Auditions form the gold standard for hiring practices in symphonic orchestras around the world. Nevertheless, research examining how auditions are evaluated by panel members remains sparse. The purpose of this brief research note is to present findings from a pilot project examining the feedback content of audition panelists during a realistic mock audition. Feedback received by 16 academy members of an internationally renowned orchestra was analyzed using inductive content analysis. A key finding of this study was that panelists tended to provide much more feedback related to improving expressivity (61.8%), compared with feedback on technique (24.5%) or other factors (e.g., tuning; 13.7%). As advancing our understanding of how orchestra auditions are evaluated may have considerable practical implications for how music educators can aid students in preparing for a successful transition to the professional circuit, we hope our pilot project might spur on future work investigating this important topic.
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Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to study the activation of cerebral motor networks during auditory perception of music in professional keyboard musicians (n=12). The activation paradigm implied that subjects listened to two-part polyphonic music, while either critically appraising the performance or imagining they were performing themselves. Two-part polyphonic audition and bimanual motor imagery circumvented a hemisphere bias associated with the convention of playing the melody with the right hand. Both tasks activated ventral premotor and auditory cortices, bilaterally, and the right anterior parietal cortex, when contrasted to 12 musically unskilled controls. Although left ventral premotor activation was increased during imagery (compared to judgment), bilateral dorsal premotor and right posterior-superior parietal activations were quite unique to motor imagery. The latter suggests that musicians not only recruited their manual motor repertoire but also performed a spatial transformation from the vertically perceived pitch axis (high and low sound) to the horizontal axis of the keyboard. Imagery-specific activations in controls were seen in left dorsal parietal-premotor and supplementary motor cortices. Although these activations were less strong compared to musicians, this overlapping distribution indicated the recruitment of a general 'mirror-neuron' circuitry. These two levels of sensori-motor transformations point towards common principles by which the brain organizes audition-driven music performance and visually guided task performance.
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Lecture in PhD Programme Life Science Education Research UMCU. Course Methods of Life Science Education Research. Utrecht, The Netherlands. abstract Audit trail procedures are applied as a way to check the validity of qualitative research designs, qualitative analyses, and the claims that are made. Audit trail procedures can be conducted based on the three criteria of visibility, comprehensibility, and acceptability (Akkerman et al., 2008). During an audit trail procedure, all documents and materials resulting from the data gathering and the data analysis are assessed by an auditor. In this presentation, we presented a summative audit trail procedure (Agricola, Prins, Van der Schaaf & Van Tartwijk, 2021), whereas in a second study we used a formative one (Agricola, Van der Schaaf, Prins & Van Tartwijk, 2022). For both studies, two different auditors were chosen. For the study presented in Agricola et al. (2021) the auditor was one of the PhD supervisors, while in that presented Agricola et al. (2022) was a junior researcher not involved in the project. The first auditor had a high level of expertise in the study’s topic and methodology. As a result, he was able to provide a professional and critical assessment report. Although the second auditor might be considered to be more objective than the first, as she was not involved in the project, more meetings were needed to explain the aim of the study and the aim of the audit trail procedure. There are many ideas about the criteria that qualitative studies should meet (De Kleijn en Van Leeuwen, 2018). I argue that procedures of checking for interrater agreement and understanding, the triangulation, and audit trail procedures can increase the internal validity of qualitative studies. Agricola, B. T., Prins, F. J., van der Schaaf, M. F., & van Tartwijk, J. (2021). Supervisor and Student Perspectives on Undergraduate Thesis Supervision in Higher Education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 65(5), 877-897. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2020.1775115 Agricola, B. T., van der Schaaf, M. F., Prins, F. J., & van Tartwijk, J. (2022). The development of research supervisors’ pedagogical content knowledge in a lesson study project. Educational Action Research. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2020.1832551 de Kleijn, R. A. M., & Van Leeuwen, A. (2018). Reflections and review on the audit procedure: Guidelines for more transparency. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17(1), 1-8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406918763214 Akkerman, S., Admiraal, W., Brekelmans, M., & Oost, H. (2008). Auditing quality of research in social sciences. Quality & Quantity, 42(2), 257-274. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-006-9044-4
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