John A. Sloboda

Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings:

Eighty-three music listeners completed a questionnaire in which thev provided information about the occurrence of a range of physical reactions while listening to music. Shivers down the spine, laughter, tears and lump in the throat were reported by over 80(% of respondents. Respondents were asked to locate specific musical passages that reliably evoked such responses. Structural analysis of these passages showed that tears were most reliablN evoked by passages containing sequences and appogiaturas, while shivers were most reliably evoked by passages containing new or unexpected harmonies. The data generally support theoretical approaches to elmotion based on confirmations and violations of expectancv.

Innate talents: Reality or myth?

Talents that selectively facilitate the acquisition of high levels of skill are said to be present in some children but not others. The evidence for this includes biological correlates of specific abilities, certain rare abilities in autistic savants, and the seemingly spontaneous emergence of exceptional abilities in young children, but there is also contrary evidence indicating an absence of early precursors of high skill levels. An analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of excellence.

Handbook of music and emotion: Theory, research, applications

PART I: OVERTURE PART II: MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES PART III: MEASUREMENT PART IV: MUSIC MAKING PART V: MUSIC LISTENING PART VI: DEVELOPMENT, PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL FACTORS PART VII: APPLICATIONS PART VIII: ENCORE

The communication of musical metre in piano performance

Six pianists of varying levels of experience were required to give repeated performances of a note sequence presented for sight-performance under two conditions. The two conditions differed only in the location of metrical stresses signified by the notation. In condition (b) the bar-lines and beams were shifted one note to the right in comparison to condition (a). Details of note duration and intensity were recorded by computer. This allowed the discovery of significant differences in expressive treatment between the two conditions. There were significant agreements between subjects concerning the position, nature and direction of expressive variation. The more experienced players, however, made greater use of expressive variation than did the less experienced players. In a second experiment listeners were asked to identify the metre of each performance from the first experiment. They achieved greatest success at this with the most experienced player, least success with the least experienced player. A detailed examination of between-performer agreements and disagreements, and their effects on listeners, allowed the isolation of a proposed set of generally effective procedures for signalling stress. These procedures imply the existence of an internal representation guiding performance which identifies the major metrical subdivisions of a bar in the absence of notational symbols specifically marking these subdivisions.

Generative processes in music : the psychology of performance, improvisation, and composition

Eric F. Clarke: Generative principles in music performance Alf Gabrielsson: Timing in music and performance and its relations to music experience Johan Sundberg: Computer synthesis of music performance Rudolf A. Rasch: Timing and synchronization in ensemble performance Linda M. Gruson: Rehearsal skill and musical competence: does practice make perfect? W. Jay Dowling: Tonal structure and childrens early learning of music Jeff Pressing: Improvisation: methods and models Maria Sagi & Ivan Vitanyi: Experimental research into musical generative ability Lyle Davidson & Lawrence Scripp: Young childrens musical representations: windows on music cognition Fred Lerdahl: Cognitive constraints on compositional systems Lyle Davidson & Patricia Welsh: From collections to structure: the development path of tonal thinking.

Visual Perception of Musical Notation: Registering Pitch Symbols in Memory:

Music bears formal relations to language which suggest that perceptual processes in the two modes may also be similar. These experiments examined the way in which experienced musicians differed from non-musicians in their recognition of briefly exposed pitch notation. Experiments I and II together demonstrated that musicians are superior to non-musicians in their immediate written recall of stimuli containing more than three notes, but only when the stimulus is available to them for 150 ms or more. These results are accounted for well by a model proposed by Coltheart (1972) for letter perception under conditions of brief exposure. In this model, two coding processes act simultaneously on the stimulus, one a fast visual coding, and the other a slower, but more permanent abstract (or name) coding. In this case non-musicians appear to be lacking a second, abstract, coding which musicians possess. Experiments III and IV attempted to investigate the nature of the abstract code for musicians by presenting various types of interference in the linguistic or musical mode. Neither concurrent letter naming nor concurrent memorization of pitches appeared to cause a decrement in the original visual task, suggesting that musicians may not have been using simple naming or pitching transformations in coding the visual input.

Music and emotion

The question of the precise link between music and emotions has exercised scholars since the time of ancient Greece. The goal of this chapter is to review contemporary empirical research on music and emotion primarily within music psychology. We begin by commenting on the recent history of the field. Then, we provide a working definition of emotions. The main part of the chapter is devoted to a systematic overview of empirical studies, first on perception of emotions, and second on arousal of emotions. We then review two specific themes in current research—development and neuroscience—and offer an outlook on the future. We conclude that music-emotion research has solid achievements on which to build, but that the field is in the need of studies with a more theoretical and applicable orientation.

An Exceptional Musical Memory

This article reports a study on a musical idiot savant (NP) who is capable of memorizing large-scale pieces of piano music in three or four hearings. Attempts to memorize two contrasting pieces are documented, one a tonal composition by Grieg, the other an atonal piece by Bartok. The results are compared with those provided by a professional pianist. Transcription of the reproductions shows that NP9s ability is confined to tonal music and is structurally based. In this respect, it resembles the performance of high IQ memorizers and supports the view that general intelligence is not a prerequisite for structure-based skill.

Quantifying Tone Deafness in the General Population

Abstract: Many people reach adulthood without acquiring significant music performance skills (singing or instrumental playing). A substantial proportion of these adults consider that this has come about because they are “not musical.” Some of these people may be “true” congenital amusics, characterized by specific and substantial anomalies in the processing of musical pitch and rhythm sequences, while at the same time displaying normal processing of speech and language. It is likely, however, that many adults who believe that they are unmusical are neurologically normal. We could call these adults “false” amusics. Acquisition of musical competence has multiple personal, social, and environmental precursors. Deficiencies in these areas may lead to lack of musical achievement, despite the fact that an individual possesses the necessary underlying capacities. Adults may therefore self‐define as “unmusical” or “tone‐deaf” for reasons unconnected to any underlying anomaly. This paper reports on two linked research studies. The first is an interview study with adults defining themselves as tone‐deaf or unmusical. The interview schedule was designed to discover what criteria are being used in their self‐definitions. Preliminary results suggest that performance criteria (e.g., judging oneself as unable to sing) play a major role, even for people who claim and demonstrate no perceptual deficits. The second study reports progress on the development of new subtests for a revised version of the Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA, Peretz et al., 2003). This currently contains six tests that allow for the assessment of melodic perception: contour, intervals, scale, rhythm, meter, and recognition memory. The MBEA does not assess two capacities that are generally accepted as central to normal music cognition: harmony and emotion. The development and norming of the emotion subtest will be described. When completed, the MBEA(R) will form a robust screening device for use with the general population, whose purpose is to discriminate “true” from “false” amusics. Such discrimination is essential to achieve a better understanding of the variety of causes of low musical achievement.

Young Musicians' Accounts of Significant Influences in their Early Lives. 1. The Family and the Musical Background

This article reports qualitative findings of an interview study in which 42 students ( aged 10–18 ) from a specialist music school were encouraged to talk about various experiences in their lives which the individual children perceived as having been potentially significant influences on their progress in learning musical instruments. The parents of half the children were also interviewed. Observations concerning the following sources of influence are reported: the family background; sibling influences; listening to music. The insights of children and their parents, which complement and add depth to quantitative findings concerning the biographical precursors of musical excellence, help to provide a rich source of descriptive information about the circumstances in which children become competent young musicians.