Expert Musician Research Articles

Psychophysical characterization of auditory temporal and frequency streaming capacities for listeners with different levels of musical expertise.

Temporal and frequency auditory streaming capacities were assessed for non-musician (NM), expert musician (EM), and amateur musician (AM) listeners using a local-global task and an interleaved melody recognition task, respectively. Data replicate differences previously observed between NM and EM, and reveal that while AM exhibits a local-over-global processing change comparable to EM, their performance for segregating a melody embedded in a stream remains as poor as NM. The observed group partitioning along the temporal-frequency auditory streaming capacity map suggests a sequential, two-step development model of musical learning, whose contributing factors are discussed.

Taking the trumpet up there: enactment of embodied high pitch in a multimodal body schema

Abstract This contribution examines how an expert musician teaches high pitch as an embodied practice in a digital instruction video. Musical meaning-making in this perspective calls for a naturalized phenomenology which deals with the practice of music teaching, which involves a performing body. The notion of high musical pitch in terms of an abstract embodied image schema is challenged in favor of a multidimensional body schema, conceptualized at the interface between multimodal language, i.e. in speech and gesture, and the affordances imposed on musical production by the human body and the instrument artefact. As a result, the traditional metaphorical take on upward verticality, movement and causal force in image schemata becomes a conceptual background which may lead to errors on behalf of the potential student, and needs to be further enriched by natural local corporeal dimensions: immobility, non-vertical change in the lips, mouth and air flow. Such body schemata can be used in teaching more dynamic concepts about enactive knowledge in the body in interactive contexts of knowledge transmission.

Da “Arte da Crítica” e dos injustos comentários a Lereno Selinuntino, o “papagaio brasileiro”: um estudo sobre a crítica a Domingos Caldas Barbosa, em paralelo com a crítica a Machado de Assis e a Catulo

Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1738/40-1800), de pseudônimo Lereno Selinuntino, é um importante poeta do século XVIII, carioca radicado em Lisboa, autor de muitas cantigas, modinhas e lundus. Foi fundador, inclusive, da Academia de Belas Letras de Lisboa, juntamente com Belchior Curvo de Semedo Torres de Sequeira, Joaquim Severino Ferraz de Campos e Francisco Joaquim Bingre. Além de presidente dessa Nova Arcádia, Caldas Barbosa foi responsável pelo Almanak das Musas, importante antologia neoclássica, publicado em 1793, em Lisboa. Apesar de ter feito fama, enquanto vivo, quer nos salões aristocráticos portugueses, quer no Brasil, inclusive, entre muitos ouvintes analfabetos, a crítica sobre sua obra acostumou-se a colocar em segundo plano o “brasileiro papagaio”, como assim se nomeou Lereno, com humor, em seu Almanak. No entanto, não se sancionou, por assim dizer, um dos mais importantes artistas da música e da literatura colonial brasileira, de que foi compositor e intérprete, sendo um exímio poeta e violeiro, seja no Brasil, seja em Portugal, onde introduziu gêneros como a modinha. Este artigo propõe traçar, de modo sintético, o percurso da crítica dirigida a Caldas Barbosa, que recebeu ofensas inclusive de poetas consagrados, com quem participou de muitas atividades literárias no Palácio do Conde de Pombeiro, como Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage (1765-1805) e José Agostinho de Macedo (1761-1831). Também, comentam-se sobre alguns versos de Caldas Barbosa, procurando verificar neles expedientes expressivos que ajudem a compreender a poética lereniana. Para isso, intercalam-se a historiografia crítica mais relevante e comentários sobre as cantigas do poeta, retiradas principalmente da obra Viola de Lereno, publicada em dois volumes (1798; 1826). Em suma, levantam-se argumentos da crítica de Lereno e expõem-se observações a respeito de seus versos, buscando reconhecer-lhe o artístico. Em paralelo, comenta-se sobre a tradição crítica da obra lírica e dramática de Machado de Assis, além da crítica “neotérica” de Cícero, na Roma Antiga, propondo uma reflexão sobre a Historiografia da Crítica.

Applying Self-Regulated Learning and Self-Determination Theory to Optimize the Performance of a Concert Cellist.

The professional practice of classical music performers has been better understood and enhanced across the last two decades through research aimed at tailoring rehearsing strategies that support the development of a sense of self as an agentic and proactive learner. One approach focuses on helping students make use of various tools that can enhance their learning, particularly in terms of what they do, feel and think when practicing and performing music. This study expands literature on expertise development by embracing the idea that this line of research would benefit from additional studies where the researcher forms part of the research process as an active participant who generates data, especially when these researchers are “members” of the social world they study, and therefore have insider knowledge. Thus, this case study is focused on the first author, a professional cellist who is also a researcher in the educational psychology of music, as the only participant. It extends current research by providing a detailed longitudinal mapping of a professional cellist’s preparation across nine profiled concerts in five countries of classical-romantic repertoire and a commercial recording that resulted from 100 weeks of dedicated practice. Anonymous feedback from the audiences and interviews with an expert musician who followed the concerts and the CD recording was also collected. For the data analysis, traditional psychometric measurements were applied to test the internal consistency of the time series data as well as the relationship between variables. In addition, the application of Leximancer analysis of the self-reflections allowed the researchers to probe self-regulated learning (SRL) and self-determination theory (SDT) processes in ways that uniquely mapped, over time, her differing motivations to perform at a high level. Specifically, we report that the cellist’s psychological needs and her motivational resources changed across time within the social context of performing music publicly, and that the various self-regulatory processes she drew upon impacted (both positively and negatively) on her ongoing actions, thoughts and feelings. Implications of the study are relevant for all forms of expertise development research, and especially for understandings about the nature of skill development in the context of learning to perform demanding literature in music.

Openness of the Expert Musician to Innovations to Introduce Civilizations Specifics of the Musical Excellence

The aim of the research is to highlight both the mechanism of thinking and general psychological principles of creativity as part of the musicians` activity initiative. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time in art studies, through the comparison of observations of experts and understanding of apperception (the process in which the elements of consciousness become clear), on which the Renaissance scientists formulated the term Dialogics as the law of the author’s discovery, the concept of creative roll is declared as an active prolongation of psychological pattern for the expert to be ready for innovations to combine the experience of a professional tradition with action motivation quoted by society. Methodology of the research has been analytical, comparative-historical and psychological-orientational approaches, which allowed by comparison establishing the similarity and the difference between historical phenomena in ensuring the interaction of scientific-creative and artistic and poetic decisions in the activities of the expert musician as essentially similar fields of activity and further development of this concept. In addition, the method of art style comparative art as a mechanism of artistic thinking is used, which prompts an active search to create new samples of creative and pedagogical activity and to choose the most effective methods among them. Conclusions. It is proved that the mechanism of artistic thinking inspires the expert musician and a teacher for active search, to create new samples of creative and pedagogical activity and to choose among them the most effective ones. However, its implementation in the creative product depends not only on individual intentions, but also on the external-social circumstances that determine the extent and direction of the implementation of individual needs in the independent targeting of the expert musician. It is the latter, together with the accumulation of experience, in accordance with the law of the Renaissance Dialogics, that designed to introduce the expert into an active search, where the innovative specificity of creative discovery is a result. Thus, the musician’s readiness to innovate in professional activity is defined as a stable new formation in the structure of the musician personality, which manifests itself in the direction of his actions for the continuous improvement, optimization and restoration of professional activity, realized in teaching, development and education both personal and for students.

Measuring the representational space of music with fMRI: a case study with Sting

ABSTRACTFunctional brain imaging has revealed much about the neuroanatomical substrates of higher cognition, including music, language, learning, and memory. The technique lends itself to studying of groups of individuals. In contrast, the nature of expert performance is typically studied through the examination of exceptional individuals using behavioral case studies and retrospective biography. Here, we combined fMRI and the study of an individual who is a world-class expert musician and composer in order to better understand the neural underpinnings of his music perception and cognition, in particular, his mental representations for music. We used state of the art multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational dissimilarity analysis (RDA) in a fixed set of brain regions to test three exploratory hypotheses with the musician Sting: (1) Composing would recruit neutral structures that are both unique and distinguishable from other creative acts, such as composing prose or visual art; (2) listening and imagining music would recruit similar neural regions, indicating that musical memory shares anatomical substrates with music listening; (3) the MVPA and RDA results would help us to map the representational space for music, revealing which musical pieces and genres are perceived to be similar in the musician’s mental models for music. Our hypotheses were confirmed. The act of composing, and even of imagining elements of the composed piece separately, such as melody and rhythm, activated a similar cluster of brain regions, and were distinct from prose and visual art. Listened and imagined music showed high similarity, and in addition, notable similarity/dissimilarity patterns emerged among the various pieces used as stimuli: Muzak and Top 100/Pop songs were far from all other musical styles in Mahalanobis distance (Euclidean representational space), whereas jazz, R&B, tango and rock were comparatively close. Closer inspection revealed principaled explanations for the similarity clusters found, based on key, tempo, motif, and orchestration.

Expert music performance: cognitive, neural, and developmental bases.

In this chapter, we explore what happens in the brain of an expert musician during performance. Understanding expert music performance is interesting to cognitive neuroscientists not only because it tests the limits of human memory and movement, but also because studying expert musicianship can help us understand skilled human behavior in general. In this chapter, we outline important facets of our current understanding of the cognitive and neural basis for music performance, and developmental factors that may underlie musical ability. We address three main questions. (1) What is expert performance? (2) How do musicians achieve expert-level performance? (3) How does expert performance come about? We address the first question by describing musicians' ability to remember, plan, execute, and monitor their performances in order to perform music accurately and expressively. We address the second question by reviewing evidence for possible cognitive and neural mechanisms that may underlie or contribute to expert music performance, including the integration of sound and movement, feedforward and feedback motor control processes, expectancy, and imagery. We further discuss how neural circuits in auditory, motor, parietal, subcortical, and frontal cortex all contribute to different facets of musical expertise. Finally, we address the third question by reviewing evidence for the heritability of musical expertise and for how expertise develops through training and practice. We end by discussing outlooks for future work.

Emotional intelligence predicts individual differences in proneness for flow among musicians: the role of control and distributed attention.

Emotional intelligence predicts individual differences in proneness for flow among musicians: the role of control and distributed attention.

Complexity of physiological responses decreases in high-stress musical performance

For musicians, performing in front of an audience can cause considerable apprehension; indeed, performance anxiety is felt throughout the profession, with wide ranging symptoms arising irrespective of age, skill level and amount of practice. A key indicator of stress is frequency-specific fluctuations in the dynamics of heart rate known as heart rate variability (HRV). Recent developments in sensor technology have made possible the measurement of physiological parameters reflecting HRV non-invasively and outside of the laboratory, opening research avenues for real-time performer feedback to help improve stress management. However, the study of stress using standard algorithms has led to conflicting and inconsistent results. Here, we present an innovative and rigorous approach which combines: (i) a controlled and repeatable experiment in which the physiological response of an expert musician was evaluated in a low-stress performance and a high-stress recital for an audience of 400 people, (ii) a piece of music with varying physical and cognitive demands, and (iii) dynamic stress level assessment with standard and state-of-the-art HRV analysis algorithms such as those within the domain of complexity science which account for higher order stress signatures. We show that this offers new scope for interpreting the autonomic nervous system response to stress in real-world scenarios, with the evolution of stress levels being consistent with the difficulty of the music being played, superimposed on the stress caused by performing in front of an audience. For an emerging class of algorithms that can analyse HRV independent of absolute data scaling, it is shown that complexity science performs a more accurate assessment of average stress levels, thus providing greater insight into the degree of physiological change experienced by musicians when performing in public.

Temporal guidance of musicians’ performance movement is an acquired skill

The ancillary (non-sounding) body movements made by expert musicians during performance have been shown to indicate expressive, emotional, and structural features of the music to observers, even if the sound of the performance is absent. If such ancillary body movements are a component of skilled musical performance, then it should follow that acquiring the temporal control of such movements is a feature of musical skill acquisition. This proposition is tested using measures derived from a theory of temporal guidance of movement, "General Tau Theory" (Lee in Ecol Psychol 10:221-250, 1998; Lee et al. in Exp Brain Res 139:151-159, 2001), to compare movements made during performances of intermediate-level clarinetists before and after learning a new piece of music. Results indicate that the temporal control of ancillary body movements made by participants was stronger in performances after the music had been learned and was closer to the measures of temporal control found for an expert musician's movements. These findings provide evidence that the temporal control of musicians' ancillary body movements develops with musical learning. These results have implications for other skillful behaviors and nonverbal communication.

전통악보 정간보를 위한 저작도구의 설계 및 구현

Jungganbo is a writing method for the Korean traditional music. Since writing the Korean music needs to be done by hand and Chinese characters are used, only an expert musician might handle Jungganbo. In this paper, an authoring software tool for Jungganbo is introduced. It is useful for anybody who wants to compose the Korean tradition music with a computer. This tool also enables to standardize writing techniques of Jungganbo because a musical score was done by hands without using an authoring tool. In addition, this authoring tool can be easily used since its environment is very similar to other windows-based programs such as Ms-word and Hwp. Not only the beginners but also the experts can use this authoring tool for their Korean traditional music writing easily.

Emotional Coloring of Computer-Controlled Music Performances

This dissertation presents research in the field ofautomatic music performance with a special focus on piano. A system is proposed for automatic music performance, basedon artificial neural networks (ANNs). A complex,ecological-predictive ANN was designed thatlistensto the last played note,predictsthe performance of the next note,looksthree notes ahead in the score, and plays thecurrent tone. This system was able to learn a professionalpianist's performance style at the structural micro-level. In alistening test, performances by the ANN were judged clearlybetter than deadpan performances and slightly better thanperformances obtained with generative rules. The behavior of an ANN was compared with that of a symbolicrule system with respect to musical punctuation at themicro-level. The rule system mostly gave better results, butsome segmentation principles of an expert musician were onlygeneralized by the ANN. Measurements of professional pianists' performances revealedinteresting properties in the articulation of notes markedstaccatoandlegatoin the score. Performances were recorded on agrand piano connected to a computer.Staccatowas realized by a micropause of about 60% ofthe inter-onset-interval (IOI) whilelegatowas realized by keeping two keys depressedsimultaneously; the relative key overlap time was dependent ofIOI: the larger the IOI, the shorter the relative overlap. Themagnitudes of these effects changed with the pianists' coloringof their performances and with the pitch contour. Theseregularities were modeled in a set of rules for articulation inautomatic piano music performance. Emotional coloring of performances was realized by means ofmacro-rules implemented in the Director Musices performancesystem. These macro-rules are groups of rules that werecombined such that they reflected previous observations onmusical expression of specific emotions. Six emotions weresimulated. A listening test revealed that listeners were ableto recognize the intended emotional colorings. In addition, some possible future applications are discussedin the fields of automatic music performance, music education,automatic music analysis, virtual reality and soundsynthesis.

Rāvaṇa the Great in modern Tamil fiction

The title of this brief essay is an echo of the title of a book once famous, nowadays almost forgotten: M. S. Purnalingam Pillai, Ravana the Great: King of Lanka (Munnirpallam, 1928). The same author, in his better-known Tamil Literature (1929) wrote: “The ten-faced and twenty-armed Ravana was apparently a very intelligent and valiant hero, a cultured and highly civilized ruler, knew the Vedas and was an expert musician. He took away Sita according to the Tamilian mode of warface, had her in the Asoka woods companioned by his own niece, and would not touch her unless she consented.” With this re-evaluation of the character of Rāvaṇa goes hand in hand a milder yet decisive re-evaluation of Rāma, of Rāma's warriors, of Vibhīṣaṇa, and other dramatis personae of the great story. Vibhīṣaṇa is portrayed as “the treacherous brother or deserter of Ravana, who desired to be King by hook or by crook”, the Aryans are described as haughty, cowardly, of low morality; Rāma “has his specks”, he lacks courage and falters in crises. In contrast, Rāvaṇa is not only “a physical and an intellectual giant” but also “great administrator and leader of men, … a man of his word”.

Perception and prediction in melody: simulation of the final-tone extrapolating behavior

This paper describes a theory of human melody perception and his final-tone extrapolation behavior, enbodied in a computer simulation model called FTES 2. Related experimental findings were also presented. The processes used by an expert musician in extrapolating final-tones and the computer simulation of these processes are contrasted and discussed. The theory consisted of a few general rules and several personal "tonal" processing rules. The present findings indicate that interpretation of a melody depends, in large part, on the characteristics of the "tonal" rules.

The Mutilation of a Masterpiece

The responsibilities of one who undertakes the editorship of the work of a deceased musician are many and serious: he is bound to present the text in its integrity, correcting of course any obvious clerical error, and where any point of ambiguity or doubt arises to call attention to it, and, if he please, suggest such an emendation as would appear in his judgment to carry out the intentions and exact meaning of the author. It is absolutely indispensable that an editor of music should be an expert musician, thoroughly conversant not only with the works of the composer he edits but also the methods and traditions of the period in which that composer lived. The editor will frequently have to decide on the authenticity of conflicting manuscripts and copies and to accept or reject this or that reading; but if he mutilate or add to the original draft of the author, he is like a fraudulent trustee and deserves the reprobation of all earnest workers. The annals of music, if carefully searched, would present numerous instances of unfair or unwise editorship. In passing one may mention Dean Aldrich, who edited and appropriated, I think without due acknowledgment, the music of Palestrina, Carissimi, and other Italian composers. The music of Purcell has notably suffered at the hands of unscrupulous or unskilful editors. Doubtless you are familiar with Dr. Boyce's treatment of Purcell's great Te Deum in D. He tried to Handelize it, probably with the best intention, but by expansion and additions he made it about a third longer than the composer's original draft. This same Te Deum was treated in a far more shameful manner by Stafford Smith. He published the work with the following title, “Mr. Purcell's grand Te Deum Alter'd and Digested for the Use of His Majesty's Chapel Royal, also adapted for the Organ or Harpsichord only, by John Stafford Smith, Being Proper for all Chorus and places where they sing in parts.” This is one of the most impertinent pieces of vandalism I am acquainted with. The work is transposed a note lower throughout, and is rightly described as having been “altered and digested.” Smith's digestion must have been of a remarkable character; he reduced the length of the composition by about one-third, and introduced much of his own composition or decomposition into the remaining two-thirds. I have brought a copy of this Smith concoction for your inspection, and also the first printed edition of the Te Deum published by Purcell's widow.