I designed a survey that was shared through social networks and other platforms to collect the data. The survey was shared in an educational enviroment in the Royal Conservatory of The Hague during the month of January of 2023. The participants answered the survey anonymously through a link to a forms with the questions to answer. The participants are music students from the educational institution that it was shared in. The participants are from different stages of learning, as they are asked to specify their stage they are now, as well as their instrument. This questions where written to find possible tendencies depending on the instrument or the stage of study the participants are. Here is the list of questions:
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1. Do you listen to recordings from other musicians of the pieces you are currently learning/studying?
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2. Do you listen to a recording of the piece you are preparing or start studying before or after you have read the score?
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3. How frequently do you listen to them?
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4. Which are the main reasons you normally want to find out in the recordings when you listen to them as a source of information?
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5. How frequently do you compare different recordings of the same piece from more than one musician/ensemble/orchestra?
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6. Do you constiously apply musical ideas from recordings for the realization of the piece/movement you are preparing?
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7. Do you have a preferred performer for an approach to your own repertoire? If not, how do you choose the performer to listen to?
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8. How do you discover new repertoire for your own instrument?
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9. What platform do you normally use for listening to recordings?
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10. Do you prefer to listen to recordings from live performances or recordings from studio?
The questions were divided in three different sections. The first one has the general information questions about the instrument and stage of learning (not included in the above list) and the first question from the list. The second group of questions goes from number two to number six. This whole set won’t be answered by the participants who answered negatively to the first question of the list, being unable to be answered by this participants. The third block was named as preferences in recordings and they go from question seven to the last one. After this block an empty space to write some remarks remained open for the participants to add any extra information or remark that they wanted to say. This survey will help me get to answer my research questions about this topic. We will go individually through the questions explaining more in detail what exactly we want to discover from the participants who answer the survey.
The first question “Do you listen to recordings from other musicians of the pieces you are studying?”, will let us know if the musician uses recordings as an extra source of information. Listening is the easiest way for a musician to learn and this is used in some learning methodologies for children in early stages. We want to analyze what porcentage of students use them as an additional learning tool.
The second question, which asks about when does students uses this recordings, will give us an insight of the purpose the student is looking to find. If they listen to the recordings before approaching the score, they could be looking for a general idea of the final picture they will need to perform at the end. The listening after reading the score can have different purposes. It can mean that the student only wants to make sure he or she didnt make any sightreading mistakes in rhythm and notes, ori f it is used in later stages it can be used as a source of ideas or just curiosity of how someone more experienced than them has approached it.
We ask the third question to know up to what extend does the students use recordings through the learning process, and the frequency a students does it is an important factor in this matter.
We ask the fourth question in order to learn what kind of information the students are after, knowing also which are their biggest doubts when they face a score or they have to approach a different project.
The fifth question will tell us how selective are the students with the recordings they listen to, and how are they contrasting information of the recordings they are using for tis purpouse. This will get us to the level of chriticism they have, if they are satisfied with the first result or they want to look into other perspectives of the piece.
The sixth question will find out if the students use them conscioulsy to get inspiration from other performers applying it to their playing.
The seventh question is referred to the preferences in the performer for the students about listening to their own repertoire. This will tell us if they have a concrete role model in some musician for their instrument apart from their teachers.
With the eighth question the ones who answer the survey will tell us if recordings have an important role in the process that goes before even start practicing a piece, deciding what to perform afterwards, how to complete a recital with or how to build it from the very beginning.
There are a lot of music platforms from where we can listen music to. This ninth question will tell us which is the most popular platform for listening to music from the students. We want to know how many of them are satisfied with mp3 files of audio recordings, the most common used in online platforms and the audio that is reproduced in the great mayority of online video platforms. Mp3 files occupy less space but their quality is far much worse than a not compressed audio format. We want to know if the students know about this fact with an extra subquestion that will go after it.
The final question asks about the two main ways of getting an acoustic recording done, through a live performance or in a studio. Live performances tend to be more spontaneous but susceptible of minor mistakes. For studio recordings the perfection is what is looked for. It is achieved through mixing the best takes from the best version for every passage, making it not possible for a live performance. This will tell us the preference from the students for listening recordings.