A (Technologically Enhanced) Sound Education: Implementation,

Experimentation and Analysis of Raymond Murray Schafer’s Exercises

Veronica Curioni, Luca A. Ludovico and Giorgio Presti

LIM – Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale, Dipartimento di Informatica “Giovanni Degli Antoni”,

Universit

a degli Studi di Milano, Via G. Celoria 18, 20133 Milano, Italy

Keywords:

Listening, Sound, Education, Schafer, Technology.

Abstract:

Raymond Murray Schafer is considered one of the leading experts in the ﬁeld of music ecology. In one of

his works, he proposed speciﬁc exercises to encourage listening awareness in young students. This paper

aims to describe an experimental activity in which three exercises extracted from Schafer’s work have been

implemented in the form of computer-based tools, so as to be administered both in a traditional and in a

technologically enhanced way. The experimentation has been conducted on 233 primary school students,

showing to what extent the adoption of technology can be applied to listening attention and awareness.

1 INTRODUCTION

The adoption of technology and computer-based ap-

proaches in teaching has neither positive nor nega-

tive connotation per se; rather, technological advance-

ments offer tools that, when proﬁtably used, can im-

prove the didactic experience and the learning pro-

cess. Scientiﬁc literature contains many examples of

technologies proﬁtably usable in teaching, but it also

reveals how their misuse may lead to negative effects

(Ellis, 1973; Kay, 1996; Ribble and Bailey, 2004).

This work starts from a very general research

question: is the administration of educational expe-

riences through technology more effective than a tra-

ditional one? Needless to say, this question is hard to

answer in general terms, so we restricted the investi-

gation ﬁeld to a narrow context. In particular, we tried

to understand how children relate to the surrounding

sound environment, and how technology may help

them in acquiring soundscape awareness. To this end,

we applied a quantitative methodology to the admin-

istration and evaluation of speciﬁc exercises, so as to

extract objective data on the effects produced on chil-

dren by both traditional methods and technological

tools.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows: Section 2 will introduce the theoretical bases

that inspired our research; Section 3 will describe the

state of the art about technologies that foster acoustic

awareness and listening skills; Section 4 will present

the experiences we administered to our control and

experimental group; Section 5 will provide details

about the experimental protocol; Section 6 will dis-

cuss the results we achieved; ﬁnally, Section 7 will

present our conclusions.

2 A SOUND EDUCATION

Raymond Murray Schafer, born in Canada in 1933, is

a multifaceted man: composer, librettist, pedagogue,

writer, educator, and environmentalist. He is best

known for his interest towards acoustic ecology, a

discipline that studies the relationship between hu-

man beings and their environment mediated through

sound (Wrightson, 2000). In 1966, he formed a team

at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver to investigate

themes related to acoustic ecology. Among his most

relevant publications, it is worth mentioning (Schafer,

1977), (Schafer, 1986), and (Schafer, 1992).

The latter work, titled “A Sound Education: 100

Exercises in Listening and Soundmaking”, aims to

improve the listening skills of children, stimulating

attention and awareness towards surrounding sound-

scapes. Since in his opinion the modern civilized

world is becoming deaf because of the noise, the au-

thor stresses the importance of re-education to sound.

In the introduction, he says: “I believe that the way to

improve the world’s soundscape is quite simple. We

must learn how to listen.”

As a possible solution, Schafer proposes a num-

ber of exercises dealing with soundmaking and listen-

Curioni, V., Ludovico, L. and Presti, G.

A (Technologically Enhanced) Sound Education: Implementation, Experimentation and Analysis of Raymond Murray Schafer’s Exercises.

DOI: 10.5220/0007766004730480

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 473-480

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

473

ing, gradually moving from ear cleaning (the ability to

distinguish sound from noise) to the design of sound-

scapes. All training activities do not require previ-

ous skills, and have not been conceived to be per-

formed systematically from start to ﬁnish, rather they

are intended for casual performance as the occasion

demands. In this sense, our approach – i.e. the selec-

tion of a very limited number of exercises to be pro-

posed in a classroom environment – does not conﬂict

with the pedagogical principles enunciated by Schafer

(see Section 4).

3 STATE OF THE ART

In this section we will provide a short overview on

research initiatives that make use of technology to

encourage acoustic awareness and develop listening

skills.

First, it is worth mentioning those initiatives col-

lectively referred to as ear training, aiming to iden-

tify, solely by hearing, typical elements of music,

such as pitches, intervals, melody, chords, rhythms,

etc. Ear training is considered one of the components

of formal musical education. An early application of

technology to ear training is reported in (Hofstetter,

1975): it describes an experiment conducted with an

ear-training class at the University of Delaware in or-

der to determine the impact on student achievement

in harmonic dictation.

In more recent times, McGill University devel-

oped a computer-aided system for timbral ear train-

ing. The system lets students develop their sensitiv-

ity to timbral changes and their memory for timbre

through a set of speciﬁc listening tasks of increas-

ing complexity, thus providing an objective and effec-

tive training method for the development of listening

skills (Quesnel and Woszczyk, 1994).

As the use of computers became widespread, a

growing number of institutions integrated ear-training

computer-assisted instruction (CAI) into their music-

theory programs. A comprehensive and systematic

review dating back to late 90’s, comparing more than

60 ear-training CAI programs, is contained in (Span-

gler, 1999).

Finally, it is worth mentioning those pedagogi-

cal approaches and computer-based applications that

take full beneﬁt from multi-layer music description,

namely from an integrated and synchronized repre-

sentation of score symbols, audio and video tracks,

alternative notation, and so on. Examples include

ﬁrst-sight reading, collaborative music performance,

score following, etc. Some case studies are reported

in (Barat

e and Ludovico, 2012) and (Barat

e et al.,

2014).

4 THE SELECTED EXERCISES

Within the corpus of exercises proposed in (Schafer,

1992), we chose three activities. The basic idea was

to administer them to primary school students both

in a traditional form and using technology-powered

tools (e.g, a personal computer, a sound reproduction

system, etc.) in order to track the differences in per-

formance between the control group and the experi-

mental group.

The criteria we used to select exercises included:

• Heterogeneity in the skills to be developed in chil-

dren;

• The possibility to implement a suitable and easy-

to-use tool to enhance the traditional administra-

tion model;

• The need to overcome a number of logistical

constraints typical of a school environment (a

few hours to conduct the experimentation, limited

spaces, available technological devices, etc.).

Below, we provide a short description of the se-

lected exercises and their goals within our pedagog-

ical experimentation. Regarding the commonalities,

all activities aim to develop listening and attention

skills, and are proposed in a collaborative environ-

ment. Please note that the administration modes will

be different from an exercise to another, as explained

in Section 5.

4.1 Exercise 1

Exercise 1 aims to enhance the awareness of young

listeners about the soundscape around them. Schafer

describes this activity as follows: “WRITE DOWN

ALL THE SOUNDS YOU HEAR. Take a few min-

utes to do this; then, if you are in a group, read all

the lists out loud, noting differences. Everyone will

have a different list, for listening is very personal;

and though some lists may be longer than others, all

answers will be correct. This simple exercise can

be performed anywhere by anyone. It would be a

good idea to try it several times in contrasting envi-

ronments in order to get into the habit of listening.”

This exercise, fundamental to raise attention towards

the soundscape, is actually the ﬁrst one both in our

experimentation and in Schafer’s book.

In our experimentation, children were asked to list

all the sounds they are able to detect around them,

when immersed in a natural soundscape or in an arti-

ﬁcial one.

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474

Figure 1: Indoor and outdoor listening activities for Exer-

cise 1.

As for the traditional administration, children

were taken to 4 different indoor and outdoor school

environments (hallway, amphitheater, courtyard, and

sports ﬁeld) and invited to listen carefully for 10 min-

utes (see Figure 1). Then, they were asked to list on a

paper form all the recognized sound elements, distin-

guishing between sounds perceived as far and close

only to keep children concentrated on their task. Dur-

ing the observation phase, it was noted that sounds

could be clustered into 4 groups: classroom sounds

(teacher and student voices, chalk on the blackboard,

etc.); animal sounds (singing birds, barking dogs,

buzzing ﬂies, etc.); street trafﬁc sounds (cars, buses,

bicycles, etc.); sounds of nature (whistling of the

wind, rustling of the grass, falling rain, etc.).

As for the enhanced mode, children had to ﬁll

in the same card, but they were asked to listen to

4 soundscapes coming from an ampliﬁcation sys-

tem. Scenarios had been previously created by editing

recorded live sounds or elements from sound libraries.

Audio tracks deliberately mixed stimuli that could

hardly coexist in a natural acoustic environment, but

supposedly familiar to students: noises out of school,

animal sounds, house soundscapes, metallic sounds,

water-related noises, farm sounds, and urban noises.

4.2 Exercise 2

Exercise 2 seeks to investigate the concept of synaes-

thesia between sound and color. This subject has been

thoroughly investigated from different points of view

– artistic, psychological, clinical, perceptive, etc. –

and further information can be retrieved in (Vernon,

1930), (Zilczer, 1987), and (Neufeld et al., 2012),

to cite but a few. Concerning the correlation be-

tween color, music, and emotion, it is worth citing

(Palmer et al., 2013), who scientiﬁcally proved the

existence of an instinctive connection, a sort of “emo-

tional palette”, between some music and colors.

The activity proposed to children corresponds to

Exercise 41 from (Schafer, 1992): “Do sounds have

colours? For some people they do. Discuss what

colours some of the sounds in your collection might

be. Why?” Speciﬁcally, children were asked to as-

sociate a number of music themes with colors picked

from a limited palette. In this case, the administra-

tion to the control group was carried out through a pa-

per form to be colored, while the experimental group

used a web interface (see Figure 2). For both groups

the palette included red, blue, yellow, green, orange,

fuchsia, white, and black. Such a simple palette in-

cluded 3 primary, 3 secondary and 2 neutral colors,

balanced in number and mixed in their order, so as

not to inﬂuence children in their choices.

Concerning music, we proposed 8 themes from

Sergei Prokoﬁev’s Peter and the Wolf, a sym-

phonic fairy tale for children where each character

in the story is associated with a particular instru-

ment/ensemble and a musical theme: bird (ﬂute),

duck (oboe), cat (clarinet), grandfather (bassoon),

wolf (French horns), hunters (woodwinds and trum-

pet), gunshots (timpani and bass drum), Peter (string

instruments).

4.3 Exercise 3

Exercise 3 aims to reﬁne the ability to listen to a sound

and mimic it. In (Schafer, 1992) such an activity is

proposed in Exercise 56: “Expression is trained by

imitation. Musicians know this and spend many hours

imitating musical sounds. But any sound can serve as

a model for imitation. Once I brought a set of bam-

boo chimes into a class and asked the class to come

as close as possible to imitating the chimes with their

voices. We listened to the original, then tried to repro-

duce it, listened again, tried again, until we began to

comprehend all the parameters of this devious sound.

A (Technologically Enhanced) Sound Education: Implementation, Experimentation and Analysis of Raymond Murray Schafer’s Exercises

475

Veronica Curioni 858221 es.1

 Sono un maschio

 Sono una femmina

Figure 2: The paper form vs. the Web form for Exercise 2.

You could do the same with other sound-producers:

an alarm clock, a mechanical toy, the sweeping of a

broom, a child’s rattle, etc. The main thing is to keep

at it, listening and imitating, until you come as close

as you can.”

This exercise was proposed in a classroom set-

ting by focusing on animal sounds, supposedly famil-

iar to children but not trivial to be imitated by voice.

Assignments were made by educators according to

rhythmic and melodic criteria, considering the age of

children: the hen for the ﬁrst grade, the owl for the

second, the cat for the third, the sheep for the fourth

and the horse for the ﬁfth. Children reproduced ani-

mal sounds during three sessions: a ﬁrst time imme-

diately after listening to the original sound, the sec-

ond and the third time after some practice and ad-

ditional listening. The exercise was administered in

three ways:

1. Traditional mode – Children carried out the task

cooperatively, in groups of 6 or 7 elements. Lis-

tening occurred via a loudspeaker. In order to

record the voice imitation, each group elected a

representative. There was no possibility to listen

to the recorded performance, so feedback was ex-

clusively based on schoolmates’ comments;

2. Individual enhanced mode – Children performed

the activity independently. Listening was done

via headphones. Self-assessment was possible via

recording playback;

3. Cooperative enhanced mode – Children were ad-

ministered listening and training activities both in-

dividually and cooperatively. In order to record

the ﬁnal sound, each group elected a represen-

tative, who could improve his/her performance

through playback-based training and group ad-

vice. In this case, listening occurred both via

headphones and through loudspeakers.

5 EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL

In this section, we will provide details about the ex-

perimental protocol, focusing on the composition of

the sample and the administration modes. Results will

be presented and discussed in Section 6.

5.1 Sample Composition

Experimental activities involved 233 primary-school

students attending the Istituto Comprensivo “G.

Puecher”, Erba, Italy. The sample was composed by

43 children aged 6 to 7 from ﬁrst grade classes, 51

aged 7 to 8 from the second grade, 43 aged 8 to 9

from the third grade, 53 aged 9 to 10 from the fourth

grade, and 43 aged 10 to 11 from the ﬁfth grade. Each

grade included two classrooms, named A and B. The

number of participants actually varied from a session

to another due to absences.

The sample was quite heterogeneous concerning

home Countries: 56 students out of 233 (about 24%)

were foreigners. In detail: 6 children from Albania,

1 from Bangladesh, 2 from Benin, 1 from Brazil, 4

from Burkina Faso, 4 from China, 1 from Ecuador, 1

from Egypt, 1 from El Salvador, 1 from Philippines, 1

from Ghana, 2 from Guinea, 7 from Morocco, 1 from

Moldavia, 2 from Pakistan, 1 from Peru, 4 from Ro-

mania, 1 from Rwanda, 1 from Russia, 4 from Sene-

gal, 6 from Syria, 1 from Togo, 2 from Tunisia, and 1

from Turkey.

The sample was subdivided into two groups, on

the base of the attended classroom: 119 students

formed the control group (classes 1A to 5A), and 114

the experimental group (classes 1B to 5B).

5.2 Administration Modes

As mentioned before, the sample was given 3 activ-

ities based on (Schafer, 1992). Experiments were

administered in two ways: the control group experi-

enced traditional methods (e.g., natural acoustic envi-

ronment, use of physical media, etc.), while the exper-

imental group was asked to complete the same tasks

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476

Table 1: Soundscapes and participants for Exercise 1.

Soundscape ]5 was administered to both the experimental

and the control group.

Natural soundscapes

Place Number of participants

Backyard 112

Amphitheater 116

Entrance 111

Hallway 115

Artiﬁcial soundscapes

Place Number of participants

Soundscape ]1 102

Soundscape ]2 105

Soundscape ]3 107

Soundscape ]4 102

Soundscape ]5 (joint) 110 + 101

by using technological devices (e.g., computers, ear-

phones, etc.) and computer-supported tools such as

web applications.

Activities were conducted from April 23 to May

25, 2018 during lesson time, and lasted 15 to 60 min-

utes, depending on the type of exercise. Each class-

room took part in about 5 weekly sessions.

6 RESULTS

6.1 Exercise 1

The ﬁrst exercise focused on the ability to perceive

the soundscape and recognize its elements. Details

about soundscapes and the number of participants are

provided in Table 1. During listening activities, chil-

dren were asked to take note of all perceived sounds.

For each landscape, either natural (control group) or

artiﬁcial (experimental group), the number of sounds

identiﬁed by each participant was recorded and com-

pared to the total number of elements in the sound-

scape.

The behavior across consecutive sessions was ob-

served, and the cumulative score of each group was

compared in a ﬁnal joint session. The improvements

achieved by each group were noticeable only in the

ﬁrst sessions. Moreover, the inﬂuence of administra-

tion modes was not relevant: during the ﬁnal joint ses-

sion, attended by both the control and the experimen-

tal group, their scores did not show signiﬁcant differ-

ences (see Figure 3). This outcome seems to suggest

that an effective auditory training can be performed

by means of both traditional methodologies and tech-

nological tools.

Traditional mode Augmented mode

0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0

Figure 3: Results achieved by the experimental and the con-

trol group during the joint session – Soundscape ]5 for Ex-

ercise 1.

Some interesting aspects emerged during the anal-

ysis of results. For instance, Soundscape ]5 contained

the sound of a metal teaspoon beating on a glass.

Even if this noise should be familiar, few children

were able to recognize it; rather, many of them iden-

tiﬁed it as the ringtone associated to a short message.

This is an example of schizophonia, a term coined by

Schafer to describe the splitting of an original sound

and its electroacoustic reproduction. Observing the

differences in listening abilities, children aged 8 to

11 obtained better scores than their younger school-

mates, and this seems to indicate an age-related in-

crease in attentional capacity. With respect to gender,

there was no substantial differences in the results of

the control group, whereas in the experimental group

females showed a greater ability in sound recognition

(in any case, median values are very similar).

Finally, two interesting aspects emerged from the

observation of the traditional administration. The ﬁrst

effect can be described as sound perception driven by

sight: e.g., during a rainy day, many children recog-

nized the sound of raindrops even if doors and win-

dows were closed and that sound was not actually per-

ceivable. The second aspect concerns self-production

of sounds (e.g., coughing, sneezing, etc.) when ad-

ministered sounds had already been recognized: in

this way, students could take note of additional items

and artiﬁcially improve their performance.

6.2 Exercise 2

Concerning this exercise, focusing on the association

between music themes and colors, we have analyzed

two aspects: 1. The distribution of the colors chosen

by participants for each music theme; 2. The correla-

tions between music features and the color selected

by the majority of children. In particular, the fea-

tures were: key, average beats per measure (BPM),

) and interquartile range (B

IQR

)

A (Technologically Enhanced) Sound Education: Implementation, Experimentation and Analysis of Raymond Murray Schafer’s Exercises

477

25%

50%

75%

100%

Peter Bird Duck Cat Wolf Grandfather Gunshots Hunters

21.9%

28.2%

25.1%

17.2%

19.9%

43.6%

35.5%

24.8%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Peter Bird Duck Cat Wolf Grandfather Gunshots Hunters

19.1%

30.5%

22.6%

18.9%

30.6%

25.8%

37.6%

20.4%

Figure 4: Association of colors to music themes for Exer-

cise 2: traditional administration (top) vs. enhanced mode

(bottom). Top percentages are shown in the corresponding

colored area.

of the brightness, as deﬁned in (Presti and Mauro,

2013). Differences in age have not been evaluated,

while the two administration modes have been ana-

lyzed separately. The values of the mentioned fea-

tures for each music theme are the following (TM =

traditional mode, EM = enhanced mode):

• Peter (string quartet) – Key: C; Average BPM: 95;

= 0.87; B

IQR

= 0.57;

• Bird (ﬂute) – Key: C; Average BPM: 144; Regis-

ter: high; B

= 1.25; B

IQR

= 0.7;

• Cat (clarinet) – Key: D; Average BPM: 42; Reg-

ister: low; B

= 0.49; B

IQR

= 0.34;

• Duck (oboe) – Key: E[; Average BPM: 84; Reg-

ister: high; B

= 1.3 B

IQR

= 0.42;

• Grandfather (bassoon) – Key: B[ min.; Average

BPM: 83; Register: low; B

= 0.38; B

IQR

= 0.29;

• Wolf (French horns) – Key: C min.; Average

BPM: 88; Register: low; B

= 0.48; B

IQR

= 0.17;

25%

50%

75%

100%

6 7 8 9 10 11

years

colors

25%

50%

75%

100%

6 7 8 9 10 11

years

colors

Figure 5: The choice of colors associated to the bird’s theme

in Exercise 2, organized by age (horizontal axis). The upper

diagram shows results for the traditional administration, the

lower one those for the enhanced mode.

• Gunshots (timpani) – Key: C; Average BPM: 87;

= 0.33; B

IQR

= 0.18;

• Hunters (woodwinds) – Key: F min.; Average

BPM: 54; Register: low; B

= 0.45; B

IQR

= 0.35;

The associations of colors to music themes in the

two administration modes are reported in Figure 4.

White is more present in enhanced experiences, prob-

ably due to the presence of the color in the palette,

whereas in the traditional mode children had to inten-

tionally leave a space uncolored.

Often the most selected color was the same for the

two administration modes. But it is particularly in-

teresting the case of the bird’s theme, where yellow

stimulated complementary behaviors in the two ad-

ministration modes: in the traditional mode, it is the

preferred choice among the lateral age groups, while

in the enhanced mode it is the top choice for the cen-

tral bands (see Figure 5).

Observing the outcomes of the second analysis,

i.e. music features and colors, results are correlated

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

478

with the data about brightness and music key. For

those themes where B

is low and the key is minor,

children mainly indicated darker colors; conversely,

for themes in major key and with a high value of B

they selected brighter colors. It is worth noting that,

during the ﬁnal discussion, children asked for a wider

palette. This observation underlies the need to express

themselves in a more complex and precise way.

6.3 Exercise 3

This exercise focused on the ability to imitate sounds.

In this case, we adopted a slightly different experi-

mental protocol, introducing 3 administration modes,

as explained in Section 4.3.

Methodologically, for each age group a registra-

tion was chosen as the best instance of each mode to

be compared with the other modes. In the case of col-

laborative modes, the sound was chosen by the class

by vote, whereas in the individual mode it was the

sound automatically recognized as the most similar to

the original (a choice also subjectively validated by

teachers).

In addition, automatic analysis was used to com-

pare administration modes. For each recording, ﬁve

tests were performed taking the original animal sound

as the reference. The analytical process automat-

ically extracted indicators about timbral, rhythmic

and melodic characteristics. Speciﬁcally: timbre

was investigated by calculating the Mahalanobis dis-

tance (De Maesschalck et al., 2000) between the

Mel-frequency cepstral coefﬁcients (MFCCs) of the

two sounds; rhythm was analyzed by observing the

distance extracted through Dynamic Time Warping

uller, 2007) and the cross-correlation between the

amplitude envelopes of the signals; melodic aspects

were evaluated through the correlation between the

two signals’ chromagrams and, in order to exclude the

effects of pitch shifting, through the highest correla-

tion between different circular shifts of the chroma-

grams. For a deﬁnition of the mentioned audio fea-

tures, in particular MFCCs and chromagrams, please

refer to (Al

ıas et al., 2016). Figure 6 shows the di-

agram obtained by computing the mentioned indica-

tors over all the considered recordings, clustered by

administration mode: Group A – traditional mode

(blue), Group B – individual enhanced mode (or-

ange), Group C – cooperative enhanced mode (yel-

low).

Finally, through the use of the decision method

known as Utopia point (Mart

ınez-Iranzo et al., 2009),

we tried to understand which administration mode

obtained the best results, and which participants got

the maximum and minimum distance from the Utopia

Figure 6: Aggregated indicators for Exercise 3. In blue

Group A, in orange Group B, in yellow Group C.

Table 2: Mean and standard deviation of the distances

scored by the 3 groups from the Utopia point in Exercise

Mean Standard deviation

Group A 0.7341 0.3684

Group B 0.8414 0.2702

Group C 0.9164 0.2855

point, i.e. the worst and the best result respectively.

Table 2 shows the mean and the standard deviation of

the distances from the Utopia point registered by the

three groups: Group A – traditional mode, Group B

– individual enhanced mode, Group C – cooperative

enhanced mode.

In the assessment phase, timbre-analysis results

were similar for all the administration modes; con-

versely, in the melodic analysis, and speciﬁcally in

pitch detection, results were very sparse, indepen-

dently from the administration mode.

With respect to the Utopia point, the administra-

tion mode that best scored was the traditional one,

while the other two returned similar results, not so far

from the former. The top-score participant reached

a distance d = 0.128 from the Utopia Point, work-

ing in traditional mode; conversely, the worst result

(d = 1.2385) was obtained by a child who was ad-

ministered the individual enhanced mode.

Once again, the observation highlighted some in-

teresting aspects not directly related to sound percep-

tion. For example, during the vocal performance of

sounds, many children tended to physically mimic the

animal they were interpreting. When asked to explain

this behavior, children revealed that it was intended to

improve the imitation.

A (Technologically Enhanced) Sound Education: Implementation, Experimentation and Analysis of Raymond Murray Schafer’s Exercises

479

7 CONCLUSIONS

The educational activities proposed in our experimen-

tation conﬁrmed that technology is not positive or

negative in absolute terms, at least in the context of

soundscape self-consciousness: for some types of lis-

tening experiences, the adoption of technology can

be more involving and effective with respect to tra-

ditional methods, whereas, in other cases, advantages

are not evident, and technological aids can even cause

distraction.

Even if the activities reported in this work in-

volved more than 230 students, in order to produce

meaningful and reliable results the experimentation

should be extended to other primary-school classes,

include additional exercises extracted from (Schafer,

1992), and propose other strategies to take beneﬁt

from technological means.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors gratefully wish to acknowledge the teach-

ing staff and the students of the Istituto Comprensivo

“G. Puecher” – Scuola primaria via Battisti, Erba,

Italy, for their availability and their enthusiastic par-

ticipation in the experimental activities.

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