Thorir Thorisson:

Developing literacy for musical styles: The effects of implicit versus explicit training

This article reports on the formation of musical style concepts, discusses its implications for the training of style literacy, and outlines further research in this area. The main focus is a study which compared:
(a) the effects of explicit training in typical characteristics of Classical and Romantic styles with training that requires subjects to induce style concepts from musical exemplars (implicit training) on abstraction and concept formation;
(b) the relevance of four musical elements (beat, phrases, texture and chord progression) for subjects' categorizations; and
(c) the congruence of categorizations with predictions of exemplar- or prototype -theories of concept formation.

Participants were 88 students of the Breidholt Community High School, Reykjavik. Explicitly presenting subjects with prototypical characteristics of ill-defined musical styles was more beneficial than induced category information. Only texture was reliably abstracted by the implicitly trained subjects. Texture and chord progression affected categorization more than beat and phrase attributes. Subjects in both conditions apparently relied on analytic rather than holistic strategies categorizing the exemplars.