focused on the intersection between music psychology and ear-training peda-
gogy. After all, Pratt's Aural Awareness, the book under review here, essen-
tially ignores the connection. As Butler and Lochstampfor have pointed
out, one would expect a strong and intimate link between the two and yet
"there is very little correspondence between research activities in music
cognition and pedagogical activities in aural training" (Butler &
Lochstampfor, 1993, p. 6). The earnest hope of this reviewer is that, in the

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 142 Book Reviews

future, researchers and educators can make the most of the connections
that have been outlined here. The reasons for promoting these connections
are as follows: For ear-training pedagogues, the findings of music cogni-
tion can greatly help the design of aural-skills programs. For example, re-
search can throw light on such issues as which skills might reasonably be
expected to improve through training at particular developmental stages,
and therefore help to determine curriculum content at different educational
levels. It would seem cruel and unusual punishment to make, say, univer-
sity students sit through 2 years of aural pack-drill that had no chance of
making a difference to their level of general musicianship. Research can
also provide vital information as to which types of stimuli are more diffi-
cult to process, remember, image, or play back than others. At present, any
pet theories of cognitive complexity that pedagogues might have are likely
to be intuitive and ad hoc. An experimentally derived theory of cognitive
complexity could only serve to inform decisions that educators make with
regard to the sequencing of exercises.
For psychologists, aural-skills acquisition is an area where a number of
key cognitive/mental processes can be seen to be operative. Such issues as
working memory, schémas, imagery, motor programs, or aesthetic response
have relevance not just in music psychology but more generally in cogni-
tive psychology as well. Aural-skills acquisition, then, is the practical ap-
plication par excellence of the findings and theories of the cognitive sci-
ences in music. Moreover, by directing music-psychological research toward
aural-skills pedagogy one can lessen to some extent the conflict between
internal and ecological validity. The types of musical patterns used in the
aural-skills classroom are simpler than those heard in the concert hall and
therefore more amenable to experimental control. At the same time, ear-
training is a real-world musical activity (at least in the educational setting),
so research on it meets some demands for ecological validity. Indeed, the
marriage of the reductionistic, focused, internally valid examination of in-
dividual musical elements and the more holistic, musically realistic, eco-
logically valid mode of listening is very much in the same spirit as the ana-
lytic/synthetic method proposed by Pratt in Aural Awareness. It remains to
be seen if researchers and music educators can capitalize on this approach.1

Matthew S. Royal
University of Western Ontario, Canada

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1. Address correspondence to Matthew S. Royal, Faculty of Music, University of West-

ern Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7. (e-mail: [email protected])

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 Book Reviews 143

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