Music Box Research Articles

New haptic systems for elicit emotions in audio-visual events for hearing impaired people.

In this research we have developed devices for hearing impaired people that can transmit the emotions evoked by music. In this way, we will all achieve the full inclusion of impairment people in all social activities. As this is an issue that goes beyond pure engineering research, it has been necessary to create a multidisciplinary group within the Spanish Centre for Captioning and Audio Description (CESyA), in direct collaboration with the Display and Photonic Applications Research Group (GDAF) and the Human Language and Accessibility Technologies Group (HULAT) of the Carlos III University (UC3M) and the Psychiatry and Applied Communication Departments of the Complutense University of Madrid. For this research, a pair of haptic gloves were developed, which transmit different characteristics extracted from music by means of vibrational sequences, intended to drive an emotional reinforcement. Another device, a “music box”, a vibration box, was also developed from the idea of using vibration as an instrument.Overall, the acceptance of the glove was positive, with an 80% of users accepting the negative video, repeatedly stating in the surveys that they "felt more when the glove vibrated". The music box was also well received. Volunteers felt that the system gave them a pleasant sensation and that they could feel the music. However, some participants associated the vibration with the sensation of an alarm clock, which was expectedly negative.Considering the obtained EEG results, we can conclude that the integration of simple multimodal stimuli, visual and vibrotactile, helps to enhance the activation of emotional processes linked with musical stimulation. It can also be concluded that multimodal visual and vibrotactile stimulation enhances both attentional and emotional processes. These results pave the way for future developments that will allow a hearing-impaired person to fully enjoy an audiovisual event, which will have a great impact on this group.

포디프레임을 활용한 오르골 제작과 창의적 활동을 포함한 융합교육프로그램의 교육적 효과

Objectives In this study, we investigated the educational effectiveness of a convergence education program in which students make music boxes and participate in creative activities using 4Dframes. Methods For the purpose, we developed a convergence education program that includes music box production and creative activities using 4Dframes. And this research was conducted with a total of 12 students, including 4 students of middle school, and 8 students of elementary school. Students were divided into four teams and took classes, and a survey consisting of 6 items on a Likert scale was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the program. Additionally, for qualitative research, three researchers independently analyzed video recordings and transcriptions, including students' activities, in-depth interviews, observation records, and evaluation meetings. Results The convergence education program consisting of a total of 10 sessions was developed and administered to students to confirm its educational effectiveness. Through the convergence education program that links music education, engineering, science, and technology activities developed in this study, changes in perception regard-ing students' enjoyment of music box making, self-evaluation of scientific inquiry ability, awareness of creative ability, preference for music concerto, heip with studying sheet music and playing musical insturments, and desire for music creation were confirmed. In particular, unlike traditional music classes where students play the piano while reading sheet music, they were able to gain a specific and intuitive understanding of playing music through creative activities such as making a music box with a 4Dframe and modifying it in various ways, and had a positive experience with music related activities. Conclusions Teachers can contribute to educational success by actively listening to students' ideas to stimulate their thinking processes, acknowledging the work students produce, and working collaboratively with students to explore the significance of these activities. Additionally, as digital technology makes it possible for students to take on the roles of composer, performer, and listener simultaneously. As future changes may occur in the way stu-dents engage with music in education, teachers must be equipped to design teaching methods that take advant-age of the opportunities offered by new technologies.

The music box operad: Random generation of musical phrases from patterns

We introduce the notion of multi-pattern, a combinatorial abstraction of polyphonic musical phrases. The interest of this approach to encode musical phrases lies in the fact that it becomes possible to compose multi-patterns in order to produce new ones. This composition is parametrized by a monoid structure on the scale degrees. This dives the set of the musical phrases into an algebraic framework since the set of the multi-patterns is endowed with the structure of an operad. Operads are algebraic structures offering a formalization and an abstraction of the notion of operators and their compositions. Seeing musical phrases as operators allows us to perform computations on phrases and admits applications in generative music. Indeed, given a set of initial multi-patterns, we propose various algorithms to randomly generate a new and longer phrase emulating the style suggested by the inputted multi-patterns. The designed algorithms use sorts of grammars working with operads and colored operads, known as bud generating systems.

Japanese popular songs brought home: Histories and current circulations of post-Second World War audible souvenirs from US military bases in East Asia

This article focuses on the transpacific circulations of Japanese popular songs alongside touring American military personnel in East Asia between 1945 and 1958: that is, from the end of the Second World War, across the span of the Korean War, and up to the year of the American ground forces’ withdrawal from ‘mainland’ Japan. By first tracing the trans-oceanic travels of musical souvenirs such as phonograph records and music boxes, and then by delving into their ‘afterlives’ as ex-souvenirs variously lost or preserved, this article reveals the seemingly minor yet no less significant histories and memories of musical objects containing within them the traces of post-war Japanese popular song. Over this period, musical souvenirs entered into postwar American households with returning military personnel, imparting to family and friends an auditory sensation of ‘Japan’ that carried with it the fantasy of knowing a place and culture that lay far across the Pacific. Although many of the Japanese pop songs contained therein lost their ‘souvenir’ status in the late 1960s, their recent revival via transnational online media suggests new ways of re-‘discovering’ and circulating a wealth of music that might have otherwise fallen into obscurity.

X-ray excited broadband blue emitting Lu2(1-x)Bi2xO3-PMMA thin films for high resolution imaging

In this paper, cubic-phase Lu2O3:Bi3+ nanoparticles, with a range of sizes between 110 and 180 nm, were obtained by a combination of co-precipitation and thermal annealing techniques. For these nanoparticles upon UV or X-ray excitation, strong broadband emission peaks at 410 and 480 nm corresponding to Bi3+ occupying S6 and C2 (Lu3+(S6) and Lu3+(C2)) sites, respectively, can be observed. On the basis of the concentration-dependent luminescence intensity ratios (I480(C2)/I410(S6)) of Bi3+(C2) to Bi3+(S6), the energy transfer from Bi3+(S6) to Bi3+(C2) can be confirmed at high Bi3+ concentration. In particular, their X-ray absorption coefficient, emission wavelength, afterglow level (60 ppm) and response time (465 ns) are almost comparable to those of the commercial Bi4Ge3O12 crystals. By the means of dispersing Lu1.98Bi0.02O3 nanoscintillators into organic polymer (PMMA)-acetone solution, the Lu1.98Bi0.02O3-PMMA flexible composite films exhibiting rapid response to X-ray photons, high X-ray sensitivity and radiation resistance, good mechanical performance and excellent environmental stability were prepared using a spin-coating technique. On the surface of X-ray imaging screen formed by the flexible dense composite films, the spatial resolution can reach to 6.0 lp/mm at a safe irradiation dose (4.6 μGy). Meanwhile, for the imaging screen using the flexible composite films after bended for thousands of times, we can observe clear image of each reed gap (300 μm) of the music box. For the Lu2O3:Bi3+-PMMA composite films, our results suggest that not only their scintillation properties are almost comparable to those of the commercial broadband Bi4Ge3O12 crystals, but also they might be applied in large-area and non-planar X-ray imaging.

The biosynthetic logic and enzymatic machinery of approved fungi-derived pharmaceuticals and agricultural biopesticides.

Covering: 2000 to 2023The kingdom Fungi has become a remarkably valuable source of structurally complex natural products (NPs) with diverse bioactivities. Since the revolutionary discovery and application of the antibiotic penicillin from Penicillium, a number of fungi-derived NPs have been developed and approved into pharmaceuticals and pesticide agents using traditional "activity-guided" approaches. Although emerging genome mining algorithms and surrogate expression hosts have brought revolutionary approaches to NP discovery, the time and costs involved in developing these into new drugs can still be prohibitively high. Therefore, it is essential to maximize the utility of existing drugs by rational design and systematic production of new chemical structures based on these drugs by synthetic biology. To this purpose, there have been great advances in characterizing the diversified biosynthetic gene clusters associated with the well-known drugs and in understanding the biosynthesis logic mechanisms and enzymatic transformation processes involved in their production. We describe advances made in the heterogeneous reconstruction of complex NP scaffolds using fungal polyketide synthases (PKSs), non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs), PKS/NRPS hybrids, terpenoids, and indole alkaloids and also discuss mechanistic insights into metabolic engineering, pathway reprogramming, and cell factory development. Moreover, we suggest pathways for expanding access to the fungal chemical repertoire by biosynthesis of representative family members via common platform intermediates and through the rational manipulation of natural biosynthetic machineries for drug discovery.

The Influence of Instrumental Music Alam Menyapa for Prenatal and Postnatal Patients at the Martha Friska Multatuli Hospital

The research was a trial of instrumental music therapy on prenatal and postnatal patients at the Martha Friska Multatuli Hospital in Medan. The aim of this research is to be a solution to reduce pain and stress so that mothers who are about to give birth and after giving birth can feel relaxed. The tool used in the research is BmT (Music Box Therapy). Previously, BmT (Music Box Therapy) was tested on patients affected by drugs at the Mutiara Abadi Binjai Foundation (2019) and hypertension patients at the Medan Methodist Hospital (2021). The method used in the research was a quasi-experiment on four patients before and after giving birth. The BmT is designed to use two types of sensors, namely the MPX5050dp sensor as a blood pressure sensor and Galvanic Skin Resistance (GSR) as a sensor to measure the patient's skin conductivity level. One of the components of BmT is 16 pieces of instrumental music which are musical compositions by Prof. Junita Batubara, S.Sn., M.Sn., Ph.D.. The results of this trial show that the use of the instrumental music Alam Selamat, which is one of the therapeutic music in BmT, can reduce stress levels in mothers who are about to give birth and after giving birth.

Music Box-Inspired Semi-Automatic Hematocrit Validation Device.

A high hematocrit (HCT) level is strongly associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease. For early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, it is vital to regularly measure the HCT, which is typically achieved by centrifuging a blood sample to measure the percentage of red blood cells. However, the centrifugal modalities are usually bulky, expensive, and require a stable electric input, which restrict the availability. This research develops a semi-automatic and portable centrifugal device for HCT measurement. This torque-actuated semi-automatic centrifuge, which we call the tFuge, is inspired by a music box, allowing different operators to generate the same rhythm. It is electricity-free and can be controlled based on a constant torque mechanism. Repeatable test results can be received from among different users regardless of their age, sex, and activity. With the assistance of the Boycott effect on the tFuge, we proved that the HCT level is in high linearity to the length of the sedimentation of the blood cells in a tube (R2 = 0.99, sample HCT range 10-60%). The tFuge takes less than 4 min and requires no more than 10 μL of blood that can be obtained by a less-invasive finger prick to complete the testing procedure. Calibrated gradient numbers are printed onto the rotation disc for instant HCT results that can be read by the naked eye. We expect this proposed point-of-care testing device possesses the potential to replace the microhematocrit centrifuge in the regions with limited resources.

Spiny keratoderma: A review of case reports and histopathological descriptions.

Spiny keratoderma (SpK) is a rare skin condition characterized by spine-like papules on the palms and soles. The condition is identified under several names such as "music box spine keratosis" and "palmoplantar filiform hyperkeratosis," creating ambiguity in the diagnostic and histopathologic features of the disease. In this study, we reviewed 84 cases of SpK to examine patient demographics, medical history, clinical and histopathological descriptions, and sporadic versus hereditary onset. Notably, the most used histopathological terms were "parakeratosis" and "hypogranulosis," and the most used clinical terms were "spine" and "hyperpigmented." The average age at presentation was 60.1 years with the majority of cases in males. Only 29.8% of cases were associated with a family history of SpK and underlying malignancies were present in 28.6% of cases. This review investigates the frequency of histopathologic and clinical terms used to describe SpK to provide insight into the clinical and histopathological characteristics of this rarely reported condition.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A 36-NOTE LOW-COST CUSTOMIZED DIGITAL MUSIC BOX

The purpose of the current study was to design and build a music box with digitally produced notes. The input command sheet allows anybody to create any melody from the octave, making it possible to think of it as a small version of a musical instrument. This instrument is capable of producing frequencies in all three octaves, i.e., the lower, the middle, and the higher octaves. This music box may therefore play any tune, no matter how short or lengthy the note is. There is no need to alter the frequencies over time because no string is used in the creation. It can play any song to one’s heart’s content if the song’s music sheet is accessible. In an epitome, this music box can be viewed as a very simple musical instrument with digitally created tones. There is no need to customize the strings over time like with traditional mechanical musical instruments owing to tones produced digitally. The ability to generate a vast variety of tones, the ease with which it can be adjusted, the convenience with which anyone may have their desired notes customized, and the low cost at which it was produced are the most notable advantages of this digital music instrument. Due to its low price, it can be simply incorporated, altered, slightly improved, and produced at a considerably reduced cost for commercial use.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A 36-NOTE LOW-COST CUSTOMIZED DIGITAL MUSIC BOX

The purpose of the current study was to design and build a music box with digitally produced notes. The input command sheet allows anybody to create any melody from the octave, making it possible to think of it as a small version of a musical instrument. This instrument is capable of producing frequencies in all three octaves, i.e., the lower, the middle, and the higher octaves. This music box may therefore play any tune, no matter how short or lengthy the note is. There is no need to alter the frequencies over time because no string is used in the creation. It can play any song to one’s heart’s content if the song’s music sheet is accessible. In an epitome, this music box can be viewed as a very simple musical instrument with digitally created tones. There is no need to customize the strings over time like with traditional mechanical musical instruments owing to tones produced digitally. The ability to generate a vast variety of tones, the ease with which it can be adjusted, the convenience with which anyone may have their desired notes customized, and the low cost at which it was produced are the most notable advantages of this digital music instrument. Due to its low price, it can be simply incorporated, altered, slightly improved, and produced at a considerably reduced cost for commercial use.

Музыкальное искусство России начала ХХ века: INFANTE

The essay considers the phenomenon designated by the notion “youthful themes”, which flourished in Russian musical art in the early XX century. This phenomenon is revealed as a depiction of various age gradations (infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, early adulthood), which has gone beyond the limits of the material focused on the needs of a specific age audience and has a generally significant character. The work traces the evolution of youthful themes starting with the turn of the XIX-XX centuries (the opera “Iolanta” (1891), the ballet “The Nutcracker” (1982) by P. Tchaikovsky, “The Music Box” (1893) by A. Lyadov, the opera “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” (1900) by N. Rimsky-Korsakov, Piano Concerto No. 1 by S. Rachmaninov (1890-1891), Piano Sonata No. 5 by A. Scriabin (1907)) and up to the 1920s. Special attention is paid to the main line of development of youthful themes in the 1910s (10 Pieces for Piano Op. 12 (1913) and the cycle “Visions Fugitives” (1915-1917) by S. Prokofiev, the orchestral piece “Fireworks” (1908), the symphonic poem “The Song of the Nightingale” (1917) by I. Stravinsky). As a result, the author highlights the nuances of content and meaning inherent in the youthful themes (birth and affirmation of new forces, enjoyment of life, carelessness, playful attitude to the world; fervor, seething energy, thirst for youthful self-affirmation; integrity, clarity, simplicity, infantilism with its inherent fragility and purity) and also notes the presence of a wide range of aesthetic and stylistic facets in this area. The appearance of youthful themes marked the advancement of new forces into the arena of life, as well as the freshness and spontaneity of world perception, freedom from canons and stereotypes.

„Schlafe, mein Prinzchen“ des Berliner Arztes Carl Eduard Flies (1770–1829) im Kontext von „Stilldebatte“, Autorschaft und Haskala

Even today, songs from the 18th century can be found in nursery rhyme books or music boxes to sing babies to sleep. The lullaby “Schlafe, mein Prinzchen” is one of them. In music historiography, it has been a matter of debate whether it was set to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or by Isaac Beer (Carl Eduard) Flies. As an amateur composer the latter was active in the social environment of the Berlin salons of the 1790s, and as a doctor he practised and published until the first quarter of the 19th century. In the context of this paper, I propose to compare a close reading of the lullaby and Flies’ journal article “Ueber den modischen Misbrauch, den vornehme Mütter mit dem Selbststillen treiben”, which was published in 1800 in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden with the broad 18th-century debate about the breastfeeding of infants by the mother (as opposed to being fed by a wet nurse). The new approach, which incorporates the medical-historical perspective and that of gender studies, offers an insight that not only determines a “mother-image” in Flies’ publication in its contemporary context, but vice versa also reveals the discursive strategies in the historical dispute about the authorship of the lullaby.

음악과 건축의 융합

Composers gain structural ideas from their original style of composition for Music and other areas. This tendency has been conspicuous since the twentieth century, and various fields of interdisciplinary studies have been conducted recently: Typical examples of multidisciplinary studies include the integration of Music and architecture, Music and Science, Music and mathematics, and music and fine arts. Music has expanded the horizon to unattempted areas by developing unconventional ideas and creative composition techniques.
 This study investigated three works: two for composition and one for architecture. The orchestral piece, Metastasis by Iannis Xenakis, piano work, Columna Infinita by György Ligeti and the architecture Music Box, located in Aspen, Colorado, the United States are significantly studied in the paper to explore composers and architects’intentions, structural manners and the background of the works.
 Research implications suggest integrating independent theories in different fields of study to create a new multidisciplinary field. We can expand traditional boundaries in academic areas without limitations, and research on interdisciplinary studies needs to be carried out further. It will inspire and drive researchers in numerous fields who want to try something new and creative.

Past Forward

Presents a photograph of John Bardeen's music box. Working at Bell Laboratories in 1949, Bardeen built three music boxes that could electronically produce five distinct notes.

Observations of a child’s movement response to music and their interaction with a musical toy robot

This article describes the author’s informal observations of the development of movement response to music with the added interaction with a musical toy robot. The subject under observation was one child, from the age of 8 to 24 months. Overall, the child’s readiness to move seemed to be motivated by the presence of the interactive toy robot. Observation revealed a variety of movement responses at a very young age, also in attempts to interact with the toy. The child appeared to form an emotional relationship with the toy robot that can be described by different phases from partnership with the toy, to the reduction of the toy’s role, to a passive music box. The toy robot was also used in a mediator role between siblings of different ages. Thus, interactive musical toy robots may have a beneficial effect on a child’s musical development as they provide a repetitive, safe and critique-free space. The human-like features of the toy robot (i.e. happy face, moving arms and legs) seemed to catch this child’s attention, allowing him to interact with the toy similarly to a human dance partner. The robot’s clumsy moves fit the concept of motionese, supporting the development of the child’s motor skills.

Expressive timing and mechanical instruments: exploring temporal idiomaticity in some music box performances

Drawing on earlier work in digital musicology that analysed beat onset data to create timing profiles for recorded performances, this research addresses the question of what kinds of timing data might be produced by a hand-cranked mechanical instrument. Mechanical instruments have been studied as part of the pre-history of recording technologies, but have not typically been considered seriously as performance media. However, a prominent tradition of nineteenth-century street performance – organ grinding – relied on mechanical instruments. If a hand-cranked mechanical instrument does not produce a totally regular rendition, then what might such a performance look like in terms of temporal variation? My hypothesis was that different players would produce different kinds of patterns, and that some of these patterns could be related to conventions of expressive performance. Six participants played two extracts, by Scott Joplin and Fredric Chopin, on a music box. I extracted onset bpm data using Sonic Visualiser and used a combination of Self-Organising Maps and manual data analysis to broadly group the different patterns of emphasis in these recordings and six others by professional pianists for comparison. The data showed that several participants employed phrase-arching, and also indicated not only 1) that different players demonstrated different tendencies in terms of temporal variation and beat emphasis but also 2) that different tendencies emerged among music box players across the two repertoire samples. I argue that these results suggest that it is possible to play both idiomatically and expressively with a hand-cranked mechanical instrument.

Somewhere out there in a place no one knows: Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the literature of forgetting

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police was published in Japanese in 1994. Since the release of its first English translation in 2019, the text has attracted a handful of responses from...

Gesture recognition real-time control system based on YOLOV4

With the development of industrial information technology in recent years, gesture control has attracted wide attention from scholars. Various gesture control methods have emerged, such as visual control, wearable device control, magnetic field feature extraction control. Based on one of the visual gesture control methods, this paper proposes a visual gesture control method applied to music box control by combining YOLOv4 object detection network. We design seven main gestures, reconstruct gesture datasets, and retrain the YOLOv4 object detection network by the means of the self-built datasets, further build a music box gesture control system. In this paper, we obtain the recognition accuracy of 97.8% for the object detection network in the gesture control system after a series of experiments, and recruit eight volunteers to conduct experimental tests on the self-built gesture-controlled music box system, mainly to quantify the time of executing a single command, attention concentration, etc. The results show that compared with the traditional control method, the visual gesture control method ensures the accuracy while has a faster response speed and takes up less of the user’s attention.

Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright by Monika Dommann

Reviewed by: Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright by Monika Dommann Peter Shirts Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright. By Monika Dommann. Translated by Sarah Pybus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. [xiii, 263 p. ISBN 9781501709920 (hardcover), $45.95; ISBN 9781501734984 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Is copyright legislation shaped by media technology innovations, or does author protection move innovation forward? This is one of the major questions that Monika Dommann seeks to complicate in Authors and Apparatus. Dommann, a professor at the University of Zurich specializing in the economic and legal history of media, data, and culture, shows that the progress of author protection in history is not clear cut. How we define authors, what type of control is granted, and extralegal cultural practices and agreements all affect the level of protection at any one time. The path copyright takes is anything but linear and predicable—though we can learn from the responses to each new technological development, which turn out to be not all that different from reactions to previous technological interruptions. This book, first published in German in 2014, is organized roughly in chronological order as a series of ten cases studies, with framing introduction and conclusion, and a brief section on further reading. The case studies are organized into three periods: 1850–1915 (“Part I: Writing and Recording”), 1915–45 (“Part II: Collecting Agencies and Research Materials”), and 1945– 80 (“Part III: Private Copies and Universal Standards”). Throughout the book, Dommann traces the copyright disputes related to new technologies of copying: music recordings and photocopies. The author also puts the history of Europe and the US and their respective copyright systems in conversation with each other, which has not been done before in a study of this length. In another duality, the author describes how various stakeholder groups vacillate between protecting creators and valuing the free flow of information. Part 1, the early history of copyright, covers debates over new technologies in music such as the development of mechanical instruments (music boxes, barrel organs, and the pianola) through early sound recordings. The result was the invention of the compulsory license [End Page 442] system in the US, which was later exported to parts of Europe. This license system approach generally favored business control over author protection. The author also briefly covers debates around early photographic reproduction of text—debates perhaps more about information dissemination than copyright. Of the three parts, part 1 is perhaps the most difficult read, consisting mainly of opinions of legal scholars and court decisions furthest removed from our current systems of copyright. In part 2, covering mainly the interwar period, Dommann examines the rise of authors’ collecting agencies around the world to capitalize on the public performance of music. She also covers the development of microfilm and increased international cooperation in information sharing. Together, these cases show that often only particular groups were allowed at copyright negotiating tables. As Dommann makes explicit in the conclusion, copyright will always be contested because it establishes ownership over the expression of ideas, rewarding some and denying others. The author even shows how the mid-twentieth-century fight over who collected radio royalties in the US, a result of how copyright was framed, may explain the rapid popularization of southern, rural, oral-based music. Part 3 may be for me the most compelling of the three parts, covering the invention of magnetic tape in Germany (including the spread of soundcollecting culture as an eerie precedent to the free culture of the internet), the development of the photocopier and related legal dispute over library copies, the legal ramifications of database input, and the debate over the ownership of folk music. In the end, Dommann demonstrates that copyright has been in crisis since at least the 1960s, if not earlier, and often stakeholders find solutions (sometimes temporary) outside a legal framework. For example, the legal battle over recording device fees in the early 1940s led to theorizing the approaches that would become digital rights management. Also, the debate over who should profit from oral traditions (yes, this is the Lomax controversy) led to new discussions about protecting traditional knowledge outside of...