Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Department

Geer College of the Arts

Publication Date

2026

Additional Department

Bailey School of Music

Abstract

Aural skills teaching depends heavily on repertoire selection, yet many large print and heritage song collections remain difficult to search in pedagogically meaningful ways. Teachers may need melodies with limited pitch collections for early solfège, modal examples for comparative listening, or repertory with controlled chromatic complexity, but such features are rarely indexed in printed sources. This paper proposes a computer-supported response to that problem: a searchable, rights-aware digital companion built around tonic-centered successive interval arrays (SIAs). SIAs provide an interpretable representation of pitch space by encoding the cyclic step pattern among the pitch classes present in a melody after tonic normalization. To move beyond a purely conceptual proposal, the paper draws on an already annotated Nova Scotian print corpus of 1,948 songs from 27 publications (Fielding, 2014). Across that corpus, seven-note collections are most common (884; 45.4%), followed by six-note collections (603; 31.0%), with smaller and larger collections occurring less frequently. Query demonstrations show that the metadata can retrieve limited-pitch songs, modal repertory, and melodies with chromatic inflection in ways directly relevant to classroom planning. The paper argues that searchable SIA-based metadata can support curriculum design, culturally grounded repertoire discovery, and computational thinking in music education while keeping printed sources central.

Journal

Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Journal ISSN

2184-5026

Volume

1

First Page

597

Last Page

602

Comments

Providing page proof of chapter. Proceedings will be Open Access via: https://csedu.scitevents.org/BooksPublishedScitepress.aspx

Download

Share

COinS