4. Discussion
This study investigated the impact of rich intercultural music engagement (RIME) on cultural understanding and empathy through a two-part, four-hour intervention program comprising non-Western music training. The White Australian participants exhibited significant improvement in five key aspects of intercultural understanding after the intervention. First, ethnocultural empathy towards people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds was significantly increased following the RIME intervention. This increase was reflected by improvements in empathic awareness, as well as improvements in empathic perspective taking, empathic feelings, and empathic expression. Such benefits contrast with results of previous investigations involving non-musical interventions (e.g., [A follow-up analysis revealed that males exhibited a statistically greater increase in empathy and its subdomains than females. This finding is intriguing given that previous research on cultural empathy has revealed no such gender differences or greater empathy shown by females than by males [Second, tolerance towards people from different cultural backgrounds was significantly increased following the RIME intervention. Although the baseline across the groups was relatively high before RIME and the sense of security was not different between learning groups, the significant increase after RIME suggests the intervention was effective in promoting the acceptance and interaction with those of other cultural backgrounds (see also, [Third, social connectedness towards Chinese and Middle Eastern people significantly improved within each respective learning group after the RIME intervention. For example, participants who learned the Chinese Why should music engagement elicit feelings of social connection? One reason is that feelings of social connection may result from the sheer enjoyment of culture-specific musicking. Indeed, in the open-ended responses, participants frequently cited enjoyment as a key experiential outcome from the RIME intervention. A second explanation is that exposure to and experience with active movement involved in learning and playing the Fourth, a more favourable attitude towards ethnocultural groups was instilled, but this result was specific to particular cultural learning groups. Participants in the Middle Eastern Fifth, the RIME intervention reduced White Australian participants’ implicit bias against ethnocultural groups, as measured by IAT It is striking that a two-part, four-hour program focusing on RIME was an effective strategy of decreasing implicit ethnocultural bias against Chinese people, but not Middle Eastern people. This pattern of results suggests that the effectiveness of the RIME intervention depends on the nature of the cultural bias (i.e., explicit or implicit) [Another explanation might be the impact of cultural distance on intergroup relationships. In particular, Australia and China may be more culturally similar than Australia and the Middle East, in part because of the physical proximity of Australia and China, but also because there is a larger contingent of Chinese immigrants than Middle Eastern immigrants within Australia. Furthermore, the divergence also highlights that attitudes (especially racial biases) are often multilayered and people only have the ability to report the most recent top layer of (explicit) attitudes, seemingly unaware that they suppress the older layers of (implicit) attitudes [Lastly, qualitative data from the open-ended questions provided additional evidence in support of the hypotheses. For example, there was agreement across many participants that the study Overall, the findings of the present study provide the first empirical evidence that RIME is an effective strategy for enhancing ethnocultural understanding, social connectedness, and attitudes. The findings underscore the benefits of music learning in multicultural societies and suggest that embodied engagement with cultural traditions may be a crucial element in unlocking such benefits. This study also demonstrated that implicit biases are often persistent and may require greater durations of RIME for changes to be detected. Negative implicit biases are deeply rooted, which may explain why bias against Middle Eastern people was persistent despite our RIME intervention. Further longitudinal studies are needed where a RIME intervention is implemented over many months with multiple measures over time. This will shed light on whether RIME can reliably reduce implicit biases and the time-course of such effects. Furthermore, investigating the effects of learning in groups could provide further evidence for the efficacy of RIME intervention. Participants in the current study were highly educated Australian residents of predominantly Anglo origin living in Sydney. Future research could investigate the effects of RIME for other populations, such as people living in non-urban regions, or people of non-dominant cultural origins. It would also be interesting to compare the impact of RIME for groups of individuals with opposing political affiliations, who may have different baseline understandings or prejudices concerning other cultures. Future studies should also compare the experience of taking part in the study for different age groups. Such a comparison might provide insight into the efficacy of RIME for younger participants who may be constructing and developing their cultural identities and attitudes versus participants for whom such identities and attitudes are well established.