This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Music 8271. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Half the listening paper is missing
Start with the gap, because it determines whether this page is any use to you.
AQA's listening paper covers four areas of study and every candidate is examined on all four. Six of these eleven activities cover two of them.
AoS1, the Western classical tradition 1650 to 1910, has three: melody, harmony and tonality; structure, sonority and texture; and tempo, rhythm and dynamics. AoS2, popular music, has three more on the same elements applied to that repertoire.
AoS3, traditional music, and AoS4, the Western classical tradition since 1910, have nothing.
If your class is weakest on world music or on twentieth-century classical, this page cannot help, and pretending otherwise would waste a revision lesson.
What the AoS1 and AoS2 activities actually do
They build listening vocabulary, which is the thing that makes a listening paper answerable.
A student who cannot hear the difference between homophonic and polyphonic texture, or who has no word for what a plagal cadence does, is not short of musicality. They are short of labels, and a listening question wants the label.
The three-plus-three structure is deliberate: the same elements, melody and harmony, structure and sonority, tempo and rhythm, met twice in two repertoires. The second encounter is where the vocabulary stops being about one style and starts being general.
The marks that get given away
Five activities are about requirements rather than music, and in this subject that is not an odd allocation.
The four-element requirement. AQA's composition work asks a candidate to work with a stated number of musical elements. Students meet three and think they have met four, or cannot say which four they meant. One activity is on identifying and counting them so the claim survives moderation.
The programme note. It is submitted, it is assessed, and it is almost always written in the last hour after months of work on the music. One activity covers what it has to contain and what a good one sounds like.
Performance delivery routes and submission requirements cover how a performance can be given and what has to arrive with it, which is administrative and expensive to get wrong.
Responding to a set brief covers the composition task that is not free composition, where the brief constrains the answer and students treat it as a suggestion.
None of this is glamorous. All of it protects marks that have already been earned musically, which is the best return available in a subject where the making takes months.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
Departments running Music alongside Drama will find the same administrative theme at AQA GCSE Drama, where the devising log does a similar job.
What this page does not do
Nothing for AoS3 or AoS4, which is half the listening paper.
No aural training. These build the vocabulary for describing what is heard; hearing it is practised with the recordings your department uses.
Nothing for the performances or the compositions themselves, beyond the rules they have to satisfy.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.