GCSE Music Listening Tests (Suitable for Edexcel, AQA, OCR and Eduqas)

This 124 page resource provides you with a broad selection of exam style listening tests, with the aim of helping your students to prepare as best as possible for the listening paper at the end of the course.

Books of listening questions for GCSE Music are not new, and you may have access to one or more of these that are written specifically for your course already. The aim of this book is slightly different in that the questions are grouped by element of music. Like in a GCSE paper each question in this book has multiple parts; however, each part of the question in this book links to one, rather than multiple, elements of music. This is useful when you’re still teaching content as you can get your students to practicing listening and recognising specific compositional elements, without having to use up, or edit, your bank of ‘real’ exam questions.

The questions in this book are grouped into five units, one for each element of music:

• Unit 1: Instrumentation and Sonority
• Unit 2: Rhythm and Metre
• Unit 3: Melody
• Unit 4: Texture and Dynamics
• Unit 5: Harmony and Tonality

Each unit concludes with a summary question covering a range of the topics covered in the unit. At the end of the book you’ll find a set of 6 exam style questions. These differ in that they cover all elements of music, and have one extract for each question, rather than several. This format is more similar to what you’ll find in the exam, and provides a useful bridging point into attempting questions specific to your course.

This book includes 45 total questions, complete with a mark scheme and mark record sheet that students can used to track their progress.

A sample double page spread is available to view in the files section.

Audio files
All of the audio tracks you’ll need to answer the questions in this book are included with the digital download of the resource. The files are contained in two compressed zip files, which you’ll just need to extract onto your computer.

Please note that, as a result of only certain genres being released under the Creative Commons and Public Domain licenses, the majority of the audio tracks are drawn from classical and jazz repertoire. Some film music style tracks have also been used, although these are stock audio files, and in many cases will never have been used in film. For the purposes of practice listening, however, this should not affect the value of this book.

This book provides excellent unfamiliar listening practice for your course and helps your students develop exam technique without you needing to edit actual past paper questions to remove parts because you haven’t yet taught the whole course. It is not, however, a substitute for actual practice questions tailored specifically for your exam board. Further, no questions are specifically written for set works or study pieces.