Musical instrument choices and gender – time for change?

In a world in which gender equality issues have been prominent since the late 1960s and with musical education initiatives that promote student autonomy and choice (e.g. Musical Futures) one might expect to see secondary school students choosing which instruments they would like to learn without any gendered preference. Nevertheless, there is still much debate about how the choice of instrument is made and whether this a gendered decision. Should parents and music teachers encourage girls to play the tuba or boys to play the piccolo?  Or do children and adolescents themselves display gendered preferences for specific types of musical instruments, perhaps influenced by their peers? If so, what challenges do these encultured choices pose for music educators in secondary schools?

Research has suggested that boys tend to choose larger, lower-pitched instruments and girls smaller, higher-pitched instruments. This may be familiar to many music educators in primary and secondary education, where the choice has typically included Western classical and pop instruments. However, in a new study,  Steven Kelly and Kimberly VanWeelden explore possible gender associations with world music instruments. They asked 455 middle and high school students on a music summer camp to classify ten world music instruments as feminine or masculine on a 10-point Likert scale. Musicians were split into three groups: one group listened to 45 second clips of each instrument being played a cappella; the second group were shown photographs of each instrument and the third group received audio and visual information about the instruments. The authors found that both boys and girls identified larger instruments such as the Kora and the Zheng as masculine, although the Sitar, despite being large, was only moderately perceived as being masculine. They suggest that one factor influencing student perceptions may be the existing enculturation of gendered choices about Western musical instruments in the USA. This, they point out, means that music educators seeking to lead world music in secondary school settings should be vigilant in developing teaching strategies which avoid cultural stereotypes and gendered choices about which instruments male and female students play.

In a second study, Elizabeth Wrape, Alexandra Dittloff and Jennifer Callahan ask whether trends have changed in the choice of musical instruments in middle schools in the USA.  The researchers wanted to find out whether choices of instruments mirrored existing gender-stereotypes, whether these stereo-types became more rigid as students matured and whether the gender of a student influenced the way in which they categorised instruments. The students were given a simple choice: is this instrument  a boy or a girl instrument?

The findings confirmed previously noted trends: the tuba was perceived to be a boy instrument and clarinet and flute were seen as girl instruments. Overall, students with more in bands described trombone, trumpet and French horn as boy instruments, whilst bassoon and oboe were described as girl instruments. However, among the girls with more experience, there was a strong view that trombone and French horn were girl instruments.  Interestingly, the younger students were less likely to make gendered judgements about their choice of instruments. As other researchers have found, this study confirmed that instrument choices may also be influenced by peer pressure from classmates. Contrary to the authors’ optimism that gender-stereotyping in the choice of musical instruments may not be as prevelant as shown in earlier studies, this study showed that whilst younger students are more open-minded about instrumental choices, gender stereo-types become more apparent as students mature.  The question then remains – what should middle school band leaders and instrumental teachers do – if anything – to try and reduce this gender-stereotyping?

So what happens when students enter higher education? Are musical instruments perceived with similar connotations of gender? Lisa Stronsick, Samantha Tuft, Sara Incera and Conor McLennan set out to investigate how female undergraduate students in a US Department of Psychology  perceived timbre and pitch of nine instruments. Instruments were grouped into threes based upon prior research and described as masculine, neutral or feminine. Participants listened to phrases on each instrument and indicated on a slider controlled by a mouse where they placed the instrument on a male-female continuum. Interestingly, the research team discovered that these female participants were more likely to rate masculine instruments more towards the feminine end of the continuum if they heard high pitched sounds. The authors suggest that this could be explained by the fact that female participants may be more responsive to high pitched sounds. This points towards an important conclusion that gender ratings of musical instruments may be flexible, based upon the gender of participants in the study. In the context of secondary education, one possible implication may be that students should be encouraged to listen carefully to both the pitch and timbre of instruments before making choices about which instrument they wish to play.

Another quite different view, not expressed by any of the authors above, might be that more role models are needed of both sexes to demonstrate that musical instrumental choices do not need to be associated with gender, but rather with a love of learning to play a musical instrument.

Monica Esslin-Peard, University of Liverpool

Following the completion of her PhD in July 2017, Monica joined the Department of Music at the University of Liverpool, UK, as Lecturer in Performance. She teaches on the undergraduate and masters programmes, focusing on performance, style and authenticity, pedagogy and conducting. Her research interests include reflective practice in musical learning, cross-cultural learning with Chinese students and popular music pedagogy.

Music soundtracks in our lives

I remember the very first time that I used a portable cassette tape player to add a music soundtrack to an otherwise music-free zone. I was cross country skiing, and as I glided along the trail, I listened over and over to a recording of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. I remember clearly the wonder of this idea that we could listen to music anywhere, and I also remember how the countryside seemed to have greater clarity; the smells seemed stronger, the colours more vivid, the air crisper. Fast forward to 2017, where we inhabit a world where music is readily available and background music is ubiquitous. The idea that we may perceive the world differently through the prism of music is intriguing.

A body of research has been preoccupied with questions around how music can influence human behaviour and how we use music to regulate our own emotional responses to the world. Recently, a group of researchers used experimental methods to investigate the influence of music listening on perceptions of real-life environments. Teruo Yamasaki, Keiko Yamada and Petri Laukka measured their participants’ impressions of four different urban contexts: a residential area, a park, a busy crossroads, and a commuter train. These impressions were gathered with five different ‘soundtrack’ conditions – no music, and four different tracks that varied with regards to arousal and pleasantness (activation and valence). Their results showed that the music soundtracks did influence impressions of the environment, in the direction of the characteristic of the music. For example, highly positive music fostered more positive impressions of the environment, and inactive music seemed to diminish the impression of activity in the environments that had been perceived as being highly active without any music - i.e. the busy crossroads and the commuter train (the latter being of particular interest to me, as someone who spent many years commuting on packed commuter trains in the Southeast of England, and always experimenting with how I could use music to endure the journey)..

The effects of soundtracks in our perceptions of the world extend beyond our perceptions of the environment, though. Consumer research has demonstrated that music can influence consumer behaviours and perceptions. Film music soundtracks have also been shown to have a powerful influence on our responses and to influence our perceptions of emotions.

Some researchers have wondered whether entrainment – being in sync with one another - might play a role in the effects of music soundtracks of our lives. Essentially, entrainment refers to the process that happens when our internal biological rhythm interacts with and becomes synchronised with an external rhythm. Entrainment has been studied in the context of communal music-making, where it has been linked with the unifying sense of fellowship and trust that is often reported by participants in music groups. Sarah Knight, Neta Spiro, and Ian Cross were curious about whether entrainment could have a similar effect in situations where we are passive listeners or observers. In their study, participants watched videos with soundtracks that were entrained (a drumbeat in time with the footsteps of the actor) or disentrained (the drumbeat was out of time with the footsteps). After watching the videos, the participants in the study rated the trustworthiness of the actor in the video. The researchers found that perceptions of trustworthiness were higher when the drum beat was in time (entrained) than when it was disentrained (out of time). It is not clear whether entrainment heightened the perceptions of trustworthiness or, alternatively, disentrainment diminished perceptions of trustworthiness. Nevertheless, this study, which raises many questions, is a reminder that the soundtracks in our lives may have more far-reaching influence than we may have thought.

These studies raise important questions about the music that frames our experiences of the world, and our personal responses to that music. Thinking about this topic also made me wonder about contexts where the music stops – where access to music, be it listening or participating, is not easy or even possible. In a world where we have grown accustomed to soundtracks, what happens in our individual perceptions and social interactions, when the music stops?

Thinking about practising

I have been thinking about practising. The question of how practice makes perfect continues to fascinate researchers in the psychology of music. It is generally accepted that the 10,000 hour rule alone is insufficient in explaining the development of expertise, and that it is quality as much as quantity that really makes a difference. The idea of deliberate practice has been explored. This is usually associated with formal practising, involving goal directed, focused behaviours, the intentional use of practice strategies, and self-regulatory approaches such as reflection and self-assessment. The different strategies employed in deliberate practice have been researched empirically and the idea of deliberate practice has made its way into discourses and reflections on learning and performing, including this thoughtful piece by my own daughter.

Questions have persisted, though, with regards to the approaches to practising that may offer the greatest promise in terms of the development of expertise. This research area has enormous implications for all those who are invested in the intense commitment that instrumental learning requires.

One model of effective practising, proposed by Arielle Bonneville-Roussy and Thérèse Bouffard, synthesises the ideas relating to the quantity and quality of practising, adding in a third dimension of motivation, the thinking being that if we are motivated we are more likely to persist with effortful and deliberate practice (as highlighted by Paul Evans and Gary McPherson in their study focusing on identity and practice – although Susan Hallam and colleagues have reported complex relationships between motivation and practice, pointing to the need for research with this focus.).  

In their study involving 173 Canadian college students learning western classical instruments, Bonneville-Roussy and Bouffard reiterated the view that it is what you do, as well as how much you do it, that makes practising fruitful. Their study showed that focused attention on deliberate, goal-directed and self-regulated formal practice functioned as the key link between time spent practising and the development of expertise. In addition, a positive motivational profile (measured here by self-perceptions of musical competence) had an indirect effect, in that strong self-perceptions of competence were related to more time spent engaged in formal practising.

The question of how young musicians go about their practising has also been researched extensively by Sue Hallam and her colleagues. They have ‘unpacked’ the idea of deliberate practice, identifying several specific strategies and showing how these develop over time, as expertise develops. It may be unsurprising to some to find that there seem to be gender differences in young people’s approaches to practising. Girls reported more systematic approaches to practising, but boys reported higher levels of concentration when they practised. These findings are based on self-report, with a sample of over 3000 children and adolescents learning western classical instruments.

Pamela Pike adopted a different approach to understanding practising, looking in-depth at the practising undertaken by intermediate piano pupils. A striking finding is that the students reported using more practise strategies than were actually observed. Curiously, they could describe effective practice strategies, but were not necessarily actually doing what they said they did. Pike’s study also underlines the importance of context. The students were attempting to engage in deliberate focused practice, yet this was undertaken at the end of the day when they were lethargic and easily distracted.

Much of this research focuses on how we practice, with some attempts to understand how motivation fits in to the practising puzzle. But, perhaps there is a need for a greater emphasis on the bigger ‘why’ that underpins our practice. The answer seems obvious – we practice to make perfect, to become experts. But, is deliberate practice – and lots of it - sufficient if we strive to be creative, to explore our musicianship and to take risks in performance? Is it possible to practice exploratory and expansive approaches to music-making, or is ‘risk-taking’ and ‘deliberate practice’ an oxymoron?

These questions are considered by Guro Johansen in his qualitative study of how jazz musicians practice improvisation. Johansen proposes the concept of incremental, explorational practice. According to this model, practising can be expansive, encompassing exploitation of existing knowledge as well as exploration of emerging knowledge. At one end of a continuum, musicians acquire and exploit well-known knowledge and structures (is this what we might recognise as ‘deliberate’ practice?). At the other end, they explore new knowledge, breaking the rules, finding new and emergent structures. This is described as open ended practising that has as its goal a flexible and intuitive state, with a focus on feeling rather than thinking.

So, do we need to rethink our model for practising, and account for motivational influences, context, deliberate strategies, self-regulation, as well as expansive and exploratory approaches to developing as deeply creative and innovative musicians? An important question may be whether it is ever too early to adopt expansive approaches, and whether it is never too late to rethink our practising.

The curious paradox of music performance anxiety

I have written about the power of music, particularly with regard to the links between music-making and wellbeing. Many argue that participation in music, which leads to a positive music self-concept, has a direct and positive impact on self-esteem. So, it is somewhat of a paradox that the very activity that can foster such positive feelings of joy, fellowship, wellbeing, and self-esteem can also function as host to feelings of terror, in the form of music performance anxiety (MPA). MPA has been defined as apprehension prior to performance, or impairment of performance, that is entirely out of kilter with what might be expected given one’s level of training and preparation.

One of my most vivid early memories is of my first violin recital. It is the terror – the anticipation of catastrophe – that has stayed with me for over 50 years. Therefore, I was particularly interested in the research investigating whether music performance anxiety may be related to the age at which musicians start learning their instruments. A group of Spanish researchers carried out a survey study with over 200 school-aged young people learning instruments, as well as a second group of over 400 conservatoire students. Amongst both groups, those who had started learning at age 7 or younger had lower levels of music performance anxiety than those who had started at age 9 or 10. The researchers explain that it is at about age 8 that children start to develop the complex cognitive mechanisms that underpin ‘mature embarrassment’ and suggest that at younger ages children are therefore in some sense protected from anxiety in performance situations. In addition, the authors highlight the importance of context, in explaining their findings. Starting an instrument at an early age can provide frequent experiences of performance within an encouraging and warm context and these repeated experiences of success can generate a positive feedback loop which evidently may have far-reaching impact. However, the adults and peers in that environment play a key role. Early performance experiences that lack personal warmth and encouragement, or that are just ‘too hard’ and therefore do not contribute to a bank of mastery experience, may lead to a negative feedback loop that can be hard to shift. A key message in this research is that an early start can provide a wonderful opportunity to build positive performance experiences that may, if experienced within supportive and safe contexts, subsequently act as a buffer in the face of MPA.

Focusing on their group of 437 conservatoire students, the same group of researchers explored the relationship between psychological vulnerabilities and MPA. The results showed that a sense of helplessness was a strong predictor of MPA, and that self-efficacy and optimism were both negatively related to MPA. Helplessness, they explain, can have its roots in early childhood, and once established can be persistent. Circling back to the discussion around links between age of starting learning and MPA, it seems ever more clear that early childhood experiences of performance must be handled with care. While these early experiences may form the building blocks of positive strategies and attitudes towards performance, they may very easily also form the foundation of helplessness, spiralling into debilitating MPA.

Finally, these recent papers concerned with MPA once again highlight troubling and persistent gender differences. In line with other research, the group of Spanish researchers reported that women experienced higher MPA than men, and that self-efficacy was higher amongst the men. This phenomenon of gender differences in anxiety under stressful performance conditions was explored in some depth by a group of Dutch researchers. Eighty-one conservatoire students described what they were thinking about when they play under pressure. It seems that while playing under pressure women are distracted by many more worries and disturbing thoughts, compared to men – 37% of the women’s thoughts were coded as worries or disturbing thoughts, compared with 18% of the men’s thoughts coded in that way. The men seemed to have strategies for remaining focused on task – 46% of the men described being focused on the music, as compared with just 25% of the women.

This brings me back to my early memory of MPA, and to the paradox. Music-making can be a joyful and enriching lifelong activity – there can be little doubt about that. But what are the facets of those early formative experiences that set our children off on a pathway of vulnerability, or alternatively resilience, with regards to MPA? And, why is it so persistently women who are the most vulnerable? Perhaps we need to be exploring in-depth our pedagogical practices in the early years, looking for the potential roots of gender differences in MPA.

Bouncing back: Can music be used to restore wellbeing?

Several researchers have explored possible pathways between engagement with music and subjective wellbeing. A recent Australian study suggests that dancing to music and singing, are activities that are related to high levels of subjective wellbeing. This study, which involved 1000 telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 500 men and 500 women, highlighted the importance of musical social networks – the positive relationship with wellbeing was strongest amongst those who said that they danced or sang with others.

But can engaging with music help us to bounce back from stressful and threatening experiences, and to restore our sense of wellbeing? The authors of the Australian study, Melissa Weinberg and Dawn Joseph, explain that subjective wellbeing represents a stable and consistent sense of general mood happiness. In the face of stressful events, we draw upon external and internal resources to restore our baseline ‘setpoint’ for subjective wellbeing. Music, it is argued, might function as such a resource.

Emotional regulation may play an important role in restoring the status quo for subjective wellbeing. One recent study, carried out in Spain, adds to the growing evidence that listening to music can help to regulate emotion, in this case helping individuals to regain a sense of relaxation and equilibrium following an acute stressful event. Alejandro de la Torre-Luque, and his colleagues used an experimental approach (randomized controlled trial), and measured cardiovascular outcomes as well as affective state following a recovery period after the stress-inducing task. While the experimental group listened to their own preferred calming music during the recovery period, the control group rested in silence. Listening to self-selected calming music helped physiological recovery from the stressful event and the music-listeners also reported more positive feelings after the recovery period, as compared with their colleagues who had not listened to music.

The deliberate use of listening to music as a way to alleviate negative moods has been highlighted in a study by William Randall and Nikki Rickard at Monash University. Using an experience sampling report method, these researchers collected data from 327 participants about reasons and contexts associated with their music listening. Emotional reasons were the most frequently cited, and it was particularly when individuals were in a negative mood that they chose to listen to music in order to release emotion, feel stronger, forget problems, cope, reflect, express themselves, or improve their mood.

Engaging with music may have an even more profound role in relation to wellbeing. According to those who have theorised the idea of Terror Management Theory, the greatest existential threat that we must negotiate, as humans, is the unconscious or conscious knowledge of our inevitable death. In her thought-provoking paper, Audrey Cardany reviews the literature concerned with the role of music as a mechanism for mitigating what is referred to as ‘mortality salience’ – that is, the conscious awareness of the certainty of death. Cardany discusses a small but growing body of empirical evidence in support of the idea that musicking (including listening, creating, and performing) may function as a buffer in the face of mortality salience because it promotes a sense of social connectedness, and strengthens our cultural identities.  In this psychological account of why we ‘do’ music, it is proposed that the power of music lies in its potential as a symbolic world that distracts us from our physical existence, helping us in our quest for meaning, and providing a safe space within which to develop a relationship with death.

In a curiously roundabout way, this brings me back to the idea of bouncing back and regaining one’s subjective wellbeing, in the face of threat or stress. The emerging evidence provides ever stronger support for the view that musicking, be it listening, creating, or performing, can function as a profoundly important mechanism for coping with the multitude of threats that life presents, including loss, stressful events, and even our deepest existential crises. Whether we refer to deliberate individual music listening musical social networks, music in community, or shared musical identity, the power of musicking seems to be extraordinary.

Social integration and inclusion

Can music promote social inclusion? 

Increasingly, researchers in the psychology of music have turned their attention to this question. Within our current global context where we are witness to  unprecedented numbers of displaced peoples, research in this area has important implications. Several researchers have investigated the power of music to support vulnerable groups in forging a sense of belonging within their wider communities. Psychology of Music is leading in highlighting some of this research, embracing methodologies that include meta-analyses, experimental designs and in-depth qualitative case studies.

Music’s role in the lives of young people coping with multiple barriers to social inclusion has also been investigated. Lindblom reports a rich and detailed account of the ways in which traditional and contemporary musics offered several pathways to social inclusion for two young First Nations Canadians, both of whom had been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Some critical questions are raised, in this article, relating to the ethics of music interventions and in particular the need for cultural sensitivity.

Focusing on music-making as a potential creative and compassionate response to issues around social inclusion,  Henderson, Cain, Istvandity, and Lakhani reviewed the evidence for the role of participatory music in supporting the integration of migrant communities. The researchers focused on research over the past decade concerned with positive mental, physical, and emotional health outcomes of music interventions. While the wider benefits of music interventions for migrant groups is, as yet, an under-researched area, there is some compelling evidence to suggest that collaborative music-making could play an important role in promoting acculturation and helping newly arrived community members to develop self-confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of identity within their new environments. Amongst the studies reviewed, a significant feature of the music interventions was the potential for developing inter-cultural respect and understanding, through sharing of musics from the former home country as well as exploration of musics from the new home country.

Some of the positive effects of music for social inclusion may be related to the characteristics of musical social networks noted by Pearce, Launay, MacCarron, and Dunbar. These researchers compared singing groups to craft and creative writing groups, focusing on social and relational bonding. The singers were distinctive in rapidly forming social bonds; this was possibly attributable to their sense of collaboration in working together towards a common goal, as well as endorphin release (as a result of the singing), which may have fostered feelings of closeness towards an unfamiliar group of people.

Listening to music, too, may evoke feelings of cross-cultural affiliation. According to a groundbreaking study reported by Vuoskoski, Clarke, and DeNora,  listening to music from a culture different to one’s own may increase the listener’s positive implicit attitudes towards that particular culture. This study, the first to demonstrate that listening to music can evoke feelings of social affiliation, extends our knowledge concerning the potential for synchronous music-making music to promote empathy and pro-social behaviour.

There are clearly many avenues of investigation yet to be explored, relating to the multi-faceted ways in which music participation and listening may support social inclusion and integration of marginalized or vulnerable groups. Interdisciplinary, multicultural research will help us enormously in developing deeper understandings of this important topic, with the potential for significant impact upon social integration practices.

Welcome to the Psychology of Music Editor’s blog

Welcome to the Psychology of Music Editor’s blog

It is a great honour to be taking on the role of Editor of Psychology of Music, and also a wonderful gift! In the spirit of the five-hour rule, I am delighted to have an opportunity to spend daily time reading and reflecting on the fascinating work of my colleagues in the field of Psychology of Music. Together, my Assistant Editor Maria Varvarigou and I will use this blog to highlight themes and ‘hot topics’ amongst the recently published papers on Psychology of Music Online First.