Improving Students' Memory for Musical Compositions and Their Composers: Mneme That Tune!

Summary

---

Students enrolled in music appreciation and music history courses may find it difficult to remember composers' names and the titles of their compositions - particularly when retrieval is prompted by corresponding classical music themes. We sought to develop and validate a mnemonic approach in which musical themes were first recoded as more concrete referents, and then meaningfully associated with names and titles. Undergraduates were randomly assigned to either "own best method" or mnemonic conditions in both experiments. In Experiment 1, students associated composers and composition titles. In Experiment 2, students associated musical themes and composers' names (Day 1), and themes, names, and titles (Day 2). In all statistical comparisons, students using the mnemonic approach statistically outperformed corresponding "own best method" control groups. Our positive findings are of special note in Experiment 2, where classical music themes prompted students to identify titles and composers' names. To our knowledge, this is the first research to validate a mnemonic approach of this sort.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Improving Students' Memory for Musical Compositions and Their Composers: Mneme That Tune!

Beginning in 1953, a popular U.S. quiz show asked contestants to "Name That Tune." Contestants rang a bell as soon as they felt they could identify a musical segment performed by a studio orchestra. That show's popularity serves to underscore the fascination we have with the sometimes challenging task of identifying music. Likewise, in academic settings, undergraduates enrolled in music appreciation or music history courses are often required to "name that tune" and to identify the composer on course exams when prompted by selections of music. While popular tunes typically include a verbal component (i.e., memory-facilitating lyrics), classical music usually does not. Thus, making classicalmusic associations (i.e., music, title, and composer) can be difficult for the beginning student.

In this regard, the mnemonic keyword method (Atkinson, 1975; Higbee, 2001; Ormrod, 2004) may prove helpful to the learner. In the traditional application of this strategy, an unfamiliar word (e.g., lentissimo) is...

See the full content of this document

---