Learning Music Composers’ Styles: To Block or to Interleave?

Abstract

The ability to recognize and distinguish among varying musical styles is essential to developing aural skills and musicianship. Yet, this task can be difficult for music learners, particularly nonexperts. To address this challenge and guide music education practice, this study drew on cognitive psychological principles to investigate the effect of interleaved presentation of music pieces by various classical music composers on learning to identify these composers’ styles. Participants with 4 or fewer years of musical experience were presented with music pieces from six composers in an interleaved manner (alternating between listening to different composers’ works) and music pieces from anoth..