Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an (...) aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music. (shrink)

In this chapter I look at some questions around the notion of experimentation in philosophy, science, and the arts, through the thought of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze. My argument is articulated around three areas of enquiry – Bachelard’s work on the experimental sciences, Deleuze’s notion of philosophy as an experimental practice, and recent musicological debate around the practical and political stakes of the term ‘experimental music’. By drawing together these three senses of experimentation, I test the (...) possibilities of understanding experimentation as a transdisciplinary concept and/or method. I develop a notion of experimentation as open, fluid, and non-hierarchical, but also consider points where such an idea is short-circuited by the reassertion of disciplinary closure and more top-down forms of method. My frame for discussing this question is a commonly posited distinction between the experiment and the experimental. Here the experiment is something like a controlled and closed environment in which a privileged observer tests predefined hypotheses, while the experimental concerns attempts to relinquish such control and to produce contexts in which the unknown and the unexpected can arise. By turning to Bachelard’s studies of the practice of science, I will question the common conception of a disciplinary split between the experiments of science and experimental art, showing both how such a distinction cannot be so neat and how these terms are often not easily separable. Putting this notion into conjunction with recent critical discourse on experimentation in music, namely regarding the kinds of exclusions and closures that the term ‘experimental music’ has produced, and with Deleuze’s criticisms of scientific method as well as the apparent disciplinary closure of his transdisciplinary project that is present and his and Félix Guattari’s final work, What is Philosophy?, I argue that refining our understanding of experimentation as a pluralistic and fragile concept will help us engage with the difficulties raised in these fields. More generally I point towards a project of mapping out the diverse and divergent relations that a transdisciplinary understanding of experimentation may draw between philosophy, science, and art. (shrink)

Philosophers of music often appeal to intuition to defend ontological theories of musical works. This practice is worrisome as it is rather unclear just how widely shared are the intuitions that philosophers appeal to. In this paper, I will first offer a brief overview of the debate over the ontology of musical works. I will argue that this debate is driven by a conflict between two seemingly plausible intuitions—the repeatability intuition and the creatability intuition—both of which may be defended on (...) the grounds that they are reflective of our actual musical practices. The problem facing philosophers within this debate is that there is no clear way to determine which of the two conflicting intuitions is more reflective of our musical practices. Finally, I offer discussion of an experimental study that was designed to test participants' intuitions regarding the repeatability of musical works. The evidence presented there suggests that the participants broadly accept the repeatability of musical works, but in a much narrower way than philosophers would likely accept. (shrink)

Among improvisers and composers today there is a resurgence of interest in experimental music (EM) practices that welcome contingency; engaging with unforeseen circumstances as an essential component of the music-making process, and a means to sonic discovery. I propose theExperimental Composition Improvisation Continua(ECIC) as a model with which to better understand these experimental musical works. The historical Experimental Music movement of the 1950s and 60s is briefly revisited, and the jazz tradition included as an essential protagonist; both (...) being important historical movements leading to the formulation of ideas around contingent musical practices. The ECIC model is outlined as providing a means to observe the interactions and continua between composition and improvisation on the one hand and more or less experimentally conceived music on the other. This model is applied as an investigative and comparative tool to three distinctive works in order to illuminate the presence or otherwise of various experimental interactions within them. The works are: “Spiral Staircase” – a composition by written by Satoko Fujii in late 2007, John Cage’s4′33″, and a performance of “My Favorite Things” by the John Coltrane Quartet. Further possible applications of the ECIC are suggested in the conclusion. (shrink)

Experimental encounters in music and beyond opens a necessary dialogue on experimental practices in the arts and negotiates their place in contemporary society. Going beyond the music-historical usage of the term "experimental", this book reimagines experimentation as an open working definition encompassing multiple forms of artistic attitudes and processes. The texts, images, and sounds offer multiple traces, faces, and spaces, revealing what experimentalism in music and the wider arts entails today. With perspectives from a range of disciplines (...) - from choreography through composition to philosophy and beyond - the different experiences and artistic projects documented and discussed explore the complexity of experimentation in a way that is all the richer for being never-ending."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges and practical implications of the experimental ontology of music. It offers an overview of the existing research, primarily focusing on how people judge whether two musical performances are of one and the same or two distinct musical works, followed by a discussion of the current methodological debates in this field and, finally, an exploration of its potential legal implications.

In this thesis we construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This encounter circulates through a constellation of problems found across and between mid-twentieth century musical, artistic, and philosophical practices, the central focus for our line of enquiry being the concept of experimentation. We emphasize the production of a method of experimentation through a practice historically situated with regards to the traditions of the respective fields of music and philosophy. However, we argue that (...) these experimental practices are not reducible to their historical traditions, but rather, by adopting what we term a problematic reading, or transcendental critique, with regards to historical givens, they take their historical situation as the site of an experimental departure. We follow Cage through his relation to the history of Western classical music, his contemporaries in the musical avant-garde, and artistic movements surrounding and in some respects stemming from Cage’s work, and Deleuze through his relation to Kant, phenomenology, and structuralism, in order to map the production of a practice of experimentation spanning music, art, and philosophy. Some specific figures we engage with in these respective traditions include Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Pierre Schaeffer, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Edmund Husserl, Maurice-Merleau-Ponty, Alain Badiou, and Félix Guattari. In so doing we seek to find between these practices points of both conjunction and disjunction which enrich our understanding of Cage’s and Deleuze’s work, and, more widely speaking, of the passage of twentieth century music and philosophy in general. Here we hope to make contributions to the fields of continental philosophy and music theory especially, and to open a point of engagement with the nascent field of sound studies. (shrink)

This paper discusses methodological issues of two recent experiments conducted by Christopher Bartel, and Elzė S. Mikalonytė and Vilius Dranseika, respectively, about the repeatability and individuation of musical works. I argue, first, that the reliability of their results about people’s intuitions in our everyday musical practices can be questioned due to the use of descriptions instead of musical stimuli of the works and performances involved in the cases tested. This procedure is prone to place participants in an epistemic situation in (...) which their mental capacities for their everyday judgments are not deployed and makes their judgments more vulnerable to the problem of “filling in”. I provide empirical data of an experiment that implements musical stimuli, obtaining large effect sizes regarding the results obtained by Bartel, Mikalonytė and Dranseika. In addition, I argue that the results of three scenarios of the experiment conducted by Mikalonytė and Dranseika are suspicious of being influenced by presentation effects that favor the contextualist intuition that the composer is a relevant parameter in work-individuation. Formal and superficial aspects of the description of their cases would cause these effects. I supply empirical data of an experiment that neutralizes those effects, obtaining moderate and large effect sizes regarding the results of Mikalonytė and Dranseika. (shrink)

In western cultures, when it comes to places of worship and liturgies, music, acoustics and architecture go hand in hand. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether the emotions evoked by music are enhanced by the acoustics of the space where the music was composed to be played on. We explored whether the emotional responses of western naïve listeners to two vocal pieces from the Renaissance, one liturgical and one secular, convolved with the impulse responses of four Christian (...) temples from the United Kingdom, were modulated by the appropriate piece/space matching. In an alternative forced choice task where participants had to indicate their preference for the original recording of the piece (not convolved with any temple-like acoustics) vs. the convolved one, no significant differences were found. However, in the tasks where participants rated their emotional in response to each piece and acoustic condition, the factorial ANCOVA analyses performed on the results revealed significant effects. We observed that, across pieces and spaces, participants found the temple-like acoustics as more transcendent, compared to the acoustics of the original version of the pieces. In addition, they rated the secular piece as more tender and the liturgical piece as more expressive in its original versions, compared to the convolved ones. We conclude that the acoustic signature of the four Christian temples causes an exaltation of certain emotions on listeners, although this effect is not associated to one or another musical piece. (shrink)

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

Musical Group Interaction (MGI) has been found to promote prosocial tendencies, including empathy, across various populations. However, experimental study is lacking in respect of effects of everyday forms of musical engagement on prosocial tendencies, as well as whether key aspects—such as physical co-presence of MGI participants—are necessary to enhance prosocial tendencies. We developed an experimental procedure in order to study online engagement with collaborative playlists and to investigate socio-cognitive components of prosocial tendencies expected to increase as a consequence (...) of engagement. We aimed to determine whether mereperceivedpresence of a partner during playlist-making could elicit observable correlates of social processing implicated in both MGI and prosocial behaviors more generally and identify the potential roles of demographic, musical, and inter-individual differences. Preliminary results suggest that for younger individuals, some of the social processes involved in joint music-making and implicated in empathic processes are likely to be elicited even by an assumption of virtual co-presence. In addition, individual differences in styles of listening behavior may mediate the effects of mere perceived partner presence on recognition memory. (shrink)

Aesthetics, experiments and values -- Between cybernetics, aesthetics, and semiotics -- 'I/other' oppositions in music, aesthetics, and semiotics -- Interpersonal analysis in film music -- Janácek from an interpersonal viewpoint -- Postscript.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. -/- In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences (...) of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. -/- Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human. (shrink)

The paper’s authors are composers operating within the field of experimental music. Their music is created from the use of limited materials placed into repetitive structures involving cyclic pitch patterns and sustained tone textures. This reductive approach to composition provides a fertile area for discussions of temporality, as the music functions outside of standard teleological narrative structures thereby prompting more varied subjective temporal experiences for listeners. The paper will take as its starting point the experience of the listener, rather (...) than the musical score, enhancing discussions from Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard.1 This angle is particularly relevant when discussing minimal works, as the score does not give an indication to what the auditory experience will be, it simply acts as what pianist Philip Thomas describes as a ‘prescription for action’ for the performers.2 Drawing particularly upon work on the temporal experience by Merleau-Ponty, the paper discusses how phenomenological approaches can provide effective insight into the experience of sustained tone and repetitive music. By discussing notions of retention and protention, the two composers will explore how this permeates their compositional approach, particularly in relation to the use of repetition, examining the different types of musical materials used by the composers and how this affects the temporalities experienced upon performance. Points of similarity and variance between the two outlooks are explored in detail, providing an in-depth discussion as to how attitudes towards temporality can result in nuanced differences in output. Fundamental essences are clarified and discussed in relation to other composers’ work, and in particular American composer James Tenney’s work in applying a phenomenological model upon the listening experience is considered alongside the central discussion. The results of this investigation provide both clear artistic statements on the role of phenomenological thought in the creative process, and also tentative starting points for further discussion on experiential temporalities in minimal and experimental musics. (shrink)

The situational context within which an activity takes place, as well as the personality characteristics of individuals shape the types of strategies people choose in order to regulate their emotions, especially when confronted with challenging or undesirable situations. Taking self-regulation as the framework to study emotions in relation to learning and performing chamber music canon repertoire, this quasi-experimental and intra-individual study focused on the self-rated emotional states of a professional classical cellist during long-term sustained practice across 100-weeks. This helped (...) to develop greater awareness of different emotions and how they vary over artistic events. Data analysis included traditional psychometric measurements to test the internal consistency of the time series data as well as the relationship between variables. The study mapped the cellist’s flexible regulation of 17 different positive and negative emotions empirically linked to learning and achievement while practicing within the social context of performing music publicly at a high level. Findings arising from the study help with understandings of how to support musicians to maximize their artistic potential by reducing emotion dysregulation and strengthening the types of adaptive methods that enable them to manage their own emotions. (shrink)

Contemporary electronic music has splintered into numerous genres and subgenres, all of which share a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. Listening through the Noise considers how the experience of listening to electronic music constitutes a departure from the expectations that have long governed music listening in the West.

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social rela- tions between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking (...) that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, dis- dainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole. (shrink)

This article reviews some of the ways in which philosophical problems concerning music can be informed by approaches from the cognitive sciences (principally psychology and neuroscience). Focusing on the issues of musical expressiveness and the arousal of emotions by music, the key philosophical problems and their alternative solutions are outlined. There is room for optimism that while current experimental data does not always unambiguously satisfy philosophical scrutiny, it can potentially support one theory over another, and in some cases allow (...) us to synthesize or reject traditional philosophical differences. (shrink)

Serial music was one of the most important aesthetic movements to emerge in post-war Europe, but its uncompromising music and modernist aesthetic has often been misunderstood. This book focuses on the controversial journal die Reihe, whose major contributors included Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel and G. M. Koenig, and discusses it in connection with many lesser-known sources in German musicology. It traces serialism's debt to the theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to developments in concrete art, modern poetry (...) and the information aesthetics and semiotics of Max Bense and Umberto Eco. M. J. Grant sketches an aesthetic theory of serialism as experimental music, arguing that serial theory's embrace of both rigorous intellectualism and aleatoric processes is not, as many have suggested, a paradox, but the key to serial thought and to its relevance for contemporary theory. (shrink)

Finding the Raga is more than a book that tries to make sense of the raga, of Indian classical music, and of how Indian music challenges Western notions of what music might be. It is a work of self-inquiry, as might be expected from Amit Chaudhuri, a musician who is also a novelist; a novelist who is also a critic and essayist; a trained and recorded performer in the Indian classical vocal tradition who was also, once, a guitarist and songwriter (...) in the American folk music style and is now a composer and recorded performer in experimental music. Each one of these undertakings and selves signifies turns at different points in life, and each turn and change of direction brings a fresh perspective on music, writing, and what it means to take on and do these things. No category-Indian, Western-is a given in this book. Partly a record of one of the most important turns in the author's life, toward North Indian music, and of its long aftermath, Finding the Raga is also part autobiography set in 1970s Bombay, part essay, and part detailed analysis of how we might grasp the conceptual underpinnings as well as the experience of music. It explores the different ways in which music relates to the world-whether it's through representation or evocation, as in Western music, or through the raga being sung at different times of day and in different seasons, as in Indian music-and also tries to understand what the act of listening involves for individuals and cultures. (shrink)

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, however, is (...) not as transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. -/- Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. (shrink)

Truth happens to an idea." So wrote William James in 1907; and twenty-four years later John Dewey argued that artistic experience entailed a process of "doing and undergoing." But what do these ideas have to do with music, or with research conducted in and through music - that is, with "artistic research?" In this collection of essays, fourteen very different authors respond with distinct and challenging perspectives. Some report on their own experiments and experiences; some offer probing analyses of noteworthy (...) practices; some view historical continuities through the lens of pragmatism and artistic experiment. The resulting collection yields new insights into what musicians do, how they experiment, and what they experience - insights that arise not from doctrine, but from diverse voices seeking common ground in and through experimental discourse: artistic research in and of itself. (shrink)

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological (...) responses. Based on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

The ancient Greeks already used to give ethnic names to their different scales, and observations on differences in music of the various nations always raised the interest of musicians and philosophers. Yet, it was only in the late nineteenth century that “comparative musicology” became an institutional science. An important role in this process was played by Carl Stumpf, a former pupil of Brentano’s who pioneered these researches in Berlin. Stumpf founded the Phonogrammarchiv to collect recordings of folk and extra-European music (...) and a dedicated journal, the Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Gifted in the field of science no less than in that of musicology, Stumpf developed an empirically-oriented approach to phenomenology, deeply divergent from Husserl’s and highly influential over the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. A self-declared “outsider” among armchair philosophers, Stumpf experimentally investigated the perception of sounds and the origins of musical consonance. Developing the physiological studies of Ernst Weber on the sense of touch, Stumpf discovered that two sensations of tone, given at the same time, tend to mix in a certain degree. Musical consonance – he claimed – lays in this level of “tonal fusion”, not in the allegedly “natural” series of the harmonic partials of a vibrating chord, as suggested by the naturalists of all times from Pythagoras to Stumpf’s great contemporary Hermann Helmholtz. Accordingly, no musical system can claim for preponderance over the others: Stumpf’s researches in comparative musicology served to corroborate his theses on “tonal fusion” and the psychological foundations of consonance. Although Stumpf later revised and finally abandoned this theory, its permanent value lays in its opposition to dominant naturalistic approaches. The commitment for comparative musicology at the Berlin School is then no concession to a positivistic fashion for exoticism. The fundamentally Eurocentric stance of naturalistic theories of music is also fiercely contrasted by Stumpf’s pupil Erich Hornbostel, who suggests that music ought to be considered as culture, rather than as nature, and focuses attention on the eventually melting human cultures. The Berlin school flourished until the Nazis forced most of its exponents to emigration and, for tragically obvious reasons, heavily discouraged researches on these topics. (shrink)

The dissertation discusses the relationship between two approaches to researching music: the empirical approach of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and the speculative approach of philosophical aesthetics of music. The aim of the dissertation is to determine the relationship between problems, conceptual frameworks, and domains of inquiry of the two approaches. The dissertation should answer whether the philosophical and the empirical approach deal with the same, or at least relatable aspects of music. In particular, it should answer whether the (...) results of the empirical research contribute to the debates of philosophical aesthetics of music. Each of the three chapters of the dissertation deals with one particular problem in philosophy of music: meaning in music, value of music, and the relationship between music and the emotions. For each particular philosophical problem discussed in these chapters, it is demonstrated that the experimental results provide interesting insights for philosophy of music. It is concluded in the dissertation that philosophers can benefit from examining experimental studies, not only regarding the particular aesthetic theories, but also in regard to the methodological consideration, since the dissertation shows that this kind of interdisciplinary approach uncovers methods useful to philosophers, not commonly available to the armchair philosophical approach. (shrink)

Performing and listening to music occurs in specific situations, requiring specific media. Empirical research on music listening and appreciation, however, tends to overlook the effects these situations and media may have on the listening experience. This article uses the sociological concept of the frame to develop a theory of an aesthetic experience with music as the result of encountering sound/music in the context of a specific situation. By presenting a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical studies, we unfold this theory for one (...) such frame: the classical concert. After sketching out the underlying theoretical framework, a selective literature review is conducted to look for evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and to identify desiderata. We refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert, and how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects. Finally, an empirical research program is proposed, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Such a research program will provide empirical evidence to tackle a question that is still open to debate, i.e., whether the diversified world of modern-day music listening formats also holds a place for the classical concert – and if so, for what kind of classical concert. (shrink)

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific (...) class='Hi'>experimental training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions. (shrink)

We present methods for automatically producing summary excerpts or thumbnails of music. To find the most representative excerpt, we maximize the average segment similarity to the entire work. After windowbased audio parameterization, a quantitative similarity measure is calculated between every pair of windows, and the results are embedded in a 2D similarity matrix. Summing the similarity matrix over the support of a segment results in a measure of how similar that segment is to the whole. This measure is maximized to (...) find the segment that best represents the entire work. We discuss variations on the method, and present experimental results for orchestral music, popular songs, and jazz. These results demonstrate that the method finds significantly representative excerpts, using very few assumptions about the source audio. (shrink)

Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed (...) from subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution. (shrink)

Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine connection. We then (...) explore the nature of this value in two experimental studies. The results suggest a striking relationship between music and conversation. People see something distinctively musical in works that express precisely those emotions that they think most create connection within conversation. (shrink)

The central point of Raffman’s discussion is to distinguish the perception, knowledge, and effability of the standard chromatic “categorical” pitch events from what she calls “nuance” pitch events—events whose individuation is more fine-grained than C-events, and which seem to resist reliable, psychologically available categorization. Thus, two pitches a quarter-tone apart may be classified as the same C-event, even though they are different N-events. Experimental evidence suggests that whereas people are quite good at recall and discrimination of C-events, they are (...) considerably poorer with respect to N-events, and this, according to Raffman, is due to the availability of “schemas,” or conceptual “cubby-holes,” in the former but not the latter case. But this is not to say that people aren’t aware of N-events: a good deal of musical pleasure turns on appreciation of such N-events as vibrato, slides, and pitch coloration. The point is merely that “it is overwhelmingly unlikely that we have, or could have, interval schemas as fine-grained as the N-pitches and N-intervals we can hear”. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the field of music perception and cognition, which is the area of cognitive psychology devoted to determining the mental mechanisms underlying our appreciation of music. The chapter begins with the study of pitch, including the constructive nature of pitch perception and the cognitive structures reflecting its simultaneous and sequential organization in Western tonal‐harmonic music. This is followed by reviews of temporal organization in music, and of musical performance and ability. Next, literature concerning the cognitive neuroscience of music (...) is examined, including studies of neuropsychology, neuroimaging, and event‐related potentials. The chapter concludes with a discussion of developmental music cognition, cross‐cultural music cognition, and the evolutionary psychology of music. (shrink)

Research in basic and clinical neuroscience of music conducted over the past decades has begun to uncover music’s high potential as a tool for rehabilitation. Advances in our understanding of how music engages parallel brain networks underpinning sensory and motor processes, arousal, reward, and affective regulation, have laid a sound neuroscientific foundation for the development of theory-driven music interventions that have been systematically tested in clinical settings. Of particular significance in the context of motor rehabilitation is the notion that musical (...) rhythms can entrain movement patterns in patients with movement-related disorders, serving as a continuous time reference that can help regulate movement timing and pace. To date, a significant number of clinical and experimental studies have tested the application of rhythm- and music-based interventions to improve motor functions following central nervous injury and/or degeneration. The goal of this review is to appraise the current state of knowledge on the effectiveness of music and rhythm to modulate movement spatiotemporal patterns and restore motor function. By organizing and providing a critical appraisal of a large body of research, we hope to provide a revised framework for future research on the effectiveness of rhythm- and music-based interventions to restore and train motor function. (shrink)

Experimental investigations of cross-cultural music perception and cognition reported during the past decade are described. As globalization and Western music homogenize the world musical environment, it is imperative that diverse music and musical contexts are documented. Processes of music perception include grouping and segmentation, statistical learning and sensitivity to tonal and temporal hierarchies, and the development of tonal and temporal expectations. The interplay of auditory, visual, and motor modalities is discussed in light of synchronization and the way music moves (...) via emotional response. Further research is needed to test deep-rooted psychological assumptions about music cognition with diverse materials and groups in dynamic contexts. Although empirical musicology provides keystones to unlock musical structures and organization, the psychological reality of those theorized structures for listeners and performers, and the broader implications for theories of music perception and cognition, awaits investigation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 11.2 (2003) 141-156 [Access article in PDF] Music Education as Critical PracticeA Naturalist View Lauri Väkevä University Of Oulu, Finland I This essay defends naturalism as a framework for philosophy of music education. I have three general reasons for supporting naturalism. First, by taking naturalism seriously we can keep our philosophies up-to-date with scientific inquiry. Second, naturalism can emancipate us from transcendental pseudo-questions and (...) instead help us to deal with the empirical problems of everyday life. Third, with naturalism, we can free ourselves from a priori theories of morals and aesthetics and thus view the active part that normative and aesthetic concerns play in human praxis. Even if I endorse naturalism, I do not subscribe to scientism. 1 Rather, I submit to a pragmatist view that stresses the role of philosophy (and science) in dealing with the questions of our life practices. Of the recent perspectives in the philosophy of music education my approach comes closest to the critical praxialism discussed in the MayDay group. 2All in all, I find a lot in common with the praxialist discussion (within or outside the MayDay group) and the kind of pragmatism that follows John Dewey's mature philosophy. 3 However, it seems to me that the naturalist bent of Deweyan pragmatism has not been thoroughly analyzed in our field. 4 One reason for this [End Page 141] might be the bad report that 'hard' or reductive naturalism has been given in connection with the experimental paradigm of music education research. 5 I want to argue that the critical potential of Deweyan pragmatism should not (and cannot) be separated from a naturalist approach. Taken together, critical and naturalist views can contribute to any philosophy, especially in fields that have a long tradition of leaning on otherworldly explanations.In what follows, I begin by outlining (in broad brushstrokes) the historical position of pragmatism and its status in present day philosophy. Next, I focus on the implications of Deweyan naturalist pragmatism and the possibility of maintaining a critical pragmatist attitude with naturalist presumptions in a pedagogical context. In the final part of the essay, I outline an interpretative framework for a critical pragmatism of music education that takes advantage of the naturalizing tendencies in contemporary philosophy without losing its grasp on the things that matter musically. II For a while, pragmatism had a bad name in academic philosophy. This was especially true after the linguistic turn in the first half of the last century. 6 By making the linguistic turn, many philosophers hoped to disassociate themselves from the speculative tradition(s) once and for all. Logical analysts also made it more difficult for philosophers to ignore the findings of scientists. Thus they paved the way for contemporary reductive naturalism that takes science as the measure of what can be known. 7However, analytic philosophers were not alone in their attempt to provide philosophy with scientific rigor. Classical pragmatists, too, had integrated a naturalist penchant in their output. Embracing naturalism with an open-ended experimental spirit, they wanted to focus on "the problems of men" as the chief subject matter of philosophy. 8 To many analytic philosophers, this seemed like a return to armchair speculation with an ingredient of sentimental ethics thrown in for good measure. Worse still, it looked as though the classical pragmatists were giving in to the spirit of the corporate West: speaking of the truth as "cash-value" surely seemed like a blasphemy to intellectuals who sought from formal logic and mathematics a purity of mind to clear up the messiness of everyday experience. 9Logical analysis also had its shortcomings. While many mainstream philosophers turned to logical analysis for clarity and certainty, at the same time they submitted to Cartesian-Kantian mind-body dualism with its problematic epistemology. Thus, they kept supporting the tensions between the rationalist and empiricist or analytic and synthetic domains of knowledge that haunted modernist neo-Kantian arguments.These distinctions turned out to be easy targets for postanalytic critics. 10 [End Page 142]Classical pragmatists anticipated this... (shrink)

In order to highlight the role of music teaching in the teaching of ideological and political courses, this study puts forward research on the integration of music teaching and ideological and political teaching. This study analyzes the promotion and necessity of college music teaching to ideological and political work, constructs a fusion model of college music teaching and ideological and political work, introduces deep learning methods, and weakens the influence of errors in the data of college music teaching and ideological (...) and political work. This study also optimized the integration mode of college music teaching and ideological and political work and realized the model research of college music teaching and ideological and political work. The experimental results show that the resource output amplitude controlled by the deep learning method has the best stability, and there is no large amplitude fluctuation during the experiment. The output amplitude and control time of the fusion resource are guaranteed and the fusion path of music teaching and ideological and political education is clearer. The maximum control time of the fusion resource of this method is 23.55 ms. (shrink)