Compositional thinking in classical music within a computer-mediated composition environment

This empirical study examines the relationship between cognitive thinking styles and composing strategies in classical music by analysing the work of 22 Hong Kong secondary students within a computer-mediated composition environment. A Yale scholar in psychology, Sternberg (1997), proposed that academic performance should not be the only indicator by which an individual’s success is judged. Instead, the measurement of success ought to rely more on the contexts of thinking and teaching styles together with the learning environment. In the first stage, a survey of students’ thinking styles was conducted to see which ‘type’ each belonged to. In the second stage, students’ innate computer-related abilities were demonstrated by observing their approaches to computer-mediated composition of classical music. This study aims to identify a correlation between an individual’s thinking style and his/her composing strategies. This correlation indicates three areas to emphasise in music curriculum development: (1) Personalised learning, which will help students develop composing strategies appropriate to different cognitive thinking styles; (2) The advantages of studying compositional thinking in a computermediated composition environment; and (3) The need to build students’ musical identities during the classical music composition process. At the end of this paper, a learner-thinking model in computer-mediated composition is proposed. Copyright © 2018 Canadian University Dubai.