Music and skills transfer: a descriptive bibliographic review for the 21st century

Abstract

The skills required to appreciate music or play musical instruments are diverse. Some of them are simple, and others require development over time given their complexity, which generally responds to the perseverance of the study of music itself. From the point of view of the discipline, the value of music for humanity has not taken any doubt in any era. However from other disciplines, the scope of music outside itself generates various types of questions. T here is meta-analytical evidence that tends to show that the effects of music may be over-estimated in their transfer of skills (Sala & Gobet 2017), but it becomes contradictory when we thoroughly review what literature offers in recent years. Considering that problem, this article describes how research has been distributed inside and outside the music discipline during the 21st century. A detailed literature search shows that the number of articles that investigate for the transfer of near and far skills has been increasing in the last 20 years, with far skills being the ones that show the greatest growth and leaving aside some topics that would be interesting to investigate in future research.