Junwen Deng, Jinlong Men, Shizhang Qu, Yuexiang Xu
Ideological and political education (IPE) in higher education has long faced the problem of transforming knowledge transmission into value identification. Music can open new educational routes through aesthetic experience, collective participation, and meaning co-creation, but the tension between aesthetic autonomy and educational intention still lacks a mechanism-based explanation grounded in long-term practice. This article draws on a ten-year action research study conducted from 2015 to 2025 in a Chinese higher vocational institution and frames the inquiry as model-building and theory-generating action research. The study integrates anonymous paired questionnaires from 428 students at T1, T2, and T3, voluntary non-clinical SCL-90 self-reported psychological-state data from 96 volunteers, practice archives, dissemination records, and three illustrative cases. Results showed increases from T1 to T2 in students’ self-reported emotional resonance, cognitive understanding, and value identification; baseline-adjusted gain maintenance from T1 to T3 was 81.1%, 73.2%, and 36.8%, respectively. In the SCL-90 sub-sample, anxiety and the global severity index decreased from T1 to T2, providing supplementary context for understanding students’ psychological-state background in the educational setting. Qualitative materials indicated that full-progression, partial-progression, and differentiated trajectories coexisted. On this basis, the study proposes a one-core, two-wing, three-driver, six-domain project architecture, a three-stage interpretive pathway, and a tension-transformation spiral model. The contribution of the study is to move music-integrated IPE from activity integration toward model generation within action research and to conceptualize tension as a dynamic condition for student meaning inquiry and the return of educational intention.