International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology
The Music, Mind and Brain group at Goldsmiths, University of London hosted the annual International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus14) from 18-20th September 2014. This conference was organised in association with SEMPRE.The SysMus conferences are annual events, designed and organised by students for students under the supervision of experienced researchers in the field. The conferences aim to allow advanced students in the field of systematic musicology – particularly those studying for PhDs or completing Masters degrees – to meet and discuss their research. Systematic musicology embraces an extremely diverse mix of epistemologies and methodologies from the sciences and humanities aimed at studying the phenomenon of music in its general rather than specific manifestations. The scientific side is primarily empirical and data-oriented; it comprises empirical psychology and sociology, acoustics, physiology, neurosciences, cognitive sciences, and computing and technology. The humanities side of systematic musicology involves disciplines and paradigms such as philosophical aesthetics, theoretical sociology, semiotics, hermeneutics, music criticism, and cultural and gender studies. The conference aims to bring together students from many areas of study- from music, philosophy, and sociology to psychology, computing, and neuroscience- to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion and collaborations.
Brain and Body Percussion: The relationship between motor and cognitive functions
Body Percussion is a motor, rhythmic learning method within music education used to teach rhythmic structures. This activity is also used in common classrooms to improve students’ concentration and attention. Although the intervention is applied to enhance cognitive functions, effects of this method have not been studied neuroscientifically before. This study investigates embodied motor rhythmic exercises’ (e.g. Body Percussions) ability to enhance cognitive functions (planning skills). As the method has been applied successfully in music education for decades, results of this study were hypothesized to be positive. The long-term effects of Body Percussion on planning skills were studied with pre- and post-measures of an executive functions test (computed neuropsychological test Tower of London). The training period lasted 2.5 months and consisted of 10-20 minutes of weekly Body Percussion training sessions (altogether ten sessions). Twenty-four 5th graders (average age: 11 years) from a local elementary school participated in the study. After the Body Percussion training period the experiment group (N=12) performed better compared to the control group (N=12). Keywords: music education, rhythm, brain, executive functions
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Studying Music Perceived Emotions through Facial Expressions
Background. As several studies already have shown, different emotions are associated with music and in some of the studies it is suggested that music and speech share the same acoustical features to induce and/or evoke emotions. Most of the studies rely on self-report and therefore solely subjective data. Other studies also include objective measurements as for example skin-conductance to complement and support subjective data. Especially for cross-cultural studies, these methods can become difficult when it comes to self-report because there are different concepts for emotions and cultural differences in adequacy to show these emotions. In additions, the words used to describe emotions are arbitrary (even when carefully translated) because of cultural and perhaps also individual differences. As there is also high evidence that facial expressions regarding emotions are universal across different cultures, I would like to suggest a new approach to study emotions through the facial expressions of the listener. Method. The idea is, that music communicates emotions to the listener and that these emotions can be seen in the listener's face. With help of facial EMG or a face-recognition software such as the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by Ekman and Friesen (1978), different muscle movements that are underlying certain facial expressions can be detected. There are different combinations of so- called action units for each emotion. This could be a way to decode the emotion perceived while listening to music. Even if there will not be a visible emotional expression, there could be a chance to detect so-called micro-expressions (emotional expressions that only last 1/25 to 1/15 of a second and are usually masked by another facial expression). Goal. This project will in some part contribute to my master's thesis and is still in development. The goal of this project is to find out, if mimic expressions arise together with music perceived emotions and to discuss if some kind of empathy can be seen as one of the underlying mechanisms that let us understand emotions in music. Keywords: emotion, facial expressions, music perception References Eerola, T. & Vuoskoski, J. (2013): A Review of Music and Emotion Studies. Approaches, Emotion Models, and Stimuli. In: Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2/2013), pp. 307-340 University of California Press Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (1978): Facial Action Coding System. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Ekman, P. (1992): An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion,6, 169-200. Gabrielsson, A. (2002: Emotion perceived and emotion felt. Same or different. Musicae Scientiae, 2001-2002, 123-147. Gabrielsson, A., & Lindström, E. (2010): The influence of musical structure on emotional expression. In: P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), Handbook of music and emotion. Theory, research, application. (367-400). New York: Oxford University Press. Ilie, G., & Thompson, W.F. (2006): A comparison of acoustic cues in music and speech for three dimensions of affect. Music Perception, 23, 319-329. Juslin, P. N., & Laukka, P. (2004): Expression, perception, and induction of musical emotions: A review and a questionnaire study of everyday listening. Journal of New Music Research, 33, 217-238. Juslin, P. N., Liljeström, S. Västefjäll, D., Barradas, G., & Silva, A. (2008): An experience sampling study of emotional reactions to music: Listener, music, and situation. Emotion, 8, 668-683. Kohler et al. (2002): Hearing sounds, understanding action: Action representation in mirror neurons. Science, 297, 846-848. Kreutz, G., Ott, U., Teichmann, D., Osawa, P., & Vaitl, D. (2008): Using music to induce emotions: Influences of musical preferance and absorption. Psychology of Music, 36, 101-126. Leman, M. (2008): Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Theory. Massachussets: The MIT Press. Ricci-Bitti, P.O. (1989): The universality in facial expressions of emotion. In: W. Schönpflug (Ed.), Bericht über den 36. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie. (332-343). Göttingen: Hogrefe. Scherer, K. R., Banse, R., & Wallbott, H. G. (2001): Emotion inferences from vocal expression correlate across languages and cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 76-92. Västfjäll, Daniel (2010): Indirect perceptual, cognitive and behavioural measures. In: P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.) Handbook of music and emotion. Theory, research, application. New York: Oxford University Press. Zentner, M., Grandjean, D., & Scherer, K. R. (2008).: Emotions evoked by the sound of music: Differentiation, classification, and measurement. Emotion, 8, 494-521.
Rhythmic entrainment, syncopation and pleasantness
Although several authors have speculated that rhythmic entrainment induces positive affect (e.g. Juslin & Vastfjäll, 2008; Clayton et al. 2004), so far there is no direct experimental evidence to support this claim. Therefore, the experiment hereby reported aimed to test the hypothesis that moving in time with music induces pleasantness and that this effect interacts with the level of syncopation of the music. Six short rhythmic musical stimuli with three levels of syncopation (low, medium, high), were presented to 77 participants, who were divided into two groups: one was asked to move along with the pulse of the music (by tapping with one foot), and the other was asked to listen without moving. The changes in the participants’ affective state were measured by using two techniques: self-report scales of pleasantness and arousal, and an indirect technique consisting of asking participants to evaluate the level of pleasantness expressed by emotionally ambiguous facial expressions –The perceived pleasantness works as an indicator of the observer’s own affective state (Niedenthal et al., 2000)-. It was predicted that: 1) intermediate levels of syncopation would be associated with the most pleasantness, and that 2) these effects would be larger in the ”˜tapping’ condition. The results revealed that even though the data from the indirect technique showed a trend in the predicted direction, there was a great amount of within-subjects variability which made these results unreliable. The data from self-reports supported the first prediction –participants experienced slightly higher levels of positive affect when tapping along to stimuli with a medium level of syncopation-; but not the second prediction –participants in the ”˜tapping’ condition did not experience more pleasantness nor unpleasantness than the participants in the ”˜stationary’ condition. No significant differences were found in any of the measures of arousal. These findings suggest that the effect of musical entrainment on the induction of pleasantness is primarily the result of the expectations aroused by syncopated rhythms, not by the movements made by the listener. References Clayton, M., Sager, R., & Will, U. (2004). In time with the music: The concept of entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology. ESEM CounterPoint, 1, 1–45. Juslin, P. N., & Västfjäll, D. (2008). Emotional responses to music: the need to consider underlying mechanisms. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(5), 559–75; discussion 575–621. doi:10.1017/S0140525X08005293 Niedenthal, P. M., Halberstadt, J. B., & Margolin, J. (2000). Emotional state and the detection of change in facial expression of emotion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30(May 1999), 211–223.
Engagement and burnout among music performance students
The psychological and physical demands of the music profession can take their toll, putting musicians’ health and wellness at risk. Despite its potential impact on the changes in attitudes towards music- making, well-being remains under-researched in the context of tertiary music education. The current paper reports a study of two facets of well-being: engagement with performance and burnout among music performance students at conservatoires. The study aimed to establish and compare the levels of engagement and burnout in music students in the UK and Australia, exploring their potential social-environmental determinants and health and performance-related consequences. In line with the literature on sport and dance, Basic Psychological Need Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), which seeks to explain the role of satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness in well- being, was used as the theoretical framework for studying the possible determinants of engagement and burnout. A cross-sectional design and questionnaire methods were employed in the study. Data were collected from 146 performance students from several conservatoires in the UK and a single conservatoire in Australia. The results revealed that while burnout was not prevalent in the sample, the respondents tended to experience moderate to high levels of engagement. Overall, there were no differences between the students in the UK and Australia in terms of engagement and burnout. Only weak correlations were found between engagement and burnout, and health issues, musculoskeletal pain and practice strategies employed by respondents. The findings of the study suggest that the social context of the conservatoire and the sense of competence may play a major role in the psychological well-being of music performance students, confirming the basic tenets of Basic Psychological Need Theory. The study sheds light on determinants and consequences of well-being in music education setting, thus contributing to the better understanding of healthy careers in music and forming the basis of practical advice for institutions and principal studies tutors on how to enhance music-related well- being in conservatoire students. Keywords: music education, psychological well-being, engagement, burnout, Basic Psychological Need Theory References Deci, E.L., Ryan, R.M. (2000) The ”˜what’ and ”˜why’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry. Vol.11 No.4, 227-268.
Adapting computational music similarity models to geographic user groups
We present first results of experiments using music similarity ratings from human participants for group-specific similarity prediction. Music similarity is a key topic of research in music psychology and ethnomusicology. Computational models of music similarity have many applications such as music recommendation and indexing of music databases. This study evaluates the feasibility of adapting similarity models to location-specific subsets of similarity ratings. To this end we use information on the country where the data was provided. Apart from directly training similarity models to the localised data, we perform a gradual adaptation of a previously trained general similarity model to the location-specific data. This allows us to compare the general and localised similarity models, providing a comparative analysis of the importance of acoustic features (e.g. loudness, timbre, tempo, chroma, key) for modelling similarity judgment across user groups. In future work, such groups could be selected to yield culturally determined models. Our results show that localised models can be trained, but in comparison to general models this task proves more difficult due to the relatively small amount of training data available from each country. We found that the performance for some localised models can be increased using a general model as a basis for training. In one case this allows for the analysis of relevance of individual features for the specific data. The similarity ratings used in our experiments were collected in the online Game With A Purpose "Spot The Odd Song Out". The mostly popular music presented in the game is based on the openly available MagnaTagATune and Million Song datasets, two large music datasets that come with acoustic descriptors for the music. Additionally to the similarity data being collected via triad questions, the modular game architecture allows for the collection of other human annotations, such as timbre and rhythm data. We also describe the extensible game with a discussion of further possibilities of its application.
Functions of sad music in daily life: An explorative study on the influence of exposure, coping strategies and personality
People often deliberately listen to music that they consider sad, particularly during negative life events, when sad music can serve a range of self-regulatory functions (Van den Tol & Edwards, 2013). In general, traits such as coping strategies and self-efficacy determine how people react to difficult situations, yet it is unclear how sad music relates to these factors. However, sad music is also used for other reasons, e.g. to simply produce hedonic or aesthetic pleasure (Garrido & Schubert, 2011). The present study aimed to investigate the everyday functions and uses of sad music for a large number of participants, and the ambivalent emotions that they experience in response (Weth & Kickinger, 2013). In an exploratory online study (n=582), participants were asked when and why they listen to sad music, and how it makes them feel. Individual coping strategies (Brief-COPE) and personality traits (empathy and self-efficacy) were measured. We also considered relationships between frequency of exposure to sad music and the corresponding functions and emotional outcomes, since exposure to music can change attitudes towards it (Szpunar et al., 2004). Results revealed a three-factor-structure regarding motives which were labeled as 1) self-regulatory, 2) cursory, and 3) social motives. A two-factor structure emerged in terms of emotional outcomes and these were labeled as 1) light and 2) complex affect, respectively. The three functions showed specific relationships to individual personality traits and coping strategies, e.g. that people with low self- efficacy and high empathy more frequently use sad music for self-regulation. Furthermore, frequent exposure to sad music seems to enable listeners to more often use sad music for cursory functions and respond with more positive and less negative affect. Keywords: sad music, emotions, coping strategies, personality References Garrido, S., & Schubert, E. (2011). Negative emotion in music: What is the attraction? A qualitative study. Empirical Musicology Review, v6 n4 (Oct. 2011), 214-230. Szpunar, K. K., Schellenberg, E. G., & Pliner, P. (2004). Liking and Memory for Musical Stimuli as a Function of Exposure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(2), 370–381. Van den Tol, A. J. M., & Edwards, J. (2013). Exploring a rationale for choosing to listen to sad music when feeling sad. Psychology of Music, 41(4), 440–465. Weth, K. & Kickinger, M. (2013). Ambivalent Emotions in Music : We Like Sad Music When It Makes Us Happy. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Music & Emotion (ICME3), Jyväskylä, Finland, 11th - 15th June 2013. Geoff Luck & Olivier Brabant (Eds.). University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music.
Measuring listeners' emotionally expressive responses to music
Surface Electromyographic recordings (sEMG) of facial muscles such as the zygomaticus and the corrugator supercilii have been used in several studies on emotional response to music. Though recorded continuously as music is presented to a listener, the relationship between felt emotions and contractions of these facial muscles have principally been considered in aggregate, over minutes of music and across participants, but results have been hard to interpret as these signals of affective response appear to be less consistent than subjective reports of felt emotion. Rather than treat facial sEMG measurements as directly reporting the feelings of subjects (as often promised by the idea of tracking microexpressions), I propose interpreting smiles and frowns as expressive behaviours, thus inviting factors such as social context of listening, social associations with the genre of stimulus, individual differences in emotional expressiveness and listener mood to modulate the relationship between facial muscle contraction and emotional response to the music. Examples demonstrating different conditions for expressive behaviour are taken from a case study of emotional responses collected during repeated presentations of wide variety of musical stimuli from one subject (the solo response project), and responses collected from groups of subjects presented with live and recorded concert music. Interpreting facial sEMG as a measure of expressed emotion has implications for interpreting published studies on physiological responses to music and future work exploring the listening experience. Traditional experimental paradigms may have limited the expressivity of participants by presenting music they are unfamiliar with, implicitly encouraging some acceptable range of expressive response, or presenting music to which people rarely practice expressive behaviour. By making explicit factors effecting expressive behaviour, we can make better use of these tools to investigate the experience of listening to music. Keywords: Emotion, Psychophysiology, Social elements of music, Expression, Listeners
Motivational qualities of music in exercise
Music can enhance athletic performance in different ways, depending on whether it is synchronous (movements are in time with rhythm; Terry et al., 2006), asynchronous (no conscious synchronization between movement and music tempo; Terry et al., 2006), or pre-task (to regulate arousal level prior to performance; Karageorghis et al., 2012). Benefits of music include more positive mood, reduced pain/fatigue, reduced subjective exertion, improved performance (e.g. in treadmill running, cycling, on grip strength, etc.), faster acquisition of motor skills, and increased likelihood of flow states (Karageorghis et al., 2001). Motivational qualities of a piece of music depend on the response to rhythm, pitch/harmony, identification with cultural groups, and non-musical associations (Karageorghis, et al., 1999; Terry et al., 2011). Tempo is the most important determinant of response to music (Karageorghis et al., 1999) and an average of 130 bpm was reported to be most suitable for workout settings (Felstead et al, 2006) and for workouts with low to moderate intensity (Karageorghis et al., 2006). This mixed-methods project focuses on the motivational qualities of music, extending Priest’s findings (2003). Which music enhances motivation during a workout? Is music particularly designed for workouts more likely to motivate than other music? A total of 24 well-known sound samples with a tempo close to 130 bpm will be cut to a length of ten seconds and assigned to eight different musical styles, making them three samples for each style. Four styles will reflect workout- music (taken from Spotify workout playlists), and four will be non-workout music including Jazz, Classical, Pop/Rock, and Electronic music. Regular gym-goers will be asked to listen to each sample in a random order and to answer the question, how much they would like to listen to that music during a workout, using a questionnaire after each sample. Participants are requested to rate each sample on a seven-point-scale and briefly comment on it. In a second run, subjects will be asked about their musical preferences in general and to rate the samples’ musical styles on a seven-point-scale accordingly. Gathered data from both inquiries will be analyzed. Keywords: Motivation, music, exercise, musical styles References Felstead, A., Bishop, D., Fuller, A., Jewson, N., Lee, T. & Unwin, L. (Eds.) (2006). Moving to the Music: Learning Processes, Training and Productive Systems - The Case of Exercise to Music Instruction. In Learning as Work Research Paper (No. 6). Cardiff, UK: Cardiff School of Social Sciences, University of Cardiff. Karageorghis, C. I., Jones, L. & Low, D. (2006). Relationship between exercise heart rate and music tempo preference. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 26, 240-250. Karageorhis, C. I. & Priest, D. L. (2012). Music in the exercise domain: a review and synthesis (Part I). International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 5, 44-66. Karageorghis, C. I. & Terry, P. C. (2001). The magic of music in movement. Sport and Medicine Today, 5, 38- 41. Karageorghis, C. I., Terry, P. C. & Lane, A. M. (1999). Development and validation of an instrument to assess the motivational qualities of music in exercise and sport: The Brunel Music Rating Inventory. Journal of Sports Sciences, 17, 713-724. Priest, D. L. (2003). Chracteristics and effects of motivational music in exercise (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/2914/14/FullTextThesis.pdf Terry, P. C. & Karageorghis, C. I. (2006). Psychophysical effects of music in sport and exercise: An update on theory, research and application. In M. Katsikitis (Ed.), Psychology Bridging the Tasman: Science, Culture and Practice. Proceedings of the 2006 Joint Conference of the Australian Psychological Society and the New Zealand Psychological Society, September 26-30, 2006 (pp. 415- 419). Melbourne, VIC: Australian Psychological Society. Terry, P. C., & Karageorghis, C. I. (2011). Chariots of fire: The role of music in sport and exercise. In T. Morris & P. C. Terry (Eds.), Sport and exercise psychology: The cutting edge. Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology.
Why do people seek and appreciate sadness in music?
This study deals with the supposed paradox of why people engage with sad music if sadness is inherently a negative emotion usually avoided in everyday life. Using an online survey, we obtained comprehensive responses from a large multi-ethnic sample of participants (N = 772). The survey investigates the rewarding aspects of music-evoked sadness, as well as the relative contribution of listener characteristics and situational factors to the appreciation of sad music. The survey also examines the different principles through which sadness is evoked by music, and their interaction with personality traits. Four reward dimensions resulting from listening to sad music were identified: reward of imagination (i.e., pleasure derived from engaging imaginative processes), emotion regulation (i.e., pleasure derived from the achievement of different self-regulatory goals), empathy (i.e, pleasure associated with sharing the sadness portrayed by the music as an expression of another's emotion), and no “real-life” implications (i.e, pleasure that lacks any extra-musical or contextual implications). Moreover, appreciation of sad music increases in a sad mood compared to a positive mood and is greater among individuals with high empathy and low emotional stability. Surprisingly, nostalgia rather than sadness is the emotion listeners most frequently experience in response to sad music. Moreover, memory-related processes appear to be highly important in eliciting sadness. Finally, the trait empathy contributes to the evocation of sadness via contagion, appraisal, and by engaging social functions. The present findings indicate that emotional responses to sad music are multifaceted, are modulated by empathy, and are linked with a multidimensional experience of pleasure. These results were corroborated by a follow-up survey on happy music, which further showed that beneficial emotional effects such as regulation of negative emotion and mood as well as consolation are likely to be unique features of sad music compared to happy music. Such beneficial emotional effects constitute the prime motivations for engaging with sad music and may have important implications for the field of music therapy. Potential implications include the development of music interventions designed to improve health and well-being in healthy subjects as well as in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Keywords: music-evoked sadness, appreciation of sad music, reward, pleasure, empathy
The role of attention in the perception of music structure
Existing models of the perception of musical structure mostly do not account for the fact that listeners’ hearings are known to vary substantially: the same passage can be interpreted differently by different listeners, or by the same listener at different times. Attention””the deliberate or unconscious focus a listener may place on a particular aspect of the music, such as its melody or rhythm””seems to play a role in the perception of structure, but whether it is an important cause of grouping preferences or the product of them is unclear. We study how paying attention to musical features (including harmony, melody, rhythm and timbre) influences grouping decisions. The experiments use composed musical stimuli exhibiting changes in particular features by design; some stimuli exhibit a single change, while others exhibit changes in different features at different times, leading to ambiguous segment boundaries and groupings. We first tested whether our subjects were able to correctly associate changes with musical features, to establish that their understanding of the stimuli was multidimensional and not purely holistic. Second, we tested whether an explicit instruction to focus on a feature increased the salience of boundaries marked by a change in that feature. Finally, we tested whether focusing on a feature would make groupings according to that feature preferable. To do so, we asked subjects to perform a distractor pattern-detection task that directed their attention to a particular feature. They then heard ambiguous stimuli, which had structure AAB and ABB with respect to two different features, and indicated their preferred grouping. The results showed that listeners were skilled at identifying changes, that correctly-directed attention boosted the salience of changes, and that focusing on a feature could indeed cause a listener to prefer one grouping over another. Whereas one’s level of musical training greatly impacted how one responded on the first two experiments, its impact was not significant in the third task, suggesting that attention is a general mechanism in guiding grouping preferences.
Ontological description of vocal production in world's music cultures – a physiological approach
We present our investigative study into vocal production ontology intended for comparative cross- cultural analysis of singing style. Such an ontology should provide a baseline vocabulary to explicitly define and compare vocal production, helping to formalise the discourse on vocal quality and singing style within and across disciplines, including ethnomusicology, voice science, singing education and music informatics. Our study examines the viability of using physiological and functional descriptors for modelling of vocal production. Vocal quality is usually described in subjective, perceptual terms such as bright or dark sound, metallic, heavy, brassy, lyrical or round. These descriptions are not only tradition specific, but more often than not they are highly subjective. While many disciplines have approached vocal production (Johan Sundberg in voice science, Jo Estill in singing education, Alan Lomax in ethnomusicology), these approaches still have limited, discipline specific applications and some of them display methodological weaknesses. Our study is based on interviews with 13 world-class experts in vocal physiology - otolaryngologists, speech language therapists, singing teachers. They performed perceptual and physiological analysis of 19 singing fragments from 11 cultures. Physiological analysis was conducted using our preliminary ontology of vocal production based on state of the art concepts in voice science and singing education. The aim of our study is to verify the consistency of experts' ratings and the inter-rater agreement, a strong agreement indicating a general validity of physiological approach. Our study design combines quantitative and qualitative research methods. We present the results obtained through a detailed statistical analysis of inter-participant agreement, triangulated via qualitative analysis of the interviews. We also examine the relationship between experts' perceptual and physiological ratings. We discuss the implications of our results for further ontological work in the field of vocal production.
The effect of musical training on auditory grouping
Background. Auditory streaming is a process highly relevant to analyzing everyday sound environments, particularly with respect to timbre. The phenomenon of auditory streaming has a history of being studied in terms of Gestalt principles (Bregman, 1990), of pitch (van Noorden, 1975), of tempo (Bregman & Campbell, 1971; van Noorden, 1975), of timbre (Bregman & Pinker, 1978; Marozeau et al., 2013), and of attention (Botte et al., 1997; Carlyon & Cusack, 2001). All of these parameters influence the extent of auditory streaming in various ways. An increase in performance in many types of auditory tasks is seen in musicians, including streaming (Zendel & Alain, 2008), presumably a result of training and brain plasticity. Aims. This experiment seeks to corroborate this observed effect of musical training, and further define the effects of training on specific instrument. Another goal of this experiment is to clearly demonstrate the influence of attention on streaming. Method. In testing both non-musicians and musicians trained on specific instruments in a simple ABA-paradigm where timbre is manipulated (similar timbres presumably making streaming more difficult (Singh & Bregman, 1978; Hartmann & Johnson, 1991; Iverson et al., 1995)), we can find and analyze the fission and temporal coherence boundaries between groups. Participants will be exposed to trials via Max/MSP, and responses will be collected in the same patch. A manipulation of instructions to participants will evaluate the influence of attention on streaming: they will be instructed to hold on to either the galloping rhythm (integration) or the 2:1 rhythm (streaming). Results. This experiment corroborates the previously observed effect of musical training on perception, demonstrated by different threshold profiles between musicians and non-musicians. It also clearly demonstrates an influence of attention on streaming while suggesting further effects of training on specific instruments. The manipulation of attention formed two boundaries, identified as the fission boundary and the temporal coherence boundary. These boundaries were significantly different between musicians and non-musicians and additionally affected by specific timbres.
A causal involvement of the left supramarginal gyrus during the retention of musical pitches
Brain stimulation studies using transcranial direct current stimulation have shown that the processes involved in memorising pitch rely on activity within the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG). Building on this, the present study investigated which of the main phases of pitch memory processing may depend on the left SMG: retention or encoding. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was used to modulate the retention stage of a pitch memory task in Experiment 1 and the encoding phase in Experiment 2. Participants completed a pitch memory recognition task in which they had to decide whether two six tone long sequences were the same or different. Using a blocked design 5Hz rTMS was applied for 3 seconds on a trial-by-trial basis over either the left SMG (targeted site) or the Vertex (control site) during the retention phase (Experiment 1) or during encoding of the first sequence (Experiment 2). A baseline block (without rTMS) was also completed. For Experiment 1, a repeated measures ANOVA with stimulation condition (rTMS over left SMG vs rTMS over Vertex vs no stimulation) as the within-subject factor and reaction times as the dependent variable revealed a main effect of stimulation condition. Contrasts showed that only rTMS over the left SMG during retention led to significantly increased reaction times. In Experiment 2 no modulation effects were found when applying rTMS during encoding. Taken together, these findings highlight a phase-specific involvement of the left SMG for the retention period of pitch memory only, thereby indicating that the left SMG is involved for the perpetual storage of pitch information.
A Comprehensive Approach in Music and Audio Analysis: Similarities in Helmut Lachenmann’s Music Compositions
The recent paradigms related to the History of Modern Western Music may stratify an evolutionary path on the use of noise-like sound on acoustic music compositions. It can be traced primarily from the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, the French- Italian composer Edgard Varèse, the American composer John Cage and particularly with the music compositions of Helmut Lachenmann. The German composer is rightly associated with the concept of ”˜instrumental musique concreÌ€te’, a notion and a set of techniques that regard sound not as an abstract vehicle for musical ideas in the traditional sense of motivic development, but as the by-product of physical work, of the tension and release of human effort. The original approach of the ”˜musique concreÌ€te’, as developed by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, extracts its compositional materials from the noises and sounds of daily life. In the following, the materials were recorded and manipulated by collage. Lachenmann tries to apply this procedure not with prerecorded sounds, but with the instrumental music potentialities. From a chronological point of view, the Lachenmann’s works can expose a natural maturing in aesthetic, philosophical and musical positions. Contemporary Western Music can diverge from repetitious patterns both for formal structure or compositional materials, 'both for formal structure, compositional materials, and acoustic similarities. This can be highlighted by analysis based on low- level acoustic features, which gives objective evidence towards the existence of sound correspondences within a piece. The objective of the research is to stress and to pinpoint the most substantial aspects of the music of Lachenmann for large ensembles from a myriad of sound constructions, spectral features and aesthetical and compositional procedures extracted from his early works for solo instruments. In our analytical process, we calculated statistics (mean, variance and skewness) from low-level, framewise acoustic features estimated throughout recordings. It could be observed that semantically coherent excerpts were related to features that could be organized according to simple rules. This indicates that these features may be used both as objective evidence of the similarities between two excerpts, but also that they may be used to automatically extrapolate the sound perception, enhancing the analyst's capability of finding similar musical excerpts.
Exploring the club experience: Affective and bodily experiences of electronic dance music
Euphoric dance and intense affects are signature attributes of the club experience, and DJs use a range of production techniques with the explicit aim to synchronize the clubbing crowd’s bodily and emotional engagement. This doctoral research investigates the correlations between musical features of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) and pleasurable affective and bodily experiences. But how and to what extent do structural and sonic features of EDM relate to clubbers’ experiences? Particularly the EDM sections ”˜build-up’ and ”˜drop’ are filled with tension-building musical features with the purpose to peak the dance floor, and my claim is that certain features occurring in these sections, such as i) extensive use of sounds and effects with upward movements, ii) compression of rhythmical structures, iii) large changes in frequency spectrum and textural density, and iv) removal and reintroduction of bass and bass drum, can be associated with arousal in emotional responses and bodily movements. This PhD research examines these musical structures and how they are perceived in terms of motor activity, physiological responses and cognitive appraisal. The project includes a two-part empirical study comprising a physiology study and a dance study. In the dance study 16 participants danced to a DJ mix in a club-like atmosphere created in a motion capture lab. The crowd’s bodily movements were recorded and measured using an infrared marker-based motion capture system. A self-report questionnaire completed after dancing gathered information on pleasure, as well as bodily and cognitive appraisal of the music. The results from the dance study indicate correlations between the participants’ degree of movement, the self-reported intensity of their emotional experience and the above-mentioned musical features. The participants reported about the same musical features and moments as especially pleasurable and as causing arousal in their emotional and bodily engagement. This was further supported by the motion capture data, which showed a high level of synchronization at these moments and an increase in the degree of their body movements. Evidence from the qualitative data indicated that this experience was also consciously shared. Keywords: electronic dance music; motor responses; dance; affective states; pleasure
Perceived spaciousness in music presented through headphones, loudspeakers and wave field synthesis
Background. The perception of spaciousness has found increased interest in field of acoustics in the recent years because the importance of its influence on the perception of sounds has been revealed. People would rather listen with headphones than with loudspeakers, e.g. in listening studies (Kallinen and Ravaja, 2007). One possibility to avoid this issue could be to conduct studies with the wave field synthesis acting as a virtual headphone which Laumann, Theile and Fastl (2008) have designed. This work is motivated by the results of a former study in which participants were asked to evaluate spaciousness while listening with loudspeakers. The participants heard music from five different musical genres with 30 excerpts for each genre. The study demonstrated that the investigated genres allow classifications of certain spatial features such as “big”, “wide” and “open” (Stirnat, 2012). In contrast to the former study, it will utilize stereo loudspeakers, headphones and wave field synthesis to conduct another hearing test in which participants will experience all three technical conditions. Also participants will listen to only 30 excerpts of mixed genres and instruments. Questions and Hypotheses. This study will concentrate on answering the following questions: Firstly, how do we perceive spaciousness in music itself with the different technical devices? Secondly, what are the differences in the perceived spaciousness when participants listen with loudspeakers, headphones and wave field synthesis? Thirdly, is it possible to replace headphones with wave field synthesis? The results will lead to conclusions of the pros and cons of the various technical configurations. One hypothesis is that there will occur technology specific attributes for the perceived spaciousness in music. Another hypothesis is that there will be music-specific attributes for the perceived spaciousness. Method. The methodology used for this study will consist of a hearing test including twelve pictures showing spatial attributes that will be rated on a numeric scale as well as dummy head recordings for an objective comparison. Keywords: Acoustics, Music Perception, Psychoacoustics, Spaciousness References Kallin, K. & Ravaja, N. (2007). Comparing speakers versus headphones in listening to news from a computer – individual differences and psychophysiological responses. In: Elsevier, ScienceDirect, Computers in Human Behaviour, 23, 303–317. Laumann, K., Theile, G. & Fastl, H. (2008). A virtual headphone based on wave field synthesis. Proceedings Acoustics 08. Paris, France, 3593–3597. Stirnat, C. (2012). Percepted spaciousness of different musical genres. Unpublished Bachelor's Thesis, Hamburg, 1–28.
Decrypt the groove: Audio features of groove and their importance for auditory-motor interactions
When we listen to music we often experience a state that can be described as ”˜in the groove’. This state is characterized by the wish or even the urge to move our body to the musical pulse (Janata et al., 2012; Madison, 2006). A previous study showed that high-groove music modulates the excitability of the motor system, whereas no effect of low-groove music was found (Stupacher et al., 2013). But which musical qualities contribute to the feeling of groove? To answer this question, we extracted audio features of 80 song clips with similar instrumentation and correlated them with subjective groove ratings. Song clips and groove ratings of 19 participants were taken from Janata et al. (2012). The following features were extracted with Matlab’s MIR toolbox (Lartillot & Toiviainen, 2007): RMS energy, spectral flux, sub-band flux, pulse clarity (”˜MaxAutocor’ and ”˜Attack’), and event density. Additionally we used the Genesis Loudness toolbox to compute measures of loudness using the loudness model of Glasberg and Moore (2002). Results showed that groove ratings correlated positively (all ps < .01) with following audio features: RMS energy (r = .37), RMS variability (r = .57), pulse clarity ”˜attack’ (r = .38), spectral flux (r = .34), sub-band flux of band 1 (0-50 Hz, r = .29), and band 2 (50-100 Hz, r = .29). Additionally, groove ratings correlated positively (all ps < .05) with band 3 (100-200 Hz, r = .23), band 5 (400-800 Hz, r = .23), and band 6 (800-1600 Hz, r = .24). The mean loudness of song clips did not affect groove ratings. Since energy in low frequency bands (Burger et al., 2012; Van Dyck et al., 2013), percussiveness (similar to pulse clarity ”˜attack’), and spectral flux (Burger et al., 2012) have previously been shown to affect motor movements, our results indicate that the experience of groove is a phenomenon predominantly based on auditory-motor interactions (cf. Janata et al., 2012; Stupacher et al., 2013). References Burger, B., Thompson, M. R., Luck, G., Saarikallio, S., & Toiviainen, P. (2012). Music moves us: Beat related musical features influence regularity of music-induced movement. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference in Music Perception and Cognition and the 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences for Music, Thessaloniki, Greece. Glasberg, B. R., & Moore, B. C. J. (2002). A model of loudness applicable to time-varying sounds. Journal Audio Engineering Society, 50, 331–342. Janata, P., Tomic, S. T., & Haberman, J. M. (2012). Sensorimotor coupling in music and the psychology of the groove. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 141, 54–75. Lartillot, O., & Toiviainen, P. (2007). A matlab toolbox for musical feature extraction from audio. In Proc. of the 10th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-07), Bordeaux, France. Madison, G. (2006). Experiencing groove induced by music: Consistency and phenomenology. Music Perception, 24, 201–208. Stupacher, J., Hove, M. J., Novembre, G., Schütz-Bosbach, S., & Keller, P. E. (2013). Musical groove modulates motor cortex excitability: a TMS investigation. Brain and Cognition, 82, 127–136. Van Dyck, E., Moelants, D., Demey, M., Deweppe, A., Coussement, P., & Leman, M. (2013). The impact of the bass drum on human dance movement. Music Perception, 30, 349–359.
Cross-cultural emotional experience in response to music
Are emotions in music cross-culturally experienced? While analyses of the emotional experience in response to music has bloomed in the last two decades, the research community is still not able to establish if this experience transcends cultural boundaries, since our knowledge is based largely on a small number of cross-cultural studies. Since Gregory and Varney’s 1996 study of the cross-cultural perception of emotion in music, speculations about the universality or cultural uniqueness of emotions in music have been equivocal. This paper presents an overview of this small literature. An analysis of empirical cross-cultural studies of music, from 1996-2013 reveals that although psychophysical cues in music seem to be accountable for the cross-cultural experience of basic emotions, other cultural cues also influence this experience. Results also show that generally, communication of emotions is more accurate for culturally familiar versus culturally unfamiliar listeners. Yet while these results suggest of cultural influence, what these cultural cues are is unclear. The literature review reveals that ”˜culture’ is a vague concept in music psychology. This paper concludes by offering suggestions for further cross-disciplinary research, bridging sciences and the humanities to understand the value of culture in cross-cultural experience in response to music. For example, it is recommended that some emotions in music be studied in a way that is sensitive to culturally bound definitions and display rules to better understand why some emotions are recognised with such divergence across cultures.
Fingerpicking/Fingerstyle: A Musicological Uncovering of a Neglected Guitar Technique
Fingerpicking – or the synonymously used term ”˜fingerstyle’ – is a way of playing the guitar that developed in the USA around 1900 and that imitates the piano ragtime. To date, there are hardly any systematic accounts of either the history or the instrumental realization of fingerpicking. This absence of research on the topic is contrasted by a wealth of teaching material on fingerpicking, ranging from arranged classical pieces to popular guitar accompaniment. It is possible that the umbrella term ”˜fingerpicking’ is a selling point when it comes to teaching material; however, the term is usually attributed without serious attention to the historical tradition of fingerpicking. This is one of the reasons for why it is desirable to conduct detailed research on the history and characteristics of this technique, which should lead to increasing the technical and artistic understanding of it among musicians. In addition to a discussion of terminology and definitions, my paper will show when, where, how, and why fingerpicking came into being and where its musical roots are. Portraits of influential fingerpicking musicians provide the historical framework for this talk; furthermore, they serve to show regional differences in the practical uses of the technique. By looking at both theory and practice, I will elaborate on the genres in which fingerpicking is used and where it stands in relation to improvisation. Interviews with renowned national (i.e., Austrian) and international fingerpickers serve to illuminate the contemporary practice of fingerpicking as well as its history and its future from the viewpoint of practitioners. My aim is to show that, fundamentally, fingerpicking is not regular guitar accompaniment as it is understood in popular music; rather, it is a sophisticated and often virtuoso guitar technique that spans many musical genres and styles. This paper strives to raise awareness of fingerpicking as a promising research field and to inspire musicologists to continue research in this field.
Western tonal knowledge in 3- and 4-year-old children: A pilot study
Implicit knowledge of the rules governing music structure in any given culture is acquired through exposure to a particular music system and seems to follow a developmental trajectory from infancy to early adolescence. The course of acquisition of this knowledge in preschool children has been understudied and existing findings are somewhat inconsistent, largely depending on the use of either explicit or implicit tasks. Even though 2.5 to 5-year-old children have been shown to possess knowledge of harmonic rules when tested with implicit measures such as electroencephalography (EEG; Corrigall & Trainor, 2013; Jentschke, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2014) and a harmonic priming paradigm (Marin, 2009) they did not seem to perform above chance level in an explicit task which requested them to make judgments about the “goodness” of melodies (Corrigall & Trainor, 2013). In this study we presented 4-year-old children with simple and engaging explicit tasks. We compared their performance to that of 3-year old children, an age group which has not yet been consistently tested with respect to their understanding of Western tonal structure. Pilot results showed that 4- year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) performed above chance level in one of the tasks, suggesting that their knowledge of Western tonal structure can be expressed through explicit judgments if suitable measures are used. A more sensitive implicit task is also being developed (harmonic priming paradigm; Schellenberg, Bigand, Poulin-Charronnat, Garnier, & Stevens, 2005) to be administered to the same age groups. This investigation sheds light on the developmental acquisition of Western tonal knowledge and discusses methodological considerations in the assessment of preschool children. Keywords: Western music structure, music processing, preschool children References Corrigall, K. a, & Trainor, L. J. (2013). Enculturation to musical pitch structure in young children: evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological methods. Developmental Science, 1–17. doi:10.1111/desc.12100 Jentschke, S., Friederici, A. D., & Koelsch, S. (2014). Neural correlates of music-syntactic processing in two-year old children. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 200–8. doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2014.04.005 Marin, M. M. (2009). Effects of early musical training on musical and linguistic syntactic abilities. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 187–190. doi:10.1111/j.1749- 6632.2009.04777.x Schellenberg, E. G., Bigand, E., Poulin-Charronnat, B., Garnier, C., & Stevens, C. (2005). Children’s implicit knowledge of harmony in Western music. Developmental Science, 8(6), 551–66. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2005.00447.x
The relation of Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis and Syntactic Equivalence Hypothesis: Some theoretical considerations
The author’s considerations are dealing with the comparison of processing music syntax and language syntax plus neural and functional correlates of them. The focus is on the processes in the Broca area, which is said to be involved in the processing of both music syntax and language syntax. There are two points of view about the processing of syntax in both domains. On the one hand, there are neuroimaging studies, which prove an overlap of brain mechanisms while processing music and language syntax. On the other hand, studies in neuropsychology propose a dissociation between music and language syntax because of single case studies in which patients suffer from amusia without aphasia and vice versa. To take both approaches into consideration, Patel developed the Shared Syntactic Integration Hypothesis (SSIRH). This hypothesis proposes that the processing of music syntax and language syntax overlap while the mental representations are independent. However, the SSIRH is being further developed by Stefan Koelsch. He suggests the Syntactic Equivalence Hypothesis, which criticizes Patel’s Hypothesis because it should solely integrate late brain processes like the ERP P600 for proving an overlap of processing music syntax and language syntax. In his hypothesis, Koelsch includes early processes (e.g. studies dealing with the Early Right Anterior Negativity (ERAN) and (Early) Left Anterior Negativity (E)LAN)) in addition to the findings of the SSIRH. The core argument of his hypothesis is that there are cognitive operations (including the Broca area) that are involved in music syntactic, language syntactic, action syntactic and mathematical syntactic processing. But these cognitive operations are not required for the processing of acoustic deviance or language-semantic processing. The relationship between Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis and Syntactic Equivalence Hypothesis is critically evaluated, taking comparative studies between language and music research into account. In addition different aspects are investigated: Whether or not the SSIRH is only a “subset” of the Syntactic Equivalence Hypothesis, whether the Syntactic Equivalence Hypothesis is an expansion to the SSIRH and whether the naming of the SSIRH is still contemporary or needs to evolve.
Stochastic Modeling of Expressiveness: Representing the Temporal Evolution of the Descriptors Using HMM
Different interpreters do not play identically during a music performance, introducing their own expressive features. Although these features are perceptually recurrent for each musician, the deterministic modeling is a difficult task, making it more interesting to model by a stochastic patterns approach. This paper aims to model the temporal evolu- tion of the acoustic features using HMM (Hidden Markov Model) note-by note, intrinsically related to the expressive intent of the artist performing the musical fragments. Descriptors related to changes in dynamics, tempo, attack and release have been implemented and tested. Dynamics was described by the RMS (Root Mean Square) energy changes for each note in comparison with the previous. Tempo was described by the IOI (Inter Onset Interval) deviation nor- malized by the note duration according to the score. Finally, the attack and release were described by the logarithm of their duration time. The methodology is divided into two parts: first the optimal number of states for each HMM is determined by taking the maximum of the curve between number of states and recognition rate. In the second, the recognition achieved by optimal number of hidden states is analyzed together with the structure of the probabilities of transitions between the states matrix. The training and testing data used in recognition tests were executions of the same fragment for clarinet of the fourth movement of Mozart's Quintet. Five musicians performing six times each were recorded. The results indicated better recognition rates using tempo, dynamics and attack time descriptors, reaching 60 hitting percent, with two, six and five hidden states respectively.
Leadership in string quartets: paradox and possibility
A survey of 106 conservatoire students and professional string players is reported in which information was gathered regarding practices and views on leadership in the string quartet. The questions were structured using Likert scales, focussing on respondents’ background, experiences of string quartet playing, their experiences of leadership and their views on what works in their own ensembles. There were a number of open ended questions to capture additional comments. Measures of total playing time and identity suggest that string quartet playing is an important aspect of players’ portfolio of activities. The concept of shared leadership is supported; overall, players strongly agreed with the statement, “in the quartet, leadership is equally shared between members”. Self -assessment of leadership abilities were equal across all instruments. Views also suggest that the nature of leadership varies according to its purpose, which in this study were defined as musical, administrative or team leadership. Factors relating to leadership were considered important for long term success of the quartet. Differences emerged between violinists and non-violinists, particularly in relation to views on sharing musical leadership, and on leadership in rehearsal and performance. Non-violinists agreed more strongly than violinists with the statements, “musical leadership is important for the long term success of the quartet” (t(61)=-1.96, p<0.05) and “sharing musical leadership is important to success” (t(61)=-2.51, p<0.05). Differences also emerged in relation to leadership in rehearsal and performance, particularly the role of the first violin. The results are discussed in the light of previous research, and analysed in the context of a theoretical framework proposed by Smith and Lewis (2011) for categories of organisational tensions relating to paradox theory in organisations. Keywords: String quartet, leadership, shared leadership, paradox References Smith, W. K., & Lewis, M. W. (2011). Toward a theory of paradox: A dynamic equilibrium model of organizing. Academy of Management Review, 36 (2), 381-403.
Background. Many women feel anxious or stressed during pregnancy. Stress, anxiety, and depression faced by women, increase the risk of both behavioural and biological problems for the baby. These can include a lower birth weight, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and potential for depression later in life (O’Connor et al., 2002). This has been suggested to be due to the stress marker cortisol and its interference in brain development. Since medication such as antidepressants can cross the placenta and directly harm the child, these methods should be avoided, and non pharmacological methods should be used (O’Connor et al., 2005). Studies have shown that music is an effective therapy for reducing stress in patients before surgical treatments. Additionally, a study conducted by Ventura and associates (2012) found that stressed pregnant women exposed to music experienced the greatest reduction in cortisol levels alone as compared to the relaxation and the control groups. Aim. The aim of this study was to determine whether listening to lullabies for about 20 minutes a day could reduce prenatal depression and anxiety levels, long term. Based on results from past studies, it was hypothesized that music would have the greatest effect in reducing prenatal anxiety and depression. Method. Women first took online surveys that assessed their mood. Women were then assigned to one of two relaxation groups. One group listened to lullabies for about 20 minutes a day, while the other group relaxed, doing deep breathing exercises for the same amount of time. Surveys were taken once a month. The amount of time spent doing exercises was recorded, and their mood periodically assessed. Results. In this study, the prenatal depression and anxiety levels as represented by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and Spielberger State & Trait scores respectively, significantly reduced after 12 weeks of music listening. No significant reduction was found in the control groups. Possible Applications or Implications. Although much needs to be explored, these findings encourage the exploration of music as an intervention in pregnant women, in order to prevent particular neuropsychological outcomes that may occur in the developing infant due to prenatal stress and anxiety. Keywords: pregnancy, stress, neurodevelopment, music References O’Connor, T.G., Ben-Shlomo, Y., Jeron, J., Golding, J., Adams, D., & Glover, V. (2005). Prenatal Anxiety Predicts Individual Differences in Cortisol in Pre-Adolescent Children. Biol Psychiatry: 58:211- 217. O’Connor, T.G., Heron J., Golding, J., Beveridge, M., & Glover, V. (2002). Maternal Antenatal Anxiety and Children’s Behavioural/Emotional Problems at 4 Years: Report from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 180:502-508. Ventura, T., Gomes, M.C., & Carreira, T. (2012). Cortisol and Anxiety Response to a Relaxing Intervention on Pregnant Women Awaiting Amniocentesis. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 37: 148 – 156.
Exploring positive and negative empathic behavior in beginner violin-group players
Introduction. This paper reports a case study exploring the effects of musical movement games and kinaesthesia on empathic behaviour with young violinists taking group lessons in an Italian state primary school. Aim. The aim is to explore how movement games develop empathic behavior during violin-group session with beginners. Background. The interest in this topic comes from the fact that most learning occurs in social contexts and empathy (Deitch Feshbach, Feshbach, 2011) has an important role in this learning process. Empathy is defined as the skill to share and understand others’ emotions by also involving cognitive ability. In the Husserlian phenomenology and social neuroscience, imitation and embodied simulation are considered fundamental in developing empathy (Gallese, 2009). Moreover, empathy could underlie motivation in carrying out group activities (Stompe, Ritter, Northoff, 2010). Methods. The participants were 24 children all from fourth-year Italian primary state school. Due to the lack of sufficient space and instruments, they were divided into 2 groups. Both groups imitated the violin teacher and learned the same songs through movement by memory and then played them on the violin. The monitored variables were movement and children’s behavior. Qualitative methods were adopted including observation, focus group interviews, questionnaires, audio-visual material, and children’s drawings. All the sessions were video-recorded. In focus group interviews, the phenomenological approach was employed to let children verbalize their impressions after engaging in musical activities through movements. Results. Results showed that all the children imitated and simulated both their teacher and companions’ movements. It was observed that one group was influenced by a child who appeared to be the leader and contributed to developing negative empathic behavior in most of the sessions. The children from this group negatively assessed the violin course, expressing their opinions in the questionnaires and during the verbalization process they had in the 12th session. However, after the last session when all the children performed the songs they had learned on the violin in front of their parents and their companions, most of these children changed their minds, expressing a wish to continue the course. Conclusions. Possible future implication of this study could investigate the correlation between empathy and movement activities in developing motivation when learning musical instruments in a group. Keywords: empathy, kinaesthesia, violin-group players
To Read or not to Read: How pianists practise to perform with music score and from memory
Professional musicians preparing for performance demonstrate sophisticated practice strategies to facilitate accurate, efficient and reliable processing of music. To perform from memory, musicians instinctively identify technical, structural, expressive and interpretive cues during their practice, which in turn will become cues in performance. There is an expectation that pianists will perform from memory and that these performance cues serve as memory prompts. If memory is an integral part of the existing practice and performance framework, how do musicians practise if they are asked to perform with the music? Changing the performance goal may reveal different approaches and strategies to practising and performing and expand our knowledge of expert practice strategies of performing from memory. To date, no studies have considered the differences between practice strategies of expert musicians required to practise and perform the same piece from memory and with music. The aim of this study is to investigate how pianists practise to perform from memory and with music and to compare their practice strategies for each performance goal. Four tertiary piano students practised the same unknown piece for performance over two weeks in 4-6 practice sessions. Two pianists were instructed to perform from memory and two with music. Pianists made an audio recording of their practice sessions and gave verbal commentary to elucidate their practice goals and strategies. Recordings were initially transcribed to count the number and location of pianists’ repetitions, errors, starts and stops and to note any comments. Recording these features and transcribing verbal commentary gives insights into the strategies of pianists preparing to perform from memory and with the music score. Each of these markers was tallied and interpreted to identify each pianist’s technical, expressive, interpretive and performance cues. Pianists who performed from memory gave more detailed verbal commentary than those who performed with music. Recurring reading errors were more common in practice sessions of pianists performing with music. Results will be discussed with reference to the music practice literature. These findings will have implications for performers, pedagogues in understanding how performers approach learning and/or memorizing new repertoire under different performance goals.
Tonality and functional equivalence: A multi-level model for the cognition of triadic progressions in 19th century music
The subject of this paper is the cognition of triadic progressions in 19th century tonal music. Music psychological research concerning the cognition of harmonic progressions mainly relies on diatonic music in which triads are easily relatable to a key. Triadic distance is therefore measured in terms of root relationships to the tonal center, the tonic (Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982). This conception is not directly applicable to chromatic music where musical coherence is not only obtained by common a key. Transformational music theory puts strong emphasis on voice-leading parsimony as a measure of distance. The most efficient transformations between major and minor triads are P (parallel), R (relative) and L (leading-tone exchange), which is also in accordance with empirical findings of diatonic triadic relatedness (Krumhansl, 1998). Notably, P and R generate an octatonic scale containing eight major and minor triads which are claimed to be functionally equivalent. Transformational analyses result in sequential patterns of triadic progressions and an overarching key is not required. Based on an extended notion of function and acknowledging that there are compelling arguments for both hierarchical and sequential representations of the cognition of harmonic progressions a multi-level model is proposed that combines both approaches, adopting features of the generative model by Rohrmeier (2011). The two main components of the model are the concept of functional equivalence and the distinction between the hierarchic-syntactic cognition of functional progressions and the schematic cognition of functional values.
Apprehending works of computer music through a representation of the code
At the end of the 20th century Jean-Claude Risset highlighted a novel aspect of computer music composition: sound production through calculation (Risset 1999). Pursuing this line of thought, I view composition as a process that defines the different calculations needed to produce music. To be effective, these calculations are implemented in one – possibly several - programming languages. Therefore I use the term 'code' in my research to designate all the calculations needed to produce sounds. Since the code permits the creation of the work and its actualization over time - I also consider reconstruction and migration (see Bullock 2005, Dahan 2007) - I suggest that the study of the code can be useful in analysing music. This approach already exists in musical research (e.g. Meneghini 2007) but is not yet widespread. I am interested in examining how useful the code can be in musical analysis, and how a more systematic use of the code can be integrated in such analysis. I present the essential criteria of the code before examining the main difficulties of using it in musical analysis. I then propose a solution to these problems, arguing that a dynamic representation of the code during the work is helpful for the analysis. Next, I describe how I designed - both theoretically and then technically - this kind of representation, ending with a demonstration of its application to an extract of a piece. What I aim to show is that the identification of the most salient elements of the code and the representation of their evolution during the work, constitutes another way of apprehending electroacoustic and computer music works.
Emotion recognition of faces and music in asperger syndrome: A crossmodal priming study
Although autistic individuals are said by the general public to have impairments with emotion perception in social interactions, recent findings do not fully support this claim (Erbas et al., 2013). A study by Charbonneau et al. (2013) has shown that discrimination between two types of affective vocalizations and facial expressions, presented in isolation or in combination, was impaired in autistic individuals. However, controls and autistic individuals benefited from a bimodal presentation of the stimuli. Research on musical emotions has indicated that autistic individuals are not impaired in decoding musical emotions (e.g., Heaton, Hermelin, & Pring, 1999; Quintin et al., 2011). Furthermore, musical emotions have been shown to influence affective face processing in healthy individuals (Logeswaran & Bhattacharya, 2009; Marin et al., in prep). Motivated by the results of Charbonneau et al. (2013), we thus aim to systematically investigate the possible influence of musical emotions on emotion decoding of facial expressions in a crossmodal priming paradigm. Our sample comprises 15 high- functioning autistic individuals and 15 healthy controls matched for age, gender and IQ. Primes are excerpts of four types of musical emotions (happy, neutral, sad and scary). Targets are pictures of facial expressions (happy, neutral, sad and scary) taken from the Radboud Faces Database (Langner et al., 2010). In a two- alternative forced choice task, primes and targets of two types of emotions are paired in six combinations (happy-sad, sad-scary, happy-scary, neutral scary, neutral-sad and neutral- happy), and are either congruent or incongruent in terms of valence and/or arousal. This experimental design enables us to disentangle arousal from valence effects (Marin et al., 2012). The same discrimination task, collecting reaction time and accuracy data, will be performed for all stimuli in isolation in a separate session. We hypothesize that healthy controls will outperform autistic individuals on all tasks except for the musical emotion task. We hope to be able to demonstrate a crossmodal priming effect in healthy controls, but more importantly, also the presence of a reduced priming effect in autistic individuals. Our results may lead to further intervention studies in which listening to music may help to train autistic individuals to discriminate between facial expressions of emotion. References Charbonneau, G., Bertone, A., Lepore, F., Nassim, M., Lassonde, M., Mottron, L. & Collignon, O. (2013). Multilevel alterations in processing of audo-visual emotion expressions in autism spectrum disorders. Neuropsychologia, 51, 1002-1010. Erbas, Y., Ceulemans, E., Boonen, J., Noens, I. & Kuppens, P. (2013). Emotion differentation in autism spectrum disorder. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorder 7, 1221-1227. Heaton, P., Hermelin, B., Pring, L. (1999). Can children with autistic spectrum disorders perceive affect in music? An experimental investigation. Psychological Medicine, 29, 1405-1410. Langner, O., Dotsch, R., Bijlstra, G., Wigboldus, D. H., Hawk, S. T., & van Knippenberg, A. (2010). Presentation and validation of the Radboud Faces Database. Cognition and Emotion, 24(8), 1377-1388. Logeswaran, N., & Bhattacharya, J. (2009). Crossmodal transfer of emotion by music.Neuroscience letters, 455(2), 129-133. Marin, M. M., Gingras, B., & Bhattacharya, J. (2012). Crossmodal transfer of arousal, but not pleasantness, from the musical to the visual domain. Emotion, 12(3), 618. Quintin, E.-M., Bhatara, A., Poissant, H., Fombonne, E. & Levitin, D. J. (2011). Emotion perception in music in high-functioning adolescents with autism apectrum disorders. Journal of Autism Development Disorders, 41, 1240-1255.
The Loudness War & Hypercompression: Quantifying the perception of compression effects
The Loudness Wars have been fought for several decades on various fronts. The term generally indicates the efforts by the music industry to release records with a steadily increasing loudness to the market. Besides radio broadcasting, movies and television the audio recordings in popular music are one of the most contested fronts. First a few historical facts, then terms and conditions for the emerging Loudness Wars are clarified. My research is mainly focused on digitally-produced popular music, and its post-processing (audio mastering). At this stage of production compressors and digital limiters are used to make the final product sound louder. Since the Audio- CD hit the market in 1982 and established digital audio as the main form of mainstream distribution the average RMS- Level of Audio-CDs has steadily increased. In many cases, the tendency towards “hypercompression” has led to a decrease in overall sound quality in the sense of a measurable loss of dynamic range or even audible musical clutter. Quantitative studies concerning the many aesthetic concerns of the usage of dynamic range compression and the implications of the phenomenon of the Loudness War are still quite rare. Hypercompression harms the overall audio quality and lets the music sound squashed, reduces depth, texture and stereo width and lately decreases the emotional impact of music. The empirical study for my Master’s thesis examines two main questions. First, if an increasing amount of compression applied has a negative influence on overall audio quality judgements and second, if increasing amounts of compression really decrease the perceived stereo width of a song. The listening test used a double-blind method (adapted MUSHRA) with self-mastered soundsamples which were rated by a pool of expert listeners in order to collect quantitative data. The aim was to quantize the perception of compression effects on a scientific basis and thereby contribute to de-escalation strategies for the ending of the Loudness Wars. The collected data shows, that increasing amounts of compression applied significantly reduce the overall audio quality judgements. Surprisingly I failed to find any significant evidence for a loss of perceived stereo width, though some tendencies towards an expected decrease, depending on the respective audio content, are shown. Due to the lack of scientific studies on this topic, the attempt to quantize the perception of “hypercompression” can be considered as pioneering, and act as a model for further work in this area.