Functions of listening to music among choir and klapa singers

Abstract

Music plays an important role in people’s lives and has various functions, such as personal, social and cultural functions. This paper investigates the functions of listening to music among choir and klapa singers and examines whether gender, singing in a choir or a klapa, completing secondary education and attending additional music lessons are significant predictors of the aforementioned functions. The study was conducted via an online questionnaire on a sample of 130 participants, who were singing in various choirs and klapa groups from Croatia. The research employed a questionnaire to collect sociodemographic data from the participants, and The Adaptive Functions of Music Listening Scale (Groarke and Hogan, 2018), which contains 46 items, was also used. The results confirm that, compared with men, women listen to music more to satisfy cognitive functions, whereas in the case of affective functions, no differences were observed between men and women. Singing in a choir or a klapa and additional music lessons did not prove to be significant predictors of music listening functions. Compared with participants from vocational schools, those who attended grammar schools listen to music more to satisfy cognitive functions, which is explained by the influence of music lessons during secondary education. The results obtained have numerous implications for the psychology of music and music pedagogy. The paper presents implications of the obtained results for the field of music pedagogy.