Innovating Music Production Education

In the ever-evolving field of music production education, song analysis remains one of the principal methods for teaching and assessing listening skills. However, traditional approaches can lack the dynamic elements and interactivity necessary for a comprehensive understanding of a song’s layers. Aimed at music production educators and students, the primary objective of this chapter is to present an innovative Critical Listening Tool for Song Analysis (CLTSA). Developed in Google Sheets, the CLTSA incorporates and expands upon established frameworks for music production analysis. The CLTSA facilitates in-depth analysis by promoting attention regulation, providing a nuanced understanding of a song’s dynamic, tonal, and spatial attributes, and allowing users to make inferences through features like graph stacking and visualisation of azimuth and depth. The chapter first outlines the importance of song analysis in music production education and the need for more interactive and dynamic tools in critical listening education. A brief review of the literature on song analysis specific to audio engineering (i.e. sonic analysis) also discusses how the current frameworks form the foundation of the CLTSA. Thereafter, the tool itself is described, followed by a short case study which presents the implementation of the CLTSA in an educational context, accompanied by user feedback to highlight its efficacy and areas for improvement.