The effect of atonal studies on musical hearing, reading and writing skills

Music education, as an important field of education, is included in art education. For this reason , in our country, music education which helps the development of both art and education are not only carried out in formal education in a planned and programmed way in teaching music programs of the faculties of education, conservatories, faculties of fine arts with the aim of educating teachers and artists but it is also maintained for the sake of general music culture and music education in primary and secondary education levels, which are the basic steps of education and training. Hearing education forms the basis of music education while it is divided into many areas within itself. It has been identified as determining, explaining and comparing melody, form, measure, timbre and modes in a composition as well as it can be defined differently by many theoreticians and music scientists. Education and training, which are carried out according to the curriculum of hearing education, are based on the tonal system in many countries. In this study, the atonal system was applied along with the tonal axis and the students' progress was monitored. An Experimental Design with Pre-test and Post-Test Control Group, which is one of the quantitative research approaches, was used in the research. In addition, the perceptions of the students performing atonal studies about the learning process were determined by semi-structured interview forms. That's why, "Content Analysis", one of the qualitative research techniques, was used for the interview form. The study group of the research consisted of the third year students of Department of Music Teaching, Fine Arts Education Program, Faculty of Education at İnönü University in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year. Non-parametric methods were used for the analysis since the data obtained via "MIOYBDF" pre-test and post-test applied in the study process and the pretest and post-test scores of the students in the experimental and control groups were small (<30), and the Shapiro Wilk Normality Test results were significant (p <.05). Accordingly, Mann Whitney U Test was used in the comparison of pre-test and post-test scores between groups. On the other hand, the in-group comparisons of the pre-test and post-test scores were executed using Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test. The data obtained were analyzed with SPSS package program and tabulated. According to the data obtained from the study, the experimental group students who received atonal hearing training had a significant difference in all criteria except the single sound hearing criterion. When compared with the control group who received tonal hearing training, it was determined with score averages that the experimental group was more successful in the two sound hearing, four sound hearing, two sound playing and dictation hearing criteria. In the study, after analyzing the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test data applied with SPSS 21 package program, it was found that there was a significant difference in favor of experimental group according to effect size value. Keywords: Music education, atonal music, tonal music, hearing education