Drawing Contemporary Music: New Approaches to the Analysis of Creative Representations of Complex Sound Stimuli

Musicians are more sensitive to acoustic features such as onset timing and frequency (Levitin, 2006). Musical training may enhance the processing of acoustic information for speech sounds as musicians have a more accurate temporal and tonal representation of auditory stimuli than their non-musician counterparts (Kraus & Chandrasekaran, 2010; Parbery-Clark et al., 2009; Zendel & Alain, 2008). These studies suggest that musical training may enhance the processing of acoustic information for speech sounds. In the current study, we hypothesized that musical training would enhance speech perception and discrimination in musicians by engaging perceptual and attentional mechanisms more typically associated with music processing. Here, we performed a perceptual behavioral experiment using speech stimuli differing in voice onset and presented in a dichotic listening task paradigm to address whether musical training improves phonemic discrimination. Subjects either indicated aural location for a specified speech sound or identified a specific speech sound from a directed aural location. Musical training effects were reflected by diminished performance in specific perceptual conditions. We believe these results may reflect a decreased sensitivity to temporally based acoustic features of speech due to musical training on specific instruments and an indirect translation of musical cues into functional linguistic cues.

Interrelations between creativity, innovativeness and entrepreneurial skills of individuals have long been discussed in the literature. Due to the challenges regarding their measurement, most studies focused on the intentions rather than the outcomes. The idea generation that requires creativity is the first stage of social innovation. The young population's creative potentials in participating social innovation practices deserve a special attention as they play a critical role in the innovativeness and entrepreneurship of societies. This study aims to explore the factors that determine the creative intentions of university students that are important in generating social innovation projects. A structured survey based on the literature was conducted among 600 management and engineering students from 3 universities from the different percentiles of the Entrepreneurial and Innovative University Index for 2012 of the Turkish Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology. The survey included questions on the demographic characteristics, environmental factors, motivators, university/institutional context, perceptions and creative thinking attitudes. By conducting reliability and factor analysis, accuracy and validity of data is tested and the impact factors were identified. Findings reveal that visionary attitude, curiosity, exploration and learning, attitude for own creativity, self-esteem, perception about the learnability of creativity, university and social environment are components of creative thinking intentions of students and some of these factors vary by year of study and university.

Introduction: Musical performance is thought to rely predominantly on event-based timing involving a clock-like neural process and an explicit internal representation of the time interval. Some aspects of musical performance may rely on emergent timing, which is established through the optimization of movement kinematics, and can be maintained without reference to any explicit representation of the time interval. We predicted that musical training would have its largest effect on event-based timing, supporting the dissociability of these timing processes and the dominance of event-based timing in musical performance.Materials and Methods: We compared 22 musicians and 17 non-musicians on the prototypical event-based timing task of finger tapping and on the typically emergently timed task of circle drawing. For each task, participants first responded in synchrony with a metronome (Paced) and then responded at the same rate without the metronome (Unpaced).Results: Analyses of the Unpaced phase revealed that non-musicians were more variable in their inter-response intervals for finger tapping compared to circle drawing. Musicians did not differ between the two tasks. Between groups, non-musicians were more variable than musicians for tapping but not for drawing. We were able to show that the differences were due to less timer variability in musicians on the tapping task. Correlational analyses of movement jerk and inter-response interval variability revealed a negative association for tapping and a positive association for drawing in non-musicians only.Discussion: These results suggest that musical training affects temporal variability in tapping but not drawing. Additionally, musicians and non-musicians may be employing different movement strategies to maintain accurate timing in the two tasks. These findings add to our understanding of how musical training affects timing and support the dissociability of event-based and emergent timing modes.

Musicians have a more accurate temporal and tonal representation of auditory stimuli than their non-musician counterparts (Musacchia et al., 2007; Parbery-Clark et al., 2009a; Zendel and Alain, 2009; Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010). Musicians who are adept at the production and perception of music are also more sensitive to key acoustic features of speech such as voice onset timing and pitch. Together, these data suggest that musical training may enhance the processing of acoustic information for speech sounds. In the current study, we sought to provide neural evidence that musicians process speech and music in a similar way. We hypothesized that for musicians, right hemisphere areas traditionally associated with music are also engaged for the processing of speech sounds. In contrast we predicted that in non-musicians processing of speech sounds would be localized to traditional left hemisphere language areas. Speech stimuli differing in voice onset time was presented using a dichotic listening paradigm. Subjects either indicated aural location for a specified speech sound or identified a specific speech sound from a directed aural location. Musical training effects and organization of acoustic features were reflected by activity in source generators of the P50. This included greater activation of right middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus in musicians. The findings demonstrate recruitment of right hemisphere in musicians for discriminating speech sounds and a putative broadening of their language network. Musicians appear to have an increased sensitivity to acoustic features and enhanced selective attention to temporal features of speech that is facilitated by musical training and supported, in part, by right hemisphere homologues of established speech processing regions of the brain.

Many of today's monks and nuns are active composers: some have entered their communities as highly trained musicians, while others find themselves drawn to musical expression after profession. But how does such a creative musical response relate to the monastic atmosphere of hesychia (prayerful silence), and does this response differ in secular experiences of a prayerful silence? This paper provides an ethnographic account of the relationship between hesychia and creative response among twenty-first-century monastic musicians in the Western tradition, comparing these responses with those from secular Christian composers and from composers in the Quaker tradition for whom silence is, as for monastics, an integral component of worship; the issues are then explored in the context of methodological constructs for discursive meditation and contemplative prayer, and of conceptual notions of silence. This paper argues that essential differences between monastic and secular experiences of silence are significant regulators of creative response to hesychia.

Karol Szymanowski and multiculturalism

Auditory perceptual learning and changes in the conceptualization of auditory cortex

<p>Prior studies have demonstrated musicianship enhancements of various aspects of auditory and cognitive processing in older adults, but musical training has rarely been examined as an intervention for mitigating age-related declines in these abilities. The current study investigates whether 10 weeks of choir participation can improve aspects of auditory processing in older adults, particularly speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. A choir-singing group and an age- and audiometrically-matched do-nothing control group underwent pre- and post-testing over a 10-week period. Linear mixed effects modeling in a regression analysis showed that choir participants demonstrated improvements in speech-in-noise perception, pitch discrimination ability, and the strength of the neural representation of speech fundamental frequency. Choir participants’ gains in SIN perception were mediated by improvements in pitch discrimination, which was in turn predicted by the strength of the neural representation of speech stimuli (FFR), suggesting improvements in pitch processing as a possible mechanism for this SIN perceptual improvement. These findings support the hypothesis that short-term choir participation is an effective intervention for mitigating age-related hearing losses.</p>

<p>Prior studies have demonstrated musicianship enhancements of various aspects of auditory and cognitive processing in older adults, but musical training has rarely been examined as an intervention for mitigating age-related declines in these abilities. The current study investigates whether 10 weeks of choir participation can improve aspects of auditory processing in older adults, particularly speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. A choir-singing group and an age- and audiometrically-matched do-nothing control group underwent pre- and post-testing over a 10-week period. Linear mixed effects modeling in a regression analysis showed that choir participants demonstrated improvements in speech-in-noise perception, pitch discrimination ability, and the strength of the neural representation of speech fundamental frequency. Choir participants’ gains in SIN perception were mediated by improvements in pitch discrimination, which was in turn predicted by the strength of the neural representation of speech stimuli (FFR), suggesting improvements in pitch processing as a possible mechanism for this SIN perceptual improvement. These findings support the hypothesis that short-term choir participation is an effective intervention for mitigating age-related hearing losses.</p>

Prior studies have demonstrated musicianship enhancements of various aspects of auditory and cognitive processing in older adults, but musical training has rarely been examined as an intervention for mitigating age-related declines in these abilities. The current study investigates whether 10 weeks of choir participation can improve aspects of auditory processing in older adults, particularly speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. A choir-singing group and an age- and audiometrically-matched do-nothing control group underwent pre- and post-testing over a 10-week period. Linear mixed effects modeling in a regression analysis showed that choir participants demonstrated improvements in speech-in-noise perception, pitch discrimination ability, and the strength of the neural representation of speech fundamental frequency. Choir participants’ gains in SIN perception were mediated by improvements in pitch discrimination, which was in turn predicted by the strength of the neural representation of speech stimuli (FFR), suggesting improvements in pitch processing as a possible mechanism for this SIN perceptual improvement. These findings support the hypothesis that short-term choir participation is an effective intervention for mitigating age-related hearing losses.

Plasticity in the auditory system

Musically trained and untrained children between 4 and 6 years of age were tested for their discrimination of transformations of an unfamiliar six-tone melody. Transformations involved a change in one, two, or all three of the following features: melodic contour, musical intervals, or individual frequencies. In order to manipulate task difficulty, melodies were played at different presentation rates. Results revealed that discrimination performance varied as a function of (1) musical training, (2) what features of a melody were changed, (3) number of features of a melody that changed, and (4) rate of presentation. Musically trained children performed better than children without training, they showed enhanced sensitivity to the more specific melodic features (i. e., individual frequencies), they were better at detecting transformations involving changes in a fewer number of features, and their performance was unaffected by rate of presentation. In contrast, children without training attended primarily to more general pattern features (i. e., melodic contour) and needed a change involving a larger number of musical features for reliable discrimination of a transformation. In general, as the rate of presentation of the melody increased a decrement in performance occurred for untrained listeners, but the magnitude of these effects varied with transformation type.

This text is a resource on musical development and training for children of primary age. More than a compilation of methods, this book presents contemporary theories and practices of music education including strategies for developing pitch, vocal, rhythmic, instrumental, listening, movement and creative responses in children. Also inlcuded are specific chapters on technology, multiculturalism, special learners, assessment, and curriculum integration and development.

The olfactory space in the novel “Against the Grain” (“À rebours”) by J.-C. Huysmans is for the first time analysed from the perspective of Kulturphilosophie. A number of methods, particularly analytical and historical-cultural, can be used to examine this topic. At the same time, the approach of Kulturphilosophie can be applied to the semantic field of the phenomenon of smell. The article deals with the research experience of flower-images and perfume aspects concerning odoric passages in the novel. The text of the novel “Against the Grain” is examined in detail. Specific features of the use of natural, artificial, metaphysical odorisms or components referring to them are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the meaning and symbolism of some of the scents included in the novel, which have come to mark the epoch of “fin de siècle”. On the basis of the analysis of the novel’s olfactory, the olfactory and near-olfactory passages composing the text’s odoristic universe are classified into four groups, taking into account the origin (natural – artificial), the type of perception (syncretic), reality or unreality of embodiment (real – metaphysical). The Kulturphilosophie approach to the novel “Against the Grain” makes it possible to reveal the objectifications of smells, to structure them, to trace their role in revealing the author's creative intentions, and to decipher their hidden meanings, comparing them with cultural trends and creative experiments of the “fin de siècle” epoch.

This paper explores perceived and experienced emotions elicited by computer-generated music. During the experiments, 30 participants listened to 20 excerpts. Each of the excerpts lasted for about 16 seconds and was generated in real-time by specifically designed software. Measurements were performed using both categorical (a free verbal description) and dimensional approaches. The relationship between structural factors of music (mode, tempo, pitch height, rhythm, articulation, and presence of the dissonance) and emotions was examined. Personal characteristics of the listener: gender and music training were also taken into account. The relationship between structural factors and the perceived emotions was mostly congruent with predictions derived from the literature, and the relationship between those factors and experienced emotions was very similar. Tempo and pitch height – the cues common to music and speech – turned out to have a strong influence on the evaluation of emotion. Personal factors had a marginal effect. In the case of verbal categories comparable with the dimensional model, a strong correspondence was found.