Music Studies: should I choose it?

What will I learn?

How will I be assessed?

Progression and companion subjects

No complete companion or exclusion review is attached to this profile. Check the official course-entry conditions, language eligibility and your school’s sequence before enrolling. Links between resource hubs show related learning; they do not establish a compulsory prerequisite.

Will I find it hard?

Difficulty depends on your experience, interests, teaching and assessment. These are our reflection prompts, not an official difficulty rating.

• Do you enjoy practising, making or performing and responding to feedback?
• Think about sustained work on a creative project and documenting how your ideas develop.

Does it scale up or down?

Use SATAC subject evidence. An aggregate-to-ATAR table is not a subject scaling table.

Scaling is not a measure of difficulty or a guaranteed bonus. Prioritise content you can engage with and required subjects for courses you are considering.

Try a little of the subject

Rhythm, melody and time-signature recognition: hearing the beat grouping

1. What the recognition items look like and how to spend three hearings The paper opens with a run of short selected-response items. In 2025 Question 1 had nine sub-questions worth 1 mark each: two rhythms (one in simple time with a crotchet beat at crotchet = 100, one in compound time with a dotted-crotchet beat at dotted crotchet = 64), two melodies, a triad quality, two time signatures and two chord progressions under a given melody. In 2023 the same question had five items worth 2 marks each. Each example is played three times with a 5-second pause after each playing, and a bar of metronome clicks sets the tempo before the rhythm and melody items. Treat the three hearings as three different jobs rather than three identical attempts: Hearing 1 (eliminate): before the music starts, scan all four printed options and mark where they differ. Listen only for those spots and cross out anything that obviously does not match, such as an option that starts with a long note when you hear a quick pickup. Hearing 2 (decide): focus on the one or two places where the surviving options still differ. Commit to an answer in the pause. Hearing 3 (check): follow your chosen option from start to finish. If any beat feels wrong, the next most likely option is usually the one that differs from yours at that beat. The 2024 Subject Assessment Advice noted that most students could either pick the correct option or eliminate the incorrect ones, which is exactly the skill this routine trains. The 2025 advice singled out the third and ninth items as harder because they applied aural skills in more advanced contexts than the items before them, so expect difficulty to rise within each pair (for example, the second melody item is likely to be harder than the first). In this hub the excerpts are or

Original practice question: Original constructed practice material: the hub cannot play audio, so the excerpt is described in words and written in text notation (pitch letter + octave, middle C = C4; | = bar line; ~ = tie). An excerpt in 4/4 is described as follows. Bar 1: beat 1 is one note lasting the whole beat; beat 2 is three equal notes that together fill the beat; a note starts on beat 3 and lasts one and a half beats; a short note on the second half of beat 4 is held over the bar line. Bar 2: the held note ends at the end of beat 1; beat 2 has two very short notes followed by a note half a beat long; a final note fills beats 3 and 4. Write the rhythm of both bars, using correct beaming and a tie where needed. State the number of beats in each bar to prove your answer.

This is ATARMAxxing’s original sample learning material. It is not an official assessment task or a prediction of your school’s workload.

Explore the resources

Open the Music Studies subject hub and free preview (opens in a new tab)

Core subject information and planning are free. Full study resources are optional.