This presentation shows a critical listening activity designed for higher music education, implemented within an Aural Skills course. The activity aims to develop students' analytical listening, interpretative awareness, and metacognitive reflection by engaging them in the comparative analysis of recorded performances. Students select a short musical fragment and examine four different recordings of the same passage, combining score analysis, focused listening, and instrumental experimentation.

The pedagogical approach emphasizes music as a performative practice rather than a fixed textual object. By identifying and evaluating differences in rhythm, articulation, dynamics, timbre, and phrasing, students articulate substantiated judgments about how musical elements interact with stylistic, historical, and technical contexts. A key component of the activity is the integration of listening and performance, as students reproduce selected fragments on their own instruments to test interpretative hypotheses and reflect on technical constraints.

The activity is grounded in experiential learning, reflective practice, and constructivist theories of music education. It aligns with learning outcome–based education frameworks commonly used in Norwegian higher education and is explicitly mapped onto the higher cognitive levels of Bloom's taxonomy. The article argues that structured comparative listening can foster deeper learning, interpretative autonomy, and transferable analytical skills essential for professional musicians.