A Room Full of Noise: A Children's Book that Encourages Young Musicians to Persevere

Abstract

Music is a difficult skill to learn. It can sometimes be frustrating, and it feels impossible to progress, especially as a beginner. This creative project, a children’s book, aims to address the issue by encouraging young musicians. The goal is to inspire them with much-needed grit and musical self-efficacy. Studies have shown that both attributes are important not only to music but to many aspects of life. Jennifer Clark defines self-efficacy as “not only someone’s belief in her own capabilities within a field of study, but the awareness of determined effort and planned persistence involved in succeeding at a particular task, skill, or subject” (Clark 4). In order to have high self-efficacy, someone must understand the work and failures that will be involved with a task on top of believing in themselves. To improve, one must understand that they will often fail, especially early on in their studies. This is not a popular topic, but it is an important one. In Clark’s study on higher self-efficacy in music students, she found that, while all four participants had high self-efficacy, the student with the lowest self-efficacy score had the least consistent practice schedule and ended up having the lowest chair out of the students in the study (Clark 12). While self-efficacy is a great predictor of success in music, there are many attributes that help build higher self-efficacy. In G. Harpaz and T. Vaizman’s study on music self-efficacy, they write, “the results indicated that self-esteem, grit, … were positive indicators of MSE (music self-efficacy)” (Harpaz 1333). Self-esteem and grit are qualities that will positively influence greater self-efficacy.