Global Research Trends in Music and Learning: A Bibliometric Analysis of Scopus Publications (1912-2025)

Music education has gained growing attention in the global educational landscape of the digital era and is known to strengthen students' cognitive, social, and emotional skills, yet it is often treated as a supplementary subject with limited policy priority. This study aims to map the annual distribution of publications on music and learning and to identify the most productive authors and the most-cited works. Data were retrieved from Scopus on July 15, 2025, using the search string TITLE-ABS-KEY ("music" AND "learning"); of 16,327 records, 15,015 documents published between 1912 and 2025 were analyzed descriptively with Bibliometrix, and keyword co-occurrence was visualized with VOSviewer. Publications rose sharply after 2000, peaking at approximately 2,700 documents in 2022; the 2025 count is partial. Nine authors (Widmer, Yang, Serra, Calvo-Zaragoza, Ludovico, McPherson, Su, Altenmüller, and Fujinaga) each produced 10-25 documents across music psychology, music computation, and music learning technology, while the most-cited works are by Campbell and Hallam. Keyword analysis revealed four clusters: music education, digital learning, cognition, and computational music. The field is becoming more interdisciplinary and digitally oriented, although the broad search string means the findings cover music and learning rather than music education alone.