Abstract:

One of the greatest achievements of education in the 20th Century was to link the individual who learns and their context (Giroux & Mur Ubasart,1998; Wertsch, Ramírez Garrido, Zanón, & Cortés, 1988). However, in Music Didactics there are environmental aspects that are not taken sufficiently into consideration.

This work shows an itinerary, analysis and conclusions on the study of the surroundings of musical education as key didactic elements.

Background The individual and their context constitute the main shift in the focus of education in the 20th Century, with some of the most important developments coming by way of meaningful learning (Ausubel, 1976).

Secondly there was the importance of music’s communicative approach, which is based on three components:
- The individual: the person it is addressed to, or who experiences its effects
- The message: the group of signals (González Requena, 1992)
- The meaning: the location of the individual in their musical habitat.

Thirdly and lastly, we highlight the mediating nature of meaningful signals and the social nature of one’s conscience (Vigotsky, 1995). Based on all this we raised the following questions as part of our Music in Higher Education training actions, which look at the professional, elemental and obligatory settings of music from the viewpoint of our teacher’s experience.

These questions when referring to music are: Which music are we talking about?, Where is it located?, What does it mean?, What or who does it represent?, and what effects does it cause? To answer them requires the analysis and interpretation of music on a broader level, which in turn requires:
1) Content analysis,
2) Message analysis and the application of inductive processes based on the Grounded Theory.

The goal of this work is to explore and analyse different musical environments to understand the perceptions as individuals and as a group of master’s degree students. These will be key components of the Music Didactics actions that are carried out in the study of sonic contexts.
Methods. In order to meet the goal, 24 master’s degree students who obtained higher qualifications in music academies studied and debated about different aspects of musical sequences they heard in Mp4 format: the music, the audience, the stage, preparation and dissemination. Content analysis was applied to the transcript of the debate, the results of which were processed statistically and by way of text analysis with computer support.

A mixed methodology was used to show the perception that participants had about the features of music in their area of influence.
Results. A series of charts and graphs were obtained as a result. They show each of the categories and their weighted presence, which reveals their importance on the perception of music in different contexts and how they can be applied to teaching, innovation and educational research as decisive indicators in educational actions carried out in higher education.

Conclusions:
This work has allowed us to explore the profile of a Music post-graduate student and to verify that what most influences them when analysing music is what they knew about it previously.

Keywords:

Music Education, Content Analysis, Context, Exploration, Didactics, Mixed Methods, Audiovisual Media, Learning Environments.