Resumen de Verbal Responses to Music Listening by Adult Nonmusicians
Catherine Larsen, Nancy L. Whitaker
The central purpose of this research was to determine the nature of musically untrained adults' verbal response to repeated hearings of music excerpts when asked questions that encouraged interpretive responses. Two specific research questions served as the basis for the investigation: What categories emerge from an analysis of verbal responses? How does the musical understanding represented by verbal responses compare to extant literature on the music listening of adult nonmusicians? Twelve adult nonmusicians ranging in age from 28 to 77 were interviewed individually after they had listened twice to six musical excerpts, followed by a repetition of the procedure after a one-week interval. A content analysis of their responses employed a grounded theory approach to generate a list of categories. Results indicate that participants responded across a range of musical, extramusical, affective, and preference categories, and that repeated hearings of selected pieces resulted in more detailed responses for several participants.
