Just came across this. Haven't read the whole thing, yet, but a scan of it seems interesting, even though I usually don't like it when academics get involved.:-) Anyway, here's the first bit and you may read the rest by clicking here Please note, it is a copyrighted piece.

LIFELONG LISTENING: ENHANCING THE INTUITIVE WAYS WE LISTEN TO MUSIC
Robert E. Dunn
Case Western Reserve University
Copyright © Robert E. Dunn


Jean Bamberger's (1982) study of children's representations of rhythm suggested that they tend to depict learned rhythms in two categories of rhythmic drawings, figural and metric. In figural drawings, children try to translate their experience of rhythmic movement into drawings of shapes or figures. These figural drawings may contain generalities about rhythmic information but are not exact. They also contain general contextual information about groupings, or, one might say, children's intuitive responses to how the groupings make musical sense. In fully metric drawings, which correspond to traditional music notation, only specific metric information is presented, usually obscuring grouping ideas. As Hargreaves (1986) summed up Bamberger's point of view, "figural expression comes nearer to capturing the intuitive, 'musical sense' of a piece" (p. 99).



It is this idea of capturing the intuitive musical sense of a piece of music that intrigues me, not only as part of a specific listening event, but as a normal part of experiencing music, a lifelong skill to be cherished and developed. For the last few years, I have been investigating the notion of "creative listening" through subject-created visual representations, or figural maps (c.f., Dunn, 1997, 2000, 2002). Lately, my thoughts about the subject have led me to consider using the term "intuitive listening" as a larger term that includes the creative aspects of the listening process. In this paper, I will propose ten characteristics of intuitive listening, share examples of student-created figural maps and their comments about creating them, and discuss whether the maps and comments support the ten characteristics of intuitive listening.