Carl Seashore Research Articles

Book Review: Destined to Fail: Carl Seashore’s World of Eugenics, Psychology, Education, and Music

Book Review: Destined to Fail: Carl Seashore’s World of Eugenics, Psychology, Education, and Music

“Destined to Fail”: Carl Seashore’s World of Eugenics, Psychology, Education, and Music by Julia Eklund Koza (review)

“Destined to Fail”: Carl Seashore’s World of Eugenics, Psychology, Education, and Music by Julia Eklund Koza (review)

Aesthetics in the Eugenics Movement: A Critical Examination

Abstract Although multiple scholars have pushed music education to embrace the aesthetic as a curricular and pedagogical touchstone, research surrounding this aesthetic turn has largely framed aesthetics as a sensory experience rather than a social technology (one that can both liberate and oppress). In response, I address the following question: how do uncritical aesthetic philosophies and the experiences they engender act as a means of oppression within music education? By way of example, I approach this question through a text analysis of writings on aesthetics from The Eugenics Review, a long-running publication that disseminated eugenics news and research. In doing so, I construct a eugenical theory of aesthetics that illuminates how eugenicists used aesthetics to enact what Foucault defines as pastoral power and assert control of bodies and populations through education. I then frame the writings of Carl Seashore (a pioneering music education researcher and avowed eugenicist) within this eugenical theory of aesthetics, revealing the ways that Seashore used aesthetic theory to forward eugenical arguments. I conclude with implications for contemporary educators and researchers, sounding a call for a deep and critical examination of all aesthetic formations within music education.

Measuring Audiation or Tonal Memory? Evaluation of the Discriminant Validity of Edwin E. Gordon's “Advanced Measures of Music Audiation”

Edwin E. Gordon developed the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA) test to quantify the extent of an adult's stabilized audiation as a fundamental indicator of musical ability. Although intended to measure audiation exclusively, AMMA is based on a test design similar to the tonal memory subtest of the much older Measures of Musical Talents (SMMT) test developed by Carl Seashore (1919). However, previous studies have shown mixed results regarding AMMA's construct validity. It therefore remains unclear whether AMMA is suitable for measuring audiation exclusively, as intended by Gordon, or whether it additionally measures tonal memory. Accordingly, we tested this hypothesis in two steps. First, responses of 364 participants were used to identify – in terms of the Rasch model – those items of AMMA that could form a “revised” scale showing measurement invariance; second, we used a Bayesian post hoc correlation analysis ( N = 83) to measure the construct (discriminant) validity of the revised version of AMMA compared to an equal number of items in the tonal memory subtest of SMMT. Results from both studies revealed that (a) only five out of 30 items of AMMA showed a model fit that was adequate to form a scale which meets the psychometric requirements of invariant measurement, although with a low internal consistency and an increased probability for ceiling effects, and that (b) both measurements showed a strong correlation ( Mdnτ = 0.56, 95% CI [0.42, 0.70], BF+0 = 2.67·1012). We can thus conclude that there is no practical evidence to assume that both test procedures (AMMA and SMMT) are independent.

Recapturing the musical performance data in Seashore’s published performance scores

In the first half of the 20th century, Carl Seashore and colleagues undertook extensive work in performance analysis of a variety of instruments. Their data were embodied in so-called performance scores, which still exist as illustrations of laborious work undertaken by the early pioneers of music performance research and, in their original form, offer today’s researchers the opportunity to only visually examine the experimental data. This article describes the use of image-processing methods to accurately convert the visual data in Seashore’s performance scores into data points. This use of technology offers researchers the opportunity to directly engage with the data collected in Seashore’s laboratory, either for the purposes of validation or performing analyses for which the researchers in Seashore’s time did not have the computational facilities or algorithms to perform. This paper also presents a proof-of-concept study of the vocal performance scores in Harold Seashore’s “An Objective Analysis of Artistic Singing” (1936). Specifically, this study analyzes extracted fundamental frequency data in regards to vibrato rate and depth. Discrepancies between the statistics calculated on the digitized data and those reported in H. Seashore’s publication are discussed, as well as other types of analysis that may be performed on the extracted data.

Debating Music “Appreciation” outside the American Classroom, 1930–1950

Those teaching to American schoolchildren faced a fissure of sorts during the 1930s and 1940s. On one side of this divide stood Carl Seashore and the educators who embraced his philosophy. They promoted a sometimes arduous form of teaching and believed that the results of this tutelage could be quantitatively assessed. On the other side stood pedagogues influenced by the era's burgeoning learner-centered philosophy, educators who embraced the more individualized and friendly approach advocated by James Mursell and Mabelle Glenn. This well-known binary paradigm was born just as a impulse swept through America. The increasingly popular listening lessons billed as music became not just an aspect of in-school education for children but also a veritable music-appreciation industry targeting adults. It is my contention that the fissure in education, while certainly reflective of specific pedagogical trends and debates, also related to a more basic dialogue about what it meant to appreciate music. In this article, I will connect the Seashore-Mursell/Glenn binary to contemporaneous discourse about the meaning of extracurricular appreciation--discourse that occurred in many musical fields and also affected life across the Atlantic. More importantly, I will demonstrate that this discourse also played out within the pages of music-appreciation literature. This exploration will ultimately show that, while teachers were certainly grappling with new ideas about learner-centered education, this process was also influenced by and reflective of larger skirmishes about the nature of highbrow achievement that accompanied the fervor of the 1930s and 1940s. Debating Appreciation in Middlebrow America and American Schools Some comments about terminology must precede the analysis. While the phrase appreciation was prevalent in several contexts in early twentieth-century America, two uses predominated. On the one hand, schoolteachers often used this descriptor in reference to the era's increasingly popular lessons in listening. On the other hand, the term appreciation was also applied more generally to education offered to the adult layperson. While these two understandings are complex, the terrain of early twentieth-century appreciation is even thornier because there was a good deal of overlap between its curricular and extracurricular varieties. Many instructional books, for example, were written by renowned educators but were nevertheless aimed at both young students and adult laypeople. Nonetheless, terminology must be adopted to help readers make the distinction. I most often employ the phrase education to indicate school teaching (of appreciation, performance, or anything else). The term teachers will also be used in reference to official education within the school. The terms appreciation and education, meanwhile, will generally be used in discussions of the appreciation industry and its wares. Words such as educational and pedagogical will be utilized more generally. Discussion of the term is also needed. As others have chronicled the history of this term (1) and as its negative connotations burgeoned after the period discussed in this article, here I will unpack its meaning only briefly. The term became widely pejorative during the middle of the twentieth century through the writings of authors such as Russell Lynes and Dwight MacDonald. (2) MacDonald is especially important because he arguably brought criticism of the midcult and the middlebrow to new heights. Janice Radway has summarized MacDonald's critique of the Book-of-the-Month Club in a manner that astutely captures his overall perspective: [In 1960] MacDonald railed against the spreading 'tepid ooze of Midcult' and identified the Book-of-the-Month Club and its judges . …

Electrifying Speeches: Emotional Control and the Technological Aesthetic of the Voice in the Early 20th Century US

The 1920s saw the emotionally dramatic practice of elocution replaced by a more restrained model of public speaking. During this period, the “Pronunciphone” Company sold phonographs designed to teach the appropriate pronunciation of words alongside psychologist Carl Seashore’s phonophoto-graphic images of scientifically defined beautiful vocal performances. As these and other thinkers produced technologies to measure, manipulate, and improve the voice, speech acquired a technological aesthetic—something demonstrated particularly well by the speech of the radio announcer. Good speech was to be controlled, controlling, and efficient, much like the technologies through which it could be captured and broadcast. Looking at this history sheds an important light on a variety of ways in which technologies are used in speech, exposing the rhetorics of technology and emotion that underlie both past and present discourses of speech technologies.

Not Just Your Average Beauty: Carl Seashore and the History of Communication Research in the United States

This article argues for the relevance of the work of Carl Seashore to the history of communication research in the United States. A psychologist at the University of Iowa in the early 20th century, Seashore's laboratory took up questions regarding the psychology of music and art with direct relevance to communication studies and influenced such important figures as Wilbur Schramm and Kurt Lewin. Exploring this history offers a more robust picture of the history of experimental communication research in the United States and provides an important corrective to contemporary histories of the field.

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

ABSTRACT - Recorded music offers a wealth of information for studying practice. This paper examines the challenges of automatically extracting information from audio recordings of the singing voice and discusses our technique for automati catty extracting information such as note timings, intonation, vibrato rates, and dynamics. An experiment is also presented that focuses on the tuning of semitones in solo soprano performances of Schubert's Ave Maria by non-professional and professional singers. We found a small decrease in size of intervals with a leading tone function only in the non-professional group. KEYWORDS - vocal intonation, analysis, audio annotation This paper describes the challenges that arise when attempting to automatically extract pitchrelated data from recordings of the singing voice. The first section of the paper provides an overview of the history of analyzing recorded performances. The second section describes an algorithm for automatically extracting data from recordings of the singing voice where a score of the is available. The algorithm first identifies note onsets and offsets. Once the onsets and offsets have been determined, intonation, vibrato, and dynamic characteristics can be calculated for each note. The main experiment of the paper, described in the third section, is a study of intonation in solo vocal performance, where both the note onsets and offsets and fundamental frequency were estimated automatically. In the study, six non-professional and six professional sopranos performed Schubert's Ave Maria three times a cappella and three times with a recorded piano accompaniment. Our analysis of these recordings focused on the intonation of ascending and descending semitones. We found that the A-Bl, intervals with a leading tone function were on average 8 cents smaller than the non-leading tone A-Bb, but that their average size was approximately the same as the other semitones performed in the piece, regardless of intervallic direction or accompaniment. PREVIOUS WORK ON THE ANALYSIS OF RECORDED PERFORMANCES Interest in studying recorded performances dates back almost as far as the birth of recordable media, beginning with Dayton Miller's (1916) work on visualized pitch information in recordings with phonophotographic apparati. The psychologist Carl Seashore and colleagues at the University of Iowa also undertook extensive work in analysis (Seashore, 1938) employing a number of techniques to study recorded performances. Piano performances were studied from both piano rolls and films of the movement of the hammers during the performance. The team also undertook numerous studies of singing. Schoen (1922) studied five performances of Gounod's setting of the Ave Maria. He found that tuning depended on the direction of the line: notes following a lower tone tended to be flatter whereas notes followed by a higher note tended to be sharper. In general the singers were sharper than either equal temperament or just intonation. Easley's study of vibrato in opera singers found that the rate of the singer's vibrato was faster and the depth broader in songs from opera as compared to concert songs (Easley, 1932). Bartholomew (1934) studied vibrato along with other acoustic features of the singing voice in an attempt to define good singing. He observed the vibrato to be sinusoidal in nature and its rate to be approximately 6-7 Hz. H. G. Seashore (1936) also looked at Gounod's setting of the Ave Maria, as well as Handel's Messiah. He studied nine performances and focused on the connections, or glides, between notes. He was able to correlate glide extent with direction, finding that glide extent was larger going up than going down. Miller (1936) provided a large amount of detail through performance scores, though a lot of the data was not analyzed. His study of vibrato found that the rate of vibrato fell between 5. …

Autobiography and psychomusicology: Introduction to the special issue “A history of music psychology in autobiography”.

ABSTRACT-This special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain presents the scholarly autobiographies of 12 pioneers in the psychology of music. Each has witnessed over four decades of academic life and has contributed to the foundation of the field of music psychology that now flourishes. Authors were asked to recount the influences on their careers and to share lessons learned. Each of these inspirational histories exemplifies originality, tenacity, insight, and intellect. Common themes and connections among the biographies also provide a context for better understanding the present discipline of the psychology of music. Representing the United States, the most prolific country in an absolute sense, are papers by Jay Dowling, Mari Riess Jones, Roger Shepard, and a co-authored paper by James Carlsen, Jack Taylor, and David Brian Williams. The extensive international activity in the field is represented by Lola Cuddy (Canada), Andrew Gregory (UK), Alf Gabrielsson (Sweden), Helga de la Motte (Germany), Kengo Ohgushi (Japan) and Andrzej Rakowski (Poland). Together the authors reflect the scope of the psychology of music and highlight its importance to interdisciplinary scholarship. As pointed out by guest co-editor Amy Graziano in a final review, the collection is testament to the development of a research community. The special issue also contributes to the history of psychology in general and to the field of biography. At a recent biennial meeting of the Society of Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC, 2007), outgoing President Mari Riess Jones commented to the plenary group of several hundred in attendance that such a large gathering was not to be taken lightly. Her observation resonated with those of us in the authence who had watched the field escalate over the last decades. In view of the growth of the field, I had suggested to the Associate Editors of Psychomusicology, Lauren Stewart, Bruno Repp, and W. Jay Dowling, the possibility of an autobiographical issue to capture and celebrate the progress so unimaginable years ago. As we were all attending the SMPC meeting, we decided then and there to proceed with the idea, particularly encouraged by the agreement of Jay Dowling to contribute his own history. Later at the conference we invited autobiographies from two eminent pioneers of the field, Lola Cuddy and Mari Jones herself, both of whom were longstanding members of the Consulting Board of Psychomusicology. In the weeks ahead, others were invited, and the idea of the autobiographical issue became the reality you see before you. Gathering autobiographical writings in psychology is by no means new. Approximately two dozen autobiographies of psychologists are published in the series begun by Carl Murchison (Volumes I - III, 1930-1936) with the project taken on by Gardner Lindzey, Edwin Boring and their collaborators in later years (to Volume IX, 2007). Among the autobiographies in the Murchison series are those of Carl Seashore (1930/1961) and Carl Stumpf (1930/1961), who devoted much of their careers to music psychology. It is important for the field to see the recognition of their work within the early history of psychology. More recently, a four-volume History of Neuroscience in Autobiography (Squire, 1996, 1998) has been compiled. James Birren and Johannes Schroots (2000) also published 24 autobiographies associated with the field of geropsychology. Countering the disproportionate male representation in these volumes is a three-volume series edited by Agnes O'Connell (1983, 2001; O'Connell & Russo, 1988) of 53 autobiographical reflections of women in psychology. Robert Sternberg (2002) edited a volume of autobiographical chapters written by psychologists who defied the crowd. Sadly, none of the recent pioneers in music psychology were among any of these collections. For their impact and often their defiance of the crowd, their stories have every reason to be told. Autobiography satisfies a natural curiosity that people have about other people. …

Otto Rudolph Ortmann, Music Philosophy, and Music Education

What is music? What should we teach when we teach music? How should we? In the early twentieth century, these most foundational questions relating to music education were addressed by the highly regarded, though less well known, educator and researcher, Otto Rudolph Ortmann. In 1922, he published an article in which he outlined a theory of musical experience, developing aspects of the physics of sound, qualitative theory, and Gestalt psychology, prefiguring important ideas in music philosophy. Ortmann highly valued his theory, utilized it in other research throughout his career, and influenced others such as Carl Seashore. Few, however, seem to be aware of his work or its implications for music education.1

Musical Aptitude Testing: From James McKeen Cattell to Carl Emil Seashore

The purpose of this article is to describe the links between late nineteenth-century psychological research and the early musical aptitude research of Carl Emil Seashore (1866-1949). The primary link was the music-related research of the leader of the mental testing movement during the 1890s, Columbia University psychologist James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944). German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt instructed Cattell in the German scientific tradition, and English researcher Francis Galton encouraged Cattell's research on individual differences and introduced him to statistical methods. During the 1890s, Cattell conducted a longitudinal study, the hypothesis for which was that tests of sensory discrimination ability, including musical discrimination, would correlate with undergraduates' academic grades. After his study failed to produce the expected results, the mental testing movement followed Alfred Binet and Victor Henri of France, and Cattell turned to other activities. However, in the meantime, Cattell influenced many other important psychologists, including Edward W. Scripture, Carl Seashore's doctoral mentor at Yale University, and eventually Seashore himself. Despite the mental testing movement's shift to Binet and Henri's cognitive-type testing, Seashore continued his conservative, sensory approach to the testing of musical aptitude.

Disadvantaged Junior High School Students Compared with Norms of Seashore Measures

The events of recent years have begun to emphasize the characteristics of large numbers of American people variously referred to as tlle lower socioeconomic group, culturally deprived, educationally deprived, underprivileged, disadvantaged, lower class, or socially disadvantaged. It was the aim of this research to oSer some reliability and validity data on the performance of disadvantaged junior high school students on music aptitude and ability tests.1 There is reason to believe that although musical environment and creativity are brought about by a variety of factors, there are certain basic psychophysical capacities that are of fundamental importance in musical success. Of course, such extramusical variables as home environment and socioeconomic level, which are not generally evaluated, also may be relevant in determining levels of music aptitude. Certain psychophysical capacities were defined and measured in a series of studies by Carl Seashore of the University of lowa, resulting in the instrument used in this study, The Seashore Measures of Musical Talent. The group of tests used primarily for prediction, referred to as aptitude tests, differ from achievement tests in that they do not presuppose training in a particular field, but purport to measure an individual's capacity to profit by instruction in that field. Thus, the measurement of aptitude rather than achievement is more suited to the comparison of the disadvantaged with the Seashore norm groups. The problem under consideration in the present study was a comparison of national norms and some validity data on The Seashore

A note on Carl Seashore as country school teacher

A note on Carl Seashore as country school teacher

The Predictive Measurement of Musical Success

1 HE most striking development in the measurement of musical aptitude1 in recent years has been the sharp and persistent decline in interest in the topic in the United States. There are exceptions, of course, but in many quarters this decline is now almost complete. The reduced status of aptitude testing in music at present is particularly noteworthy because it stands in such marked contrast to the intense activity of earlier decades of this century, beginning with the publication of Carl Seashore's test battery in 1919. As evidence of this decline, I can report the publication of only two new standardized tests in the English language in the last 10 years, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom, though several have been revised. Not only are fewer aptitude tests published currentlyr but unpublished tests are also less numerous. A glance through Dissertation ilbstracts or through a typical bibliography of doctoral dissertations on music testing or on the psychology of music, for example, will usually reveal that only a small fraction of the experimental work going on in music testing has to do with the development of aptitude tests. In order to determine whether the use of aptitude tests is increasing or decreasing, I sought to gather data on the sales of established tests (those 10 years old or older). I was unable to collect much information on this point because publishers were reluctant to reveal competitive sales figures; but what I was able to assemble, though equivocal, did not bear out my hypothesis. Informal data from the publishers of the three such tests that appear to be technically adequate indicated that the sales of these batteries are tending to increase. This apparent discrepancy, I believe, is explainable. First, even though sales may be increasing, I suspect that the rate of increase is lower than the rate of increase of the student population and thus a smaller percentage of students is being tested. Second, it is possible or even likely, that much of the increase in volume is due to the needs of the rapidly proliferating research and development agencies, materials and resource centers, and similar noninstructional institutions. Third, an increase in dollar sales

Music aptitude tests — a commentary

Abstract Since the pioneering work of Carl Seashore, who in 1919 devised batteries of tests designed to measure musical talents,1 psychologists have been increasingly concerned with the search for objective tests which could give a reliable assessment of the musicality of persons without formal musical training.