Musicland: an Edutainment to Train Listening Abilities

In the vast editorial world of off-line and on-line multimedia, the video game has taken on a particular importance nowadays. It has become a part of contemporary culture and an object of study by psychologists, sociologists, economists and experts in communication science, due to its obvious influence in many different sectors. From this standpoint the video game belongs to the field of edutainment, a form of amusement that aims to instruct and entertain at the same time. In fact, the term edutainment combines the words educational and entertainment. This is the background to our idea to design and develop a game software named MusicLand, that could allow groups of users who are often passive, unaware listeners despite being surrounded by sound, to acquire critical listening skills. MusicLand has been applied in an experimental context to verify its usability and efficacy as a learning tool; the results are reported in the present work.