2005 / 2006 Special Issue. Interdisciplinary musicology
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/18628
2024-03-29T07:09:46ZThe vocal development of a girl who sings but does not speak
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19348
The vocal development of a girl who sings but does not speak
El Mogharbel, Christliebe; Sommer, Grit; Deutsch, Werner; Wenglorz, Markus; Laufs, Ingo
Background in music psychology. The development of singing involves not only the acquisition of melodies and words but also precise attunement to the timing structure and melodic features given by the social environment, which leads to a considerable conventionalization of performance.
Background in linguistics. In the course of language development, children adapt their phonetic output to the sound patterns of the target language. In singing songs, the rendition of the lyrics naturally leans on these native language sound patterns, even if the semantic content of the lyrics plays little role.
Aims. We report a long-term study of a child with infantile autism and severe mental handicap who sings songs but has no language. The only aspect of speech she produces is the phonetic realization of the songs she sings. This exceptional case in which musical development is dissociated from language development bears relevance to the question of the interrelationship of singing and speaking.
Method. The material consists of two hours of audio data or 269 reproductions of familiar songs extracted from a long-term video documentation of the single case covering the period from age 3-15. Based on phonetic and musical
transcriptions, the girl's musical abilities were qualitatively assessed by expert rating. Her phonetic repertoire was quantitatively assessed. Her vocal production (phonetic and musical) was examined longitudinally with respect to its approximation to the original songs.
Results. At three years the autistic girl displays precocious musical competence in singing, which, however, does not grow further from this initial level. Musical creativity and expressiveness grow to a peak in middle childhood and then decline again in adolescence. The girl's phonetic inventory of sounds is highly restricted and shows no progression, but herarticulation grows more and more deliberate and, within her bounds, nearer to the original words. The non-verbal girl apparently has a mental representation of the lyrics.
Conclusion. Musical competence, creativity and expressiveness in singing can reach a high level even in the total absence of language, and by singing, some residual language-like capacity like articulatory control may be enhanced.
2009-01-11T20:12:52ZUnderstanding musical expressiveness using interactive multimedia platforms
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19347
Understanding musical expressiveness using interactive multimedia platforms
Leman, Marc; Camurri, Antonio
Background in musicology. Understanding the gesture-based foundations of musical involvement opens a number of new perspectives for musicology, with the likely effect of a change in approach. Giving justice to the role of gesture in music calls for an integrated view of perception and action, which implies a shift from auditory-based cognition towards embodied cognition, an approach that includes the whole human body as mediator between mental processes and physical energy.
Background in computing. With the help of new measurement tools, new computational models of multi-modal interaction, and new interactive multimedia platforms, it becomes easier to study music from a multi-modal point of view, both in terms of scientific and artistic perspectives. Music also offers an appropriate domain for the testing and developing of interactive systems and computational models for handling non-verbal multi-modal communication.
Aims. In studying musical gesture, both musicology and engineering can profit from a joint collaboration. While technology provides new tools for the measurement and modelling of musical involvement, knowledge of its corporeal
foundation may largely contribute to the development of technology that in turn contributes to measurement and modelling. Furthermore, this knowledge may be exploited in artistic applications. As such, the interaction between musicology and music engineering may lead to interesting developments in the domain of embodied cognition and interactive multimedia platforms. Main contribution. An overview of recent work on the development of an
interactive multimedia platform for the measurement and modelling of musical expressiveness is presented. The paper introduces the notion of corporeal imitation and mirroring behavior as a core concept fur understanding musical
expressiveness.
Implications. The approach advocated in this paper implies a shift of paradigm in systematic musicology, away from an all too narrow focus on auditory perception and sound structure, towards a broader view that encompasses multi-modal musical involvement. This approach is grounded in multi-sensory integration, the coupling of perception and action, the study of motor imitation, and issues that relate to affect, emotions and subjectivity. The advantage of using a interactive multimedia platform for music research, rather than ad hoc solutions, pertains to the use of modular functionalities, which allow rapid prototyping of experimental setup, flexible modelling, and the subsequent use of results in artistic applications.
2009-01-11T20:10:41ZThe neural basis of pitch and harmony in the auditory system
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19346
The neural basis of pitch and harmony in the auditory system
Langner, Gerald; Ochse, Michael
Background in psychophysics. Psychophysical experiments have shown that the human brain has a natural preference for harmonic sounds and relationships between musical tones. Even naïve listeners are able to distinguish harmonic from inharmonic musical intervals and, under many conditions, the pitches of octaves are confused even though their fundamental frequency differs by a factor of two. Our psychophysical investigations in Mongolian gerbils have shown that animals can also learn to differentiate musical intervals.
Background in neurophysiology. In order to understand pitch perception and the neuronal basis of harmonicity, we have to understand how neurons in the central auditory system process acoustic signals. It has been demonstrated that temporal processing mechanisms in the auditory brainstem are essential for these fundamental aspects of musical perception. Neurophysiological experiments have revealed that the periodicity of signal envelopes is crucial for the perception of pitch. Neuronal representations of envelope periods, which reflect the superposition of partials of harmonic sounds in the cochlea, are analysed by temporal correlation mechanisms in the central auditory system. These mechanisms also include processing of resolved partials.
Aims. In this paper we attempt to explain pitch perception and our preference for harmonic sounds on the basis of the temporal neuronal analysis and the spatial representation of pitch information in the brain.
Conclusions. As a result of cochlear analysis, frequency is mapped along a tonotopic axis in all auditory brain areas. Similarly, as a result of temporal analysis, periodicity is mapped from the midbrain to the auditory cortex. In each case, tonotopic and periodotopic axes are orthogonal to each other. One may say that spectral information, as an important aspect of timbre, is mapped along a first neural axis, periodicity (pitch) is mapped along the second neural axis of the auditory system. Finally, as a result of temporal analysis, neurons in the auditory midbrain show preferences for harmonically related sounds. The major function of the ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus (VNLL), which seems to have a structure reminiscent of the pitch helix of music psychology, appears to be to control and suppress these harmonic responses.
2009-01-11T20:09:17ZStellar acoustics as input for music composition
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19345
Stellar acoustics as input for music composition
Kollath, Zoltan; Keuler, Jen O.
Background in acoustics. Variable stars show light variations due to internal acoustic waves. There are strong physical mathematical parallels between stellar behaviour and musical instruments: the basic principles underlying their "overtone" frequencies are identical. However, "stellar instruments" have many characteristics that make their sounds different from ordinary musical instruments.
Background in theory/composition. Many composers have incorporated inharmonic spectra into their music. Computer technology now enables us to control inharmonic sound processes and deal with associated theoretical implications. Drawing stellar acoustics into the orbit of music fits in well with this trend in compositional practice.
Aims. Our main aim is to demonstrate that sounds designed according to the principles of stellar physics and the nature of the processes inside stars can be used as a new basis for music composition, theoretical reasoning, and aesthetic evaluation.
Main contribution. Both cosmic and musical events are determined by the temporal and hierarchical order of events, states and processes. Acoustic models of variable stars predict unusual patterns of "overtones" and variations in these patterns as the stars evolve. Due to the enormous size of stars, their oscillatory frequencies are orders of magnitudes lower than the audible range; therefore we should transpose those oscillations to the range of human hearing. However, the frequency range of possible stellar oscillations is much wider than the musical range, indicating a need for nesting points. These questions provide an interesting starting point for a cosmically inspired music theory. We developed a C-sound based computer application, to make the compositional experiments manageable.
Implications. In our research, we combine scientific and artistic approaches and ways of thinking. Astrophysicists can investigate the special modes of vibration in stars of diverse size and inner structure, present possible sound sets that "celestial instruments" might offer, and provide information on their acoustic spectra. Composers can then scrutinize the audible features of these sonances, their behavior in diverse musical contexts, their aptness for creating tonal tensions, and their suitability for creating expressive musical structures. These points are illustrated with reference to the authors' Stellar Music No. 1.
2009-01-11T20:07:40ZA comparison of automated methods for the analysis of style in fifteenth-century song intabulations
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19344
A comparison of automated methods for the analysis of style in fifteenth-century song intabulations
Jürgensen, Frauke; Knopke, Ian
Background in historical musicology. A repertory of several thousand secular songs survives from the fifteenth century. Much of it is not attributed to any particular author, and frequently, even the approximate place of origin is uncertain. For us, the origin of a piece is a concern, so that we can better chart the development of musical style. Researchers have tried many approaches to attribution, or to style-classification in a broader sense: manuscript studies of all descriptions, studies of structural elements such as cadence degrees, ornamental
style, elements of melodic behaviour such as contour, favoured intervals, and prevalence of leaps; dissonance treatment, and others. However, a comprehensive analysis of all these elements in a sufficiently large body of pieces is too time-consuming for one person to do by hand.
Background in music information retrieval. Information technology has made it possible to analyze large amounts of data in a reduced timespan, as compared to traditional methods. While this capability has been available for some time, the analysis of multiple musical works by computer is still relatively unexplored in music theory. Modern classification techniques require the extraction of features from sets of data, which are then resolved using higher level constructions.
Aims. To detail an approach and toolset for feature-set-based analysis of musical works of the fifteenth century as applied to the Buxheim Organ Book, to show some initial results, and to suggest further avenues for musicological exploration of the Buxheim Organ Book and related repertoire.
Main contribution. Several hundred intabulations of secular songs from the Buxheim Organ Book (ca. 1450-1470) have been analysed to produce individual sets of approximately fifty features using the Humdrum toolkit, as well as
specially-constructed software tools. Some of these were general statistical features and others were features commonly examined in style studies of the mid-fifteenth-century secular song repertoire. This paper focuses on details of the initial tools developed for this project, some overall properties of the entire Buxheim set, and their relationship to previous music-theoretical work on the subject.
Implications. While some researchers have developed useful automated tools for musical analysis, these have rarely been combined with detailed musicological study of earlier repertories. Applying multiple automated tests to a single body of music gives musicologists an opportunity to compare the effectiveness and usefulness of such tools for specific tasks. Solutions specific to the analysis of the chosen repertory have been proposed, and the large-scale results will allow us re-evaluate existing musicological ideas about these pieces.
2009-01-11T20:06:18ZPlane isometries in the music and art of Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19343
Plane isometries in the music and art of Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis
Holm-Hudson, Kevin J.; Kucinskas, Darius
Background in art history. In the early twentieth century, numerous composers and artists including Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky explored connections between music and visual art. Even so, Lithuanian artist-composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911) stands apart in the extent of his formal training in both areas, and the degree to which he believed the two media interpenetrated. Initially trained as a musician, Ciurlionis studied painting at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts from 1904 through 1906. Between 1907 and 1909 he aimed at synthesis of the arts with paintings often analogous to musical forms (for example, the four-painting Sonata of the Sun). Some scholars have linked Ciurlionis to symbolism; others have linked him to abstraction. Still others have examined musical metaphor in Ciurlionis's painting.
Background in music theory. As Ciurlionis's involvement in painting deepened, his music changed to emphasize intersecting lines and a preoccupation with isometry, suggesting increasingly literal translation of visual principles into musical notation. Each of the four visual plane isometries (rotational symmetry, reflection,
translation, and glide reflection) has its musical counterpart, giving rise to various theories of musical isometry (cf. David Lewin and Ernö Lendvai).
Aims. The authors show how Ciurlionis's creative process in his music was influenced by visual principles.
Main contribution. Ciurlionis's posthumous fame was as an artist until publication of his music began in 1957. Since then, although several Lithuanian scholars have analysed his music, scholars outside Lithuania have focused on his paintings. The extent to which Ciurlionis's newly discovered "visual thought" of 1904-1906 permeated his music during those years and thereafter has scarcely been examined.
Implications. By examining the structural similarity of Ciurlionis's different artistic media, one is able to uncover the deeper unity of his artistic expression. Examination of some of the distinctive tendencies of Ciurlionis's art manifested in his music yields a deeper understanding of his unique creative process.
2009-01-11T20:04:50ZPatterns of modernization in Turkish music as indicators of a changing society
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19342
Patterns of modernization in Turkish music as indicators of a changing society
Ergur, Ali; Aydin, Yigit
Background in sociology. Turkish society has experienced a profound transformation since the late eighteenth century, that has stimulated an extensive social change in which traditional modes of cultural expression have been restructured throughout capitalistic standardizations. This simplification is also observable in the structural
transformation of traditional Turkish music. In fact, musical rationalization encodes the logic of an entire phase of modernization.
Background in ethnomusicology. The sound system of traditional Turkish music differs substantially from the Western one which became universally valid. Traditional Turkish music theory necessitates a sufficiently refined and non-
Western musical perception. However, during the last two centuries this perceptual affinity has been slowly abolished through the standardizing process of modernity, which realizes in effect a hidden temperament within the traditional sound system.
Aims. We aim to analyze the main features of rationalization in Turkish music, through the change of its expressive specificities, as representation of a sociological transformation.
Main contribution. Music is one of the most symbolic domains, in which symptoms of a rationalization process can be observed. Our study tries to demonstrate the progressive proliferation of a process of rationalization. Traditional and Westernized sound systems and performances have always been conceptualized as deeply separated spheres, even as antagonistically polarized hermetical spheres which possess their specific audience, expressive instruments, discourse, etc. Conversely, we also deduce that the actual phase of musical rationalization in Turkey has attained such a degree that the artificially fragmented nature of musical genres are being melted in a technical and stylistic fusion.
Implications. In nearly all of the sociological studies on Turkish music, the ontological specificities of music are underestimated, while developing deductions from music itself. In the case of ethnomusicological researches on the same subject, musical phenomena are usually isolated from their sociological context. Opposing such prevailing considerations both in sociology and ethnomusicology, the present study may help to inaugurate, in a totally unexplored domain, an alternate path through which the artificially divided musical spheres of the Turkish cultural
context can be reevaluated as different aspects of an identical comprehensive modernization process.
2009-01-11T20:03:07ZModelling of scales in traditional solo singing
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19341
Modelling of scales in traditional solo singing
Ambrazevicius, Rytis
Background in psychoacoustics. The scale in freely intoned music is characterised by pitch "zones" resulting from and reflecting categorical perception. Usage of the zones depends on aspects of performance as well as on melodic context. The central pitches and pitch zones corresponding to musical scale steps can be determined from frequency histograms. This approach, however, is generally not applicable in the case of floating tonality, i.e., if the pitch of the reference tone (e.g., pitch of the tonic) is slightly altered in the course of performance.
Background in ethnomusicology. Archaic traditional solo singing features pre-diatonic scales which deviate from equal temperament. For instance, Alexeyev classifies embryonic scales of solo singing into three groups based on (a) contrast of voice registers and timbre (alpha-type), (b) gliding pitches (beta-type), and (c) made of approximately equidistant steps (gamma-type). Similar conceptions are also well known from early comparative musicology studies. There have been many acoustical investigations of musical scales; however, scales of archaic traditional solo singing, characterized by wide zones of intonation as well as somewhat floating tonality, have not yet been thoroughly studied.
Aims. This paper aims (1) to develop mathematical-statistical models based on regularities of scale perception (categorical perception and neglect of floating tonality) to quantitatively describe of an insider's emic musical scale; and (2) to study, by means of the models, the regularities of musical scales in one idiolect.
Method. Three mathematical-statistical models based on different assumptions of the nature of floating tonality were developed. Pitches of tones in songs belonging to one idiolect of Lithuanian traditional male solo singing were measured and reevaluated by means of the models.
Results and conclusions. Approximately equidistant scales as well as modern diatonic scales are found in the samples under investigation. This suggests that there are different historical layers of musical thinking manifested in the idiolect.
2009-01-11T20:01:25ZUnderstanding our experience of music: What kind of psychology do we need?
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19340
Understanding our experience of music: What kind of psychology do we need?
Allesch, Christian G.; Krakauer, Peter M.
Background in the psychology of music. The historical development of the psychology of music largely followed that of psychology in general. In the 20th century it adopted the research methods and interests of cognitive psychology and more recently has turned to new interdisciplinary connections with psychobiology and the neurosciences. There remains, however, a certain inadequacy regarding work in the psychology of music and cultural psychology and as well of interpretative research aimed at interpreting the role of music in those processes, processes Bruner called "the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human action".
Background in historical musicology and cultural anthropology. Historical musicology and cultural anthropology maintain that experiencing and understanding music represents a process fundamentally dependent upon cultural context. This begs the question as to how cultural context influences social and individual representations of music in the sense that a particular "style of aesthetic experience" typifies a historical period. Although this is a genuine psychological question, it cannot be answered by a psychology which is restricted to "ahistorical" explanations of information processing. Thus from a cultural anthropological perspective there is strong interest in any kind of "cultural psychology" which is able to conceptualise the dynamic interactions between culturally determined "social representations" of music and the individual mind.
Goals. We argue for a "cultural turn" in the psychology of music. Following developments within psychology, research over recent decades in the psychology of music has concentrated on neuro-cognition while cultural aspects have been underestimated as they continue to be in psychology in general.
Conclusions. An important task for an interdisciplinary framework that wishes to include the cultural sciences and psychology should be to review recent cultural psychological theories to assess their implications for a psychological theory of music. As examples we use Ernst E. Boesch's Symbolic Action Theory which explicitly refers to the role of aesthetic experience in cultural contexts and Alfred Lang's "semiotic ecology" which provides an appropriate model for conceptualising the complex relations between the development of cultural patterns and the development of related individual representations.
2009-01-11T19:58:31ZYoung children confronting the Continuator, an interactive reflective musical system
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/19339
Young children confronting the Continuator, an interactive reflective musical system
Addessi, Anna Rita; Pachet, François
Background in music education. The present study deals with various the interaction between children and musical machines. One of the principal aims is to understand how the use of interactive musical systems can affect the learning and the musical creativity of children and more especially of younger children (3 to 5 years old).
Background in artificial intelligence. An innovative system was conceived at the Sony CSL in Paris which is able to produce music in the same style as the person playing the keyboard. The name chosen for this machine is the Continuator. Its basic design is that of Interactive Reflective systems where the core concept is to teach musical processes indirectly by putting the user in a situation where learning takes place through the actual interaction between the user and the system.
Aims. The aim of the study is to understand in what way the children relate to this particular interactive musical system, what kinds of musical and relational behaviours are developed, and how interactive reflective systems can be used in the educational field to stimulate creativity and the pleasure of playing.
Method. The study involved 27 children aged 3 to 5 years, in a kindergarten in Bologna (Italy). Three sessions were held once a day for 3 consecutive days. In every session, the children were asked to play on the keyboard in 4 different situations: with the keyboard alone, with the keyboard connected to the Continuator, with another child, and with another child and the Continuator.
Results. The present paper reports the observation of three particular aspects: the emergence of a life cycle of interaction, moving from initial surprise, to phases featuring excitement, analytical behaviour and invention; the fact that the two tasks involving the system gave rise to the longest attention span characterized by strong intrinsic motivation and joint attention; the varied nature of the listening behaviours.
Conclusion. The results show how an interactive reflective system such as the Continuator can develop interesting child/computer interaction and promote creative musical behaviours in young children. This outcome points to the considerable potential offered by the association between the disciplines of music education and artificial intelligence.
2009-01-11T19:55:32Z