어린이들의 음악 경험에 대한 실험적 연구

An Exploratory Study of Children’s Musical Experiences: Visual Representations of Emotional Responses to Music

The present study was conducted to provide descriptive information for the use of drawings in facilitating children’s subjective emotional responses to music and music’s personal meanings. In studying emotional response to music, researchers must take account of the specific interaction between listeners’ recognition of emotional content in music and listeners’ subjective emotional experience in music. This study is designed to explore children’s subjective emotional responses to music through their visual representations. The investigation is based on the assumption that images, colors, and thematic content children create in drawings have the power to express feelings and ideas as well as record events that convey to others their own ideas, beliefs, and experiences. Children’s drawings showed their ability to associate aurally perceived music with extramusical concepts of visual representations. In addition, their emotional experiences, the level of focused attention, and amount of musical knowledge were presented in the drawings. The findings of similar and collective representations suggest children can understand emotional content in music stimuli and these results support previous research. The findings of different and personal representations of images, colors, and thematic content show that each child’s subjective emotional experiences in music are connected to his/her association, imagination, and life experiences.