Proposal for Scholarship Project

Mainstream general music classrooms have prevailed in holding the auditory sense as the
hierarchical ruler throughout classroom history. However, in today's inclusive classroom, the
sole promotion of musical listening practice has downgraded many other relevant
communication skills. Today, there is a strong push towards understanding music as a
communication act that follows a living creative sphere. This idea runs rampant within the
education and involvement of the hearing-impaired community. This community has a demand
for a-typical communication styles, thus they can often participate in the act of musiking
differently than their peers. The inclusive K-12 general music classroom has progressed to an
age of using music to teach linguistic skills to young students with hearing disabilities. In many
cases, individuals will learn their spoken (or signed language) completely through a musical
context. This practice also involves breaking down the barrier between music context listening
and music communication skills. By fostering a creative, artistic space that also allots for lexicon
improvement, the general music educator can aid students in a physical, emotional, and
psychological realm. The act of music as communication also spreads beyond the classroom to
the hearing-impaired population to affect their day-to-day life. Exterior to this idea, it is
imperative to address music communication as an open forum for the world population and not
just the hearing-impaired one. It is pivotal that the scope of the music classroom increases
beyond musical listening and its artistic function to aid individuals in contextualizing present-day
linguistics. By examining modalities within the classroom as well as the mainstreaming of
hearing impaired education, musical communication can be further interpreted. The place of
music as communication in common day society for all populations will also be assessed to
determine its role. The following articles will be investigated to try and answer the ever pressing
question of what is listening in general music education in relation to multiple modality and
communication development?

Nelson, L. H., Parker, E. W., & Wright, W. (2015) Embedding Music Into Language and
Literacy Instruction for Young Children Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Young Exceptional
Children, 19(1), 27 38.
Music is an integral aspect of human life. Its impact weaves through arts, culture,
communication, recreation, and education. In addition to benefits of enjoyment and
entertainment, music is a vital component of preschool educational settings. Music can foster
creativity, enhance academic instruction, and create a learning environment in which children
thrive emotionally, socially, and academically (Paquette & Rieg, 2008; Wiggins, 2007). Many
educators routinely utilize music as an embedded component of instruction to meet both group
and individual needs of young children. In fact, specialized musical instruction can be
particularly beneficial for children with disabilities, including those who are deaf or hard of
hearing (DHH; Gfeller, Driscoll, Kenworthy, & Van Voorst, 2011).
Rochette, F., Moussard, A., and Bigand, E. (2014). Music Lessons Improve Auditory Perceptual
and Cognitive Performance in Deaf Children. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8(July): 488.
Despite advanced technologies in auditory rehabilitation of profound deafness, deaf children
often exhibit delayed cognitive and linguistic development and auditory training remains a
crucial element of their education. In the present cross-sectional study, we assess whether music
would be a relevant tool for deaf children rehabilitation. In normal-hearing children, music
lessons have been shown to improve cognitive and linguistic-related abilities, such as phonetic
discrimination and reading. We compared auditory perception, auditory cognition, and phonetic
discrimination between 14 profoundly deaf children who completed weekly music lessons for a
period of 1.5-4 years and 14 deaf children who did not receive musical instruction. Children
were assessed on perceptual and cognitive auditory tasks using environmental sounds:
discrimination, identification, auditory scene analysis, auditory working memory. Transfer to the
linguistic domain was tested with a phonetic discrimination task. Musically trained children
showed better performance in auditory scene analysis, auditory working memory and phonetic
discrimination tasks, and multiple regressions showed that success on these tasks was at least
partly driven by music lessons. We propose that musical education contributes to development of
general processes such as auditory attention and perception, which, in turn, facilitate auditory-
related cognitive and linguistic processes.

Darrow, A., & Gfeller, K. (1991) A Study of Public School Music Programs Mainstreaming
Hearing Impaired Students. The Journal of Music Therapy, 28(1) 23 39.
The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the status of public school music instruction for
hearing impaired students, and (b) examine the factors that contribute to the successful
mainstreaming of hearing impaired students in the regular music classroom. A questionnaire was
developed with items concerning demographic information, educational preparation, extent of
instructional and administrative support, the extent to which musical and nonmusical goals are
set by music educators, factors related to the successful mainstreaming of hearing impaired
students, obstructions to mainstreaming, and activities and curricula successfully implemented in
mainstreaming programs. Results of the study revealed the following: (a) more than half of all
the hearing impaired students attend regular music classes; (b) of those students not
mainstreamed, less than half receive no music education in the self-contained classroom or
otherwise; (c) many music educators are lacking in the educational preparation necessary for
teaching hearing impaired students; (d) important instructional or administrative support is often
not available; (e) several factors, such as lack of appropriate curricula or poor communication
with other professionals, are identified as obstructions to the successful mainstreaming of
hearing impaired students; (f) only 35% of the respondents reported that they have the same
objectives for hearing impaired students as for normal hearing students; and (g) methodologies,
materials, and activities were identified that were helpful in integrating hearing impaired students
in the regular music classroom.
Looi, V., McDermott, H., McKay, C., & Hickson, L. (2008). Music perception of cochlear
implant users compared with that of hearing aid users. Ear and Hearing, 29(3), 421434.
To investigate the music perception skills of adult cochlear implant (CI) users in comparison
with hearing aid (HA) users who have similar levels of hearing impairment. It was hypothesized
that the HA users would perform better than the CI recipients on tests involving pitch,
instrument, and melody perception, but similarly for rhythm perception. Fifteen users of the
Nucleus CI system and 15 HA users participated in a series of music perception tests. All
subjects were post lingually deafened adults, with the HA subjects being required to meet the
current audiological criteria for CI candidacy. A music test battery was designed for the study
incorporating four major tasks: (1) discrimination of 38 pairs of rhythms; (2) pitch ranking of
one-octave, half-octave, and quarter-octave intervals; (3) instrument recognition incorporating
three subtests, each with 12 different instruments or ensembles; and (4) recognition of 10
familiar melodies. Stimuli were presented via direct audio input at comfortable presentation
levels. The test battery was administered to each subject on two separate occasions,
approximately 4 mo apart. The results from the rhythm test were 93% correct for the CI group
and 94% correct for the HA group; these scores were not significantly different. For the pitch
test, there was a significant difference between the HA group and the CI group (p < 0.001), with
higher mean scores recorded by the HA group for all three interval sizes. The CI subject group
was unable to rank pitches a quarter-octave apart, only scoring at chance level for this interval
size. In the instrument recognition test, although there was no significant difference between the
mean scores of the two groups, both groups obtained significantly higher scores for the subtest
incorporating single instrument stimuli than those incorporating multiple instrumentations (p <
0.001). In the melody test, there was a significant difference between the implantees' mean score
of 52% correct and the HA group's mean of 91% (p < 0.001). As hypothesized, results from the
two groups were almost identical for the rhythm test, with the HA group performing significantly
better than the CI group on the pitch and melody tests. However, there was no difference
between the groups in their ability to identify musical instruments or ensembles. The results of
this study indicate that HA users with similar levels of hearing loss perform at least equal to, if
not better than, CI users on these music perception tests. However, despite the differences
between scores obtained by the CI and HA subject groups, both these subject groups were
largely unable to achieve accurate or effective music perception, regardless of the device they
used.