ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate research trends on piano duos in Korea and to examine their implications for music education. A total of 124 dissertations and journal articles published between 1977 and 2025 were analyzed using text-mining methods to identify temporal, institutional, and thematic patterns. Morphological analysis was applied to extract key terms, while term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling were employed to derive major research tendencies. The findings indicate that research on piano duos has steadily increased since the 2000s, with particularly active development in the past decade. Periodic analysis revealed a transition from early composer- and work-centered studies to pedagogical and teaching-learning perspectives, and more recently to contemporary musical languages and experimental themes. Institutional analysis showed that several universities and journals functioned as research hubs, while thematic analysis confirmed diverse areas, including education, performance, repertoire analysis, and cultural interpretation. This study synthesizes five decades of accumulated scholarship, diagnoses the current state of Korean piano duo research, and underscores its educational value as a collaborative performance activity, thereby providing foundational resources for future academic inquiry and applications in music education.

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