From Heritage Knowledge to Audible Choice: Designing a Culture-to-Sound PIC Pedagogy for Anhui Folk-Song Learning in Chinese Higher Education

Formal inclusion of traditional repertoire does not necessarily change what students are taught to notice, explain, or decide when they perform it. This study therefore examined a narrower educational problem: how can cultural knowledge become an audible and defensible performance choice in university vocal instruction? A Design-Based Research-informed pilot was conducted in one undergraduate university in Anhui Province with three vocal lecturers and nine students. Evidence included eight curriculum documents, lecturer interviews, classroom observation and process records, baseline and post-implementation interpretation statements, performance assessments, student reflections, and multidisciplinary expert review. The intervention was iteratively organized as PIC: diagnostic Presentation, scaffolded Interaction, and culturally bounded Creation. Before implementation, Anhui folk songs were present mainly as repertoire; dialect resources, native-version comparison, regional style criteria, and an explicit pathway from cultural understanding to singing decisions were weak. Across the pilot, all nine students moved from general descriptions of region and emotion toward more specific reasoning about dialect, social function, melodic-rhythmic behavior, timbre, ornamentation, character, and performance context. The most consequential change was not a large alteration in basic vocal control, but a change in how students justified and individualized artistic decisions. On this basis, the article proposes culture-to-sound pedagogical translation as the central mechanism of the PIC model: cultural evidence is converted into audible choices through comparison, embodied experimentation, explanation, re-performance, reflection, and progressive withdrawal of teacher scaffolding. The model reframes living-heritage education from repertoire exposure toward accountable interpretive agency. Because the study is a small single-site pilot, the findings support theoretical and design propositions rather than population-level causal claims