Analysis of the Usefulness of Critique Documents on Musical Performance: Toward a Better Instructional Document Format

Today, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for remote and asynchronous lessons for musical performance is rapidly increasing. In these lessons, teachers listen to recordings of musical performances and then return textual critique documents to the performers. However, the common document formats that exist in other fields are not widely known in the field of performance instruction. To address this issue, we launched a project in 2020 to collect and publish a dataset of critique documents. This study describes a statistical analysis of the dataset to investigate which types of elements are useful for performers. The multilevel modeling results revealed that the content of the critiques differed more depending on the teacher than on the musical piece or the student. Particularly, the number of sentences about giving practice advice is a key factor for useful critique documents. These findings would lead to improved forms of critique documents and, eventually, to the development of educational programs for teachers.