Timbral Diversity in Two-Part Music Dictation as a Strategy to Overcome Transcription Difficulties

Abstract

Music dictation, listening and later transcribing musical excerpts, is the most frequent exercise in the learning process and assessment of listening skills, especially in the subject of “Musical Language” in Spanish conservatoires and music schools. The piano is the most used instrument in this task, which often presents important difficulties for students. The main aim of our research project was to determine how far the difficulty of transcribing two-part dictations could be affected by the timbres chosen to play the melodies. 57 male students and 50 female students, enrolled in the second year of Professional Studies in music conservatoires in Madrid, took part in the study. Two-part music dictations were composed specifically for this investigation, from which a set of five was selected by a group of experts. The selected dictation exercises were recorded using five different combinations of instruments: piano, trumpet and trombone, trumpet and cello, violin and trombone, and violin and cello. A questionnaire was also designed in order to gather information on participants’ prior experience in music dictation. All participant students, divided into five groups, transcribed the same dictation exercises, but these were played with different timbre combinations according to the assigned group. The results show that students obtain better marks when the dictation exercises are played with instruments of contrasting timbre. Our conclusions reveal that using other timbres different to the piano could be a strategic approach when starting to work on multi-part dictation.