Using a music microanalysis protocol to enhance instrumental practice.

The strategies that enable musicians to adapt their behaviors so that they can break through, feel energized, and perform well collectively distinguish what it is to be a self-regulated learner. These strategies range from one's ability to monitor thoughts and actions to being able to navigate and control one's emotions, especially when feeling frustrated or anxious. Given the challenges of the music profession, it becomes imperative for teachers to equip their students with the necessary skills to self-regulate their own actions, feelings, and thinking so that they are eventually able to cope with the demands required of a contemporary professional musical career. In this study, we focused on the self-regulatory engagement of four master's level cellists who were enrolled in a prominent European higher music education institution. Our data comprised self-regulated learning-based diary-reports that describes the students' practice of self-chosen, especially demanding passages as they prepared for a public recital. Results depict differences between the musicians according to the efficiency of their practice leading up to a formal public recital.

How accurate are self-evaluations of singing ability?

Research has shown that people inaccurately assess their own abilities on self-report measures, including academic, athletic, and music ability. Evidence suggests this is also true for singing, with individuals either overestimating or underestimating their level of singing competency. In this paper, we present the Melbourne Singing Tool Questionnaire (MST-Q), a brief 16-item measure exploring people's self-perceptions of singing ability and engagement with singing. Using a large sample of Australian twins (n = 996), we identified three latent factors underlying MST-Q items and examined whether these factors were related to an objective phenotypic measure of singing ability. The three factors were identified as Personal Engagement, Social Engagement, and Self-Evaluation. All factors were positively associated with objective singing performance, with the Self-Evaluation factor yielding the strongest correlation (r = 0.66). Both the Self-Evaluation factor and a single self-report item of singing ability shared the same predictive strength. Contrary to expectations, our findings suggest that self-evaluation strongly predicts singing ability, and this self-evaluation is of higher predictive value than self-reported engagement with music and singing.

Caring approaches to young, gifted music learners' education: a PRISMA scoping review.

This study reviews empirical research literature that deals with existing caring approaches to nurture and educate gifted children in music. The focus on the ethics of care stems from the need to expand notions of talent development in music from a purely behaviorist focus often associated with traumatic experiences, toward a perspective that addresses socio-emotional and cultural aspects of human development across the lifespan. We employed the Preferred Reporting Systems for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Scoping Reviews method to review literature concerning caring approaches to the upbringing and education of children gifted for music. A total of 652 records dating from the 1930s and searched via both digital databases and manually in 41 relevant journals were retrieved from which 506 were examined using our inclusion criteria. A detailed analysis process allowed the authors to include 14 studies that were organized according to sampling location, methodologies, quality appraisal, and criteria-related topics. Eleven of the studies were qualitative with a majority of these employing semi-structured interviews for data collection, while the remaining meta strategy and quantitative studies typically employed questionnaires. Salient topics covered by the selected studies included: addressing inequalities in opportunity to access gifted programs; identifying socio-emotional needs of gifted (and twice-exceptional) students; offering a nurturing environment; focusing on intrinsic motivation; developing coping strategies for overall wellbeing; and cultivating healthy attitudes toward competitions through a spirit of peer collaboration and humility. These aspects were clustered into Francoy Gagné's Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent regarding natural abilities, environmental, intrapersonal, and developmental catalysts that are involved in nurturing talents in gifted children. Results suggest that the existing research on caring approaches to musically gifted children's learning and development are scarce and that current knowledge is based mostly on single one-off studies rather than systematic research, and on studies that examine a selection of aspects but not adopting a larger-scale theoretical framework. This review highlights the need for more systematic, multidisciplinary, and empirically robust studies on caring approaches to musically gifted children's learning and development, and for policy developments in educational settings where acceleration programs are offered for young, gifted music learners.

Feedback in Music Performance Teaching.

The purpose of this article is to provide one prominent perspective from the research literature on a conception of feedback in educational psychology as proposed by John Hattie and colleagues, and to then adapt these concepts to develop a framework that can be applied in music performance teaching at a variety of levels. The article confronts what we see as a lack of understanding about the importance of this topic in music education and provides suggestions that will help music teachers refocus how they use feedback within their teaching. Throughout the article, we draw heavily on the work of John Hattie and his colleagues whose explanations on all facets of feedback, but especially those forms of feedback that are focused on ensuring students understand "where to next"-have had a huge impact on school education through various publications.

Effects of Passion, Experience, and Cultural Politics on Classical Musicians' Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The widespread cancelation of cultural events during the early 2020 stages of the COVID-19 pandemic led professional performing musicians across the world to experience an increasing economic fragility that threatened their health and wellbeing. Within this "new normal," developing countries have been at a higher risk due to their vulnerable health systems and cultural policies. Even in such difficult times, the music profession requires musicians to keep up their practicing routines, even if they have no professional commitments. This is because high level technical and expressive skills are crucial to sustaining a music career at a high performance level. However, it could be expected that not all musicians might have had the same engagement with music practice during lockdowns. In this study, we studied the experiences of 309 professional classical musicians based in European and Latin American countries with different levels of performing experience to examine their passionate (or lack thereof) engagement with music practice. Through the mixed methods combination of multigroup invariance and narrative analyses, we identified distinct profiles of musicians who displayed more harmonious or more obsessive passion orientations before and at the peak of the pandemic. We observed that musicians with higher levels of harmonious passion in particular were more capable of sustaining their practice at the peak of the pandemic and that these musicians were mostly located in Latin America-a paradox, considering that cultural politics supporting the careers of professional performing musicians and entrepreneurial education in Latin America are lacking to a great extent, especially in comparison with the European context. We explain this in terms of the "forced" self-management embraced by musicians in Latin American countries who want to engage with music practice both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic even if the music profession does not generate enough revenue for them.

Genetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability.

Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three everyday singing tasks in Australian twins (n = 1189) to explore the relative genetic and environmental influences on singing ability. We derived a reproducible phenotypic index for singing ability across five performance measures of pitch and interval accuracy. Using this index we found moderate heritability of singing ability (h 2 = 40.7%) with a striking, similar contribution from shared environmental factors (c 2 = 37.1%). Childhood singing in the family home and being surrounded by music early in life both significantly predicted the phenotypic index. Taken together, these findings show that singing ability is equally influenced by genetic and shared environmental factors.

Effects of Threat and Motivation on Classical Musicians' Professional Performance Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In the past 2 years our world has experienced huge disruptions because of COVID-19. The performing arts has not been insulated from these tumultuous events with the entire music industry being thrown into a state of instability due to the paralyzing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we examined how classical professional musicians' ability to cope with uncertainty, economic struggles, and work-life interplay during COVID-19 was influenced by various factors that affect a crucial part of the development and sustainment of music careers: musicians' practice. We analyzed responses to an online survey of 309 classical performing musicians from 41 countries in Europe and Latin America across three pandemic stages: immediately before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and when vaccines were being made available and lockdowns were being reduced or lifted. Structural equation modeling indicates relationships between perceptions of threat at the peak of the pandemic and the musicians Self- or External-Based Motivation for the three periods in which respondents were asked to reflect. Findings suggest that musicians who are more internally self-motivated seemed to be more resilient to the pandemic threats and more capable of managing their practicing routines, whereas more externally motivated musicians experienced a reduction in their dedicated time to practice during lockdown. We suggest pedagogical and policy implications, as well as future lines of research that are oriented toward supporting professional musicians in assessing and understanding their motivational drives so that they can cope with situations that disrupt their professional lives.

Regulation of Emotions to Optimize Classical Music Performance: A Quasi-Experimental Study of a Cellist-Researcher.

The situational context within which an activity takes place, as well as the personality characteristics of individuals shape the types of strategies people choose in order to regulate their emotions, especially when confronted with challenging or undesirable situations. Taking self-regulation as the framework to study emotions in relation to learning and performing chamber music canon repertoire, this quasi-experimental and intra-individual study focused on the self-rated emotional states of a professional classical cellist during long-term sustained practice across 100-weeks. This helped to develop greater awareness of different emotions and how they vary over artistic events (9 profiled concerts and 1 commercially recorded album). Data analysis included traditional psychometric measurements to test the internal consistency of the time series data as well as the relationship between variables (artistic events). The study mapped the cellist's flexible regulation of 17 different positive and negative emotions empirically linked to learning and achievement while practicing within the social context of performing music publicly at a high level. Findings arising from the study help with understandings of how to support musicians to maximize their artistic potential by reducing emotion dysregulation and strengthening the types of adaptive methods that enable them to manage their own emotions.

Music Self-Efficacy for Performance: An Explanatory Model Based on Social Support.

Personal perceptions of self-efficacy are particularly relevant in the field of music performance, which is oriented toward the outward expressions of one's own ability through public performances. Within this context, a number of personal variables, including social support and performance anxiety, have been shown to be associated with musical success and are therefore relevant for research that seeks to understand the four sources of self-efficacy (mastery experiences, vicarious observation, verbal persuasion, physiological states) that are integral components of Bandura's (2002) Social Learning Theory. Previous research, as well as observed differences among musicians associated with educational level (preuniversity) and gender (male/female), underpins the context of this study, which presents evidence regarding the factors that are capable of mediating perceptions of self-efficacy for musical performance. Specifically, the main objectives of this study were to more clearly understand relations between social support, public performance, musical performance anxiety, and self-efficacy using structural equation modeling and to compare these results according to gender. A battery of questionnaires was submitted to 359 preuniversity Spanish music students. Results highlight the relevance of family support for self-efficacy in public performance: directly and mediated through musical performance anxiety. The role of teachers and peers appeared to be relevant only for boys and was mediated through performance anxiety. Public performances lead to a greater degree of musical self-efficacy, but only in girls. Further research shall be required in order to improve pedagogical methods and help teachers increasingly individualize their teaching.

Student Vitality, Teacher Engagement, and Rapport in Studio Music Instruction.

Vitality is the feeling of being alive, vigorous, and energetic, and is an important indicator of overall motivation and wellbeing. Studio music instruction holds rich potential for creating feelings of vitality through close relationships, the potential for developing skills, and a shared endeavor of artistic expression. But they also have the potential to deplete vitality - through controlling teaching, a poor quality relationship, or harsh criticism from the teacher. The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships among student and teacher behavior, rapport, and students' experiences of subjective vitality in the context of university-level applied performance lessons. Participants were six undergraduate instrumental music majors and their teachers located at universities in the United States and Australia, who were selected because they provided the highest (three participants) and lowest (three participants) scores on a measure of subjective vitality completed immediately following a studio music lesson. A lesson was recorded for each student-teacher participant pair, coded for the frequencies of 35 lesson behaviors, described with a qualitative contextual commentary, and rated for evidence of rapport and physical proximity. Clear differences emerged between the high and low vitality lessons with regard to questioning, feedback, modeling, student performance, and student talk. Teachers of high vitality students spent most or all of the lesson within close proximity to their student, and showed stronger rapport than teachers of low vitality students. The findings suggest that students' vitality may depend on important differences in styles of teacher-student engagement and the quality of student-teacher relationships.

Applying Self-Regulated Learning and Self-Determination Theory to Optimize the Performance of a Concert Cellist.

The professional practice of classical music performers has been better understood and enhanced across the last two decades through research aimed at tailoring rehearsing strategies that support the development of a sense of self as an agentic and proactive learner. One approach focuses on helping students make use of various tools that can enhance their learning, particularly in terms of what they do, feel and think when practicing and performing music. This study expands literature on expertise development by embracing the idea that this line of research would benefit from additional studies where the researcher forms part of the research process as an active participant who generates data, especially when these researchers are "members" of the social world they study, and therefore have insider knowledge. Thus, this case study is focused on the first author, a professional cellist who is also a researcher in the educational psychology of music, as the only participant. It extends current research by providing a detailed longitudinal mapping of a professional cellist's preparation across nine profiled concerts in five countries of classical-romantic repertoire and a commercial recording that resulted from 100 weeks of dedicated practice. Anonymous feedback from the audiences and interviews with an expert musician who followed the concerts and the CD recording was also collected. For the data analysis, traditional psychometric measurements were applied to test the internal consistency of the time series data as well as the relationship between variables. In addition, the application of Leximancer analysis of the self-reflections allowed the researchers to probe self-regulated learning (SRL) and self-determination theory (SDT) processes in ways that uniquely mapped, over time, her differing motivations to perform at a high level. Specifically, we report that the cellist's psychological needs and her motivational resources changed across time within the social context of performing music publicly, and that the various self-regulatory processes she drew upon impacted (both positively and negatively) on her ongoing actions, thoughts and feelings. Implications of the study are relevant for all forms of expertise development research, and especially for understandings about the nature of skill development in the context of learning to perform demanding literature in music.

Conservatory Musicians' Temporal Organization and Self-Regulation Processes in Preparing for a Music Exam.

Performing at the very highest levels requires rigorous preparation before the important performance. Musicians and especially music students encounter many challenges when preparing themselves for an important musical performance. This study sought to identify and analyze the context-specific temporal organization and self-regulation efforts that music students employ during their preparation period. Conservatory musicians were recruited from an Australian University Conservatorium. Thirteen conservatory musicians aged between 19 and 21 years (M = 19.6; SD = 0.76) participated in the study. All musicians, through an elicitation interview, were asked to recall and reconstruct their preparation period, leading up to a performance exam. Elicitation interviews provided access to music students' experiences by describing their general preparation. The results showed that conservatory musicians go through different phases (Phase 1: Choosing a piece; Phase 2: Piece discovery; Phase 3: Piece interpretation; Phase 4: Performance preparation). Self-regulatory efforts to prepare for a music performance exam vary from one musician to another. Organizational and disorganizational competencies, specific self-regulatory skills, seem not to be exploited by conservatory musicians. Also, during their preparation, most music students prefer technical and musical work than challenges such as playing in front of the public. Emotionally, conservatory musicians go through pleasant and unpleasant emotions depending on the phase of their preparation. Our results show that music students could benefit from advice on how to organize their preparation period well before an important performance takes place. Implications for conservatory musicians and teachers are discussed.

Eye-movement efficiency and sight-reading expertise in woodwind players.

The ability to sight-read traditional staff notation is an important skill for all classically trained musicians. Up until now, however, most research has focused on pianists, by comparing experts and novices. Eye movement studies are a niche area of sight-reading research, focusing on eye-hand span and perceptual span of musicians, mostly pianists. Research into eye movement of non-piano sight-reading is limited. Studies into eye movement of woodwind sight-reading were conducted in the 1980s and early 2000s, highlighting the need for new research using modern equipment. This pilot study examined the eye movements of six woodwind (flute, clarinet) undergraduates of intermediate-to-advanced skill level during sight-reading of scores of increased difficulty. The data was analysed in relation to expertise level and task difficulty, focusing on numbers of fixations and fixation durations. The results show that as music examples became more difficult the numbers of fixations increased and fixation durations decreased; more experienced players with better sight-reading skills required less time to process musical notation; and participants with better sightreading skills utilised fewer fixations to acquire information visually. The findings confirm that the efficiency of eye movements is related to instrumental and sightreading expertise, and that task difficulty affects eye movement strategies.

The genetic basis of music ability.

Music is an integral part of the cultural heritage of all known human societies, with the capacity for music perception and production present in most people. Researchers generally agree that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the broader realization of music ability, with the degree of music aptitude varying, not only from individual to individual, but across various components of music ability within the same individual. While environmental factors influencing music development and expertise have been well investigated in the psychological and music literature, the interrogation of possible genetic influences has not progressed at the same rate. Recent advances in genetic research offer fertile ground for exploring the genetic basis of music ability. This paper begins with a brief overview of behavioral and molecular genetic approaches commonly used in human genetic analyses, and then critically reviews the key findings of genetic investigations of the components of music ability. Some promising and converging findings have emerged, with several loci on chromosome 4 implicated in singing and music perception, and certain loci on chromosome 8q implicated in absolute pitch and music perception. The gene AVPR1A on chromosome 12q has also been implicated in music perception, music memory, and music listening, whereas SLC6A4 on chromosome 17q has been associated with music memory and choir participation. Replication of these results in alternate populations and with larger samples is warranted to confirm the findings. Through increased research efforts, a clearer picture of the genetic mechanisms underpinning music ability will hopefully emerge.