The survey was answered by 24 students from Bachelor and master studies, 9 from Bachelor and 15 from Master, all of them from the Koninklijik Conservatory in The Hague. As the amount of people who asked the survey is not that much to be able to generalize from all the instruments, we will separate them by families of instruments for the analysis of the results. We have 13 string players (7 violins, 4 violas, 1 cello and 1 double-bass, 6 polyphonic instruments (2 piano, 3 harp and 1 guitar), and 5 wind instruments (3 brass instruments and 2 wooden instruments).
From all the people who answered the survey only 1 affirms that he or she doesn’t listen to recordings at any point of the preparation of the piece, representing that the 4,2 % of the students from this group. From the students who listen to recordings, only 5 of them listen to recordings after they have approached the score, leaving that the 78,3% of student remaining that listen to a recording before they read the score. Nearly half of the survey (47,8%) affirms that they listen to recordings only a few times through the preparation or study of the piece during their practice, meanwhile the 43,5% they listen to them some days of their practice. The remaining 8,7% they listen to them most of the days. For the question asking the information the students are looking for in the recordings they were given options and a blank space to add an extra one if they looked for something else. Getting a general idea of the piece was the most commonly looked for (87%), followed by interpretation reasons (65,2%), which we realized after releasing the survey that it was too generic to be counted as data in a research. We were looking to find things related to phrasing or interpreting the dynamics that were written in the score, but it could be misunderstood. More than half of the students were looking for a tempo choice in the recordings (52,2%).
Nearly a third of the students who listen to recordings in their practice, they always compare different recordings in the search of information (34,8%), meanwhile the other 65,2% they only do that sometimes, and none of them they never compare the recordings, this option was not selected at any point. A large percentage of students (73,9%) they apply consciously ideas they got from recordings into their playing, while the other 26,1% they don’t do it consciously.
Regarding to the block of questions about preferences on recordings, one third of the students (33,3%) they don´t have a preferred artist or performer for their instrument, being the most common reason of this fact that they look for different performers depending on the historical period of the piece. When students have to look for new repertoire for their instrument, they were given several options from which they could choose from (choosing more than one was possible). Nearly all of them have the recommendation from the teacher or other colleagues (87,5%) as part of this process. 75% of them use recordings for this purpose and only 20,8% rely in online libraries for looking for new repertoire. Most of the students, when asked about platforms for listening the music from, they go to YouTube and Spotify (91,7% and 83,3% respectively) and only a quarter of them (25%) go to CDs to listen to it. The surveyed students prefer more listening to live performances (53,8%) than studio recordings (41,7%).
Now I will proceed to analyce curious coincidences that happened on the survey answering. From the 21,7% of the students who listen to recordings after they approach the score, only one of them is a master student, leaving that the grate majority of the master students listening to recordings before they approach the score.