Preschool Children’s Perception of Timbre by Selected Orchestral Instruments

An Empirical Study

Abstract

Differentiating instruments by their timbre is one of the goals in the early stages of musical educa-tion and constitutes the prerequisite for the conscious listening to musical works. Studies showed that preschool children can identify instruments used in a solo performance with greater accuracy by using the skill matching than by using the skill identification. The present study sought to establish whether these results could be reproduced if the tasks were modified. The results for 120 (6-year-old) preschool children confirmed that the recognition of melody instruments was more easily achieved by using matching although it has a higher risk of producing chance solutions. However, the length of listening before a decision was reached did not differ between matching and identification. Regarding the identification of the instrument family, audio samples with soloistic instruments have a higher rate of correct identification than samples of ensembles.