Learning Music Composers’ Styles: To Block or to Interleave?

The ability to recognize and distinguish among varying musical styles is essential to developing aural skills and musicianship. Yet, this task can be difficult for music learners, particularly nonexperts. To address this challenge and guide music education practice, this study drew on cognitive psychological principles to investigate the effect of interleaved presentation of music pieces by various classical music composers on learning to identify these composers’ styles. Participants with 4 or fewer years of musical experience were presented with music pieces from six composers in an interleaved manner (alternating between listening to different composers’ works) and music pieces from another six composers in a blocked fashion (listening to works by one composer at a time before moving on to the next). A later test in which participants had to classify novel pieces by the same 12 composers revealed the superiority of interleaved over blocked presentation, although most participants misjudged blocking to be more effective than interleaving. This finding provides evidence for the utility of interleaving in teaching music composers’ styles and extends the literature on the interleaving effect in category induction to the auditory domain. Practical implications and future directions for the use of interleaving in music education are discussed.