The present article brings to attention a theoretical work of the nineteenth century, written in Romanian, concerning the musical scales and structures of the neo-Byzantine music. The writing ...entitled ‘The Scale’ was annexed to ‘The Second Book of Anthology’ (1832), a psaltic manuscript registered at the Romanian Academy Library (BAR) as ms. rom. 2233. The explanations included in the Scale are based on the rules of the hrisantic theory adopted in the Orthodox Church since 1814. These terms include 21 Ottoman makams. The first part of the article deals with general aspects of the researched manuscript, regarding to autorship and content and the second part provides the transliterated version of the text.
Expressive communication in the arts often involves deviations from stylistic norms, which can increase the aesthetic evaluation of an artwork or performance. The detection and appreciation of such ...expressive deviations may be amplified by cultural familiarity and expertise of the observer. One form of expressive communication in music is playing “out of time,” including asynchrony (deviations from synchrony between different instruments) and non-isochrony (deviations from equal spacing between subsequent note onsets or metric units). As previous research has provided somewhat conflicting perspectives on the degree to which deviations from synchrony and isochrony are aesthetically relevant, we aimed to shed new light on this topic by accounting for the effects of listeners' cultural familiarity and expertise. We manipulated (a)synchrony and (non-)isochrony separately in excerpts from three groove-based musical styles (jazz, candombe, and jembe), using timings from real performances. We recruited musician and non-musician participants (N = 176) from three countries (UK, Uruguay, and Mali), selected to vary in their prior experience of hearing and performing these three styles. Participants completed both an aesthetic preference rating task and a perceptual discrimination task for the stimuli. Our results indicate an overall preference toward synchrony in these styles, but culturally contingent, expertise-dependent preferences for deviations from isochrony. This suggests that temporal processing relies on mechanisms that vary in their dependence on low-level and high-level perception, and emphasizes the role of cultural familiarity and expertise in shaping aesthetic preferences.
With a few exceptions, musical taste has been researched via likes or preferences of certain types of music. The present study focuses on disliked music and takes a broad approach to cover ...explanatory strategies related to personal dislikes.
In-depth interviews were conducted with 21 participants in five age groups. Interviewees were asked to prepare a list of their disliked music, and for each item they were asked about the reasons for the dislike. To ensure that the complexity and range of the participants' dislikes and rationales were captured in the analysis, a structuring content analysis as a mostly theory-driven approach was combined with inductive category creation out of the interview data.
The most often mentioned type of dislike was musical style, followed by artist and genre. Five main reference points were identified for describing musical dislikes: the music itself, lyrics, performance, artist, and the people who listen to it. The identified rationales for disliked music were assigned to three larger categories: object-related reasons, such as music-compositional aspects, aesthetic dichotomies or lyrics; subject-related reasons, such as emotional or bodily effects, or discrepancies with the self-image; social reasons, which refer to one's social environment and the taste judgments common to it (in-group) or to other groups of which the participants do not feel part of (out-group). Apart from the rationales for disliked music, the participants described specific reactions when they are confronted with their disliked music, such as emotional, physical, and social reactions.
While musical dislikes have already been shown to fulfill important social functions, the current study extends the rationales to music-related and self-related reasons. Musical dislikes fulfill similar functions to liked music, such as preservation of a good mood, identity expression and construction, strengthening of group cohesion as well as social distinction.
The perception of tension and release dynamics constitutes one of the essential aspects of music listening. However, modeling musical tension to predict perception of listeners has been a challenge ...to researchers. Seminal work demonstrated that tension is reported consistently by listeners and can be accurately predicted from a discrete set of musical features, combining them into a weighted sum of slopes reflecting their combined dynamics over time. However, previous modeling approaches lack an automatic pipeline for feature extraction that would make them widely accessible to researchers in the field. Here, we present TenseMusic: an open-source automatic predictive tension model that operates with a musical audio as the only input. Using state-of-the-art music information retrieval (MIR) methods, it automatically extracts a set of six features (i.e., loudness, pitch height, tonal tension, roughness, tempo, and onset frequency) to use as predictors for musical tension. The algorithm was optimized using Lasso regression to best predict behavioral tension ratings collected on 38 Western classical musical pieces. Its performance was then tested by assessing the correlation between the predicted tension and unseen continuous behavioral tension ratings yielding large mean correlations between ratings and predictions approximating r = .60 across all pieces. We hope that providing the research community with this well-validated open-source tool for predicting musical tension will motivate further work in music cognition and contribute to elucidate the neural and cognitive correlates of tension dynamics for various musical genres and cultures.
This article examines the creation and early dissemination of John Field's nocturnes, tracing this œuvre through initial publications in St Petersburg by Dalmas (1812; H24–25) to the posthumous ...collected editions by Schuberth and Liszt first released in the 1850s. Inspired by discourse on music and environment, I take the peculiar qualities of Russian night landscapes as a key factor in understanding how these works were composed and then marketed internationally. Although little documentation remains of Field's Russian experiences as described in his own voice, it is possible to reconstruct the place in which he worked through his musical publications, related contemporary descriptions, images and recollections of friends and admirers. These sources shed fresh light on his shift in musical style on relocation from England to Russia. Viewing Field's nocturnes through the lens of this landscape, both real and as imagined by later promoters such as Liszt, offers the opportunity to reach a newly nuanced understanding of Field's array of national identities – Irish, English and Russian – and of his nocturne as a Russia-based idiom.
In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the ...experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide the listener with a tonic as a reference point during the listening experience. We argue that a narrow focus on Western TM may have led to a one-sided view regarding the qualities of the aesthetic experience of music since Western art music from the 20th and 21st century like atonal music (AM) - while lacking a tonal hierarchical structure, and while being highly dissonant and hard to predict - is nevertheless enjoyed by a group of avid listeners. We propose a research focus that investigates, in particular, the experience of AM as a novel and compelling way with which to enhance our understanding of both the aesthetic appreciation of music and the role of predictive models in the context of musical pleasure. We use music theoretical analysis and music information retrieval methods to demonstrate how AM presents the listener with a highly uncertain auditory environment. Specifically, an analysis of a corpus of 100 musical segments is used to illustrate how tonal classical music and AM differ quantitatively in terms of both key and pulse clarity values. We then examine person related, extrinsic and intrinsic factors, that point to potential mechanisms underlying the appreciation and pleasure derived from AM. We argue that personality traits like "openness to experience," the framing of AM as art, and the mere exposure effect are key components of such mechanisms. We further argue that neural correlates of uncertainty estimation could represent a central mechanism for engaging with AM and that such contexts engender a comparatively weak predictive model in the listener. Finally we argue that in such uncertain contexts, correct predictions may be more subjectively rewarding than prediction errors since they signal to the individual that their predictive model is improving.
Individual differences in the strength of music preference are among the most intricate psychological phenomena. While one person gets by very well without music, another person needs to listen to ...music every day and spends a lot of temporal and financial resources on listening to music, attending concerts, or buying concert tickets. Where do these differences come from? The hypothesis presented in this article is that the strength of music preference is mainly informed by the functions that music fulfills in people's lives (e.g., to regulate emotions, moods, or physiological arousal; to promote self-awareness; to foster social relatedness). Data were collected with a diary study, in which 121 respondents documented the goals they tried to attain and the effects that actually occurred for up to 5 music-listening episodes per day for 10 successive days. As expected, listeners reporting more intense experience of the functional use of music in the past (1) had a stronger intention to listen to music to attain specific goals in specific situations and (2) showed a larger overall strength of music preference. It is concluded that the functional effectiveness of music listening should be incorporated in existing models and frameworks of music preference to produce better predictions of interindividual differences in the strength of music preference. The predictability of musical style/genre preferences is also discussed with regard to the present results.
In this study we examine the effects of experience and culture on choral teachers' description of choral tone across a range of genres. What does a "good" choral music performance sound like? Is ...there an objective standard of performance excellence, or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? In teacher preparation programs, choral directors in the United States have been taught to identify and teach particular, culturally-bounded standards of choral tone in their students. Choral directors evaluate their students' voices along two dimensions: health and appropriateness. They discern and describe whether the student's musical instrument-their voice-is producing sound in a healthy and non-damaging way. They also judge whether the style of their sound is appropriate for the music they are singing. However, teacher preparation programs do not provide common standards or lexicon for describing tone. This may increase implicit bias of individual directors, and inadvertently exacerbate ethnocentrism and harm students' self-perception. Using a computational text analysis approach, we evaluate the content of open-ended survey responses from teachers, finding that the language used to describe and rate choral performance varies by experience, and by the choral selection (e.g., whether it is a traditional Western or non-Western song). We suggest that regularizing the terminology and providing common training through professional organizations can minimize potential bias and generate more systematic, precise use of qualitative descriptors of health and appropriateness, which will benefit students and teachers.
Music streaming services encompass features that enable the organization of music into playlists. This article inquires how users describe and make sense of practices and experiences of creating, ...curating, maintaining, and using personal playlists. The analysis relies on a mixed-method study, including music-diary self-reports, online observations, and in-depth interviews with 12 heavy users of Spotify or/and WiMP Music. The findings suggest heterogeneous management of static and dynamic playlists based on structural and contextual schemes of aggregating music. User control motivates different playlist practices that demonstrate new ways of collecting music via streaming services but also derive from pre-digital collecting.
Apprendre la musique demande le développement de multiples compétences dont le développement de l'oreille, la compréhension de la théorie, le jeu à l'instrument et la maîtrise de différents styles ...musicaux. Ces différents éléments sont, bien entendu, étroitement liés et complémentaires. La maîtrise des compétences auditives dépend de la compréhension des phénomènes théoriques, tandis que la théorie prend tout son sens lorsqu'elle est mise en application lors de prestations musicales. Cet article a pour but d'aiguiller les enseignants, afin de balancer théorie et expérience musicale, par le concept d'éducation de Zoltán Kodály. Pour ce faire, j'aborderai tout d'abord les qualités d'un bon musicien, puis les outils pédagogiques que l'on peut trouver dans cette approche pédagogique. Enfin, la centralité de l'expérience musicale sera discutée en termes d'équilibre entre enseigner la musique à nos élèves et faire de la musique avec eux.
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