Music Recordings Research Articles

The critic's voice: On the role and function of criticism of classical music recordings.

In the Western classical tradition music criticism represents one of the most complex and influential forms of performance assessment and evaluation. However, in the age of peer opinion sharing and quick communication channels it is not clear what place music critics’ judgments still hold in the classical music market. This article presents expert music critics’ view on their role, function, and influence. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 14 native English- and German-speaking critics who had an average of 32 years professional activity in classical music review. We present the first visual model to summarize music critics’ descriptions of their role and responsibilities, writing processes, and their influences (on the market and on artists). The model distinguishes six roles (hats): consumer adviser, teacher, judge, writer, stakeholder, and artist advocate. It identifies core principles governing critical writing for music as well as challenges that arise from balancing the above six responsibilities whilst remaining true to an implicit code of conduct. Finally, it highlights the factors that inform critics’ writing in terms of the topics they discuss and the discursive tools they employ. We show that music critics self-identify as highly skilled mediators between artists, producers and consumers, and justify their roles as judge and teacher based on a wealth of experience as against the influx of pervasive amateur reviews. Our research approach also offers occupation-based insights into professional music review standards, including the challenges of maintaining objectivity and resisting commercial pressures. This article offers a new viewpoint on music critics’ judgments and recommendations that helps to explain their expectations and reflections.

The critic's voice: On the role and function of criticism of classical music recordings

The critic's voice: On the role and function of criticism of classical music recordings

Digital Sources for Nineteenth Century Music in Spain: The Digitization Project of the National Library in Context

The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) is the head of the Spanish library system. It holds all books published in Spain, and also several collections of different types, including the Music and Audiovisuals Department's sound recordings and sheet music. Its Department of Bibliographic Control of Periodicals catalogues both newspapers and magazines. In addition, the BNE offers a number of online services including the Hispanic Digital Library (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, BDH) and the Digital Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Digital, HemD). The BDH, was created in 2008 and currently provides free and open access to more than 220,000 digitized documents, including recordings and scores.1 In contrast, HemD, which is part of the BDH, focuses on the public dissemination of the digital collection of Spanish historical presses.2 It currently offers around 2,500 titles and more than 70,000,000 pages.3 Newspapers and magazines are available in PDF format and searches are facilitated by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Towards Ubiquitous Personalized Music Recommendation with Smart Bracelets

Nowadays, recommender systems play an increasingly important role in the music scenario. Generally, music preferences are related to internal and external conditions. For example, mood state and ongoing activity will affect users' music preferences. However, conventional music recommenders cannot capture these conditions since they only utilize the online data but ignore the impact of physical-world information. In this paper, we leverage the contexts from low-cost smart bracelets for ubiquitous personalized recommendation to meet users' music preference. We first conduct a large-scale questionnaire survey, which illustrates moods, activities, and environments will affect music preferences. Then we perform a one-week field study among 30 participants, where they receive personalized music recommendation and record preferences and mood. Meanwhile, participants' context information is collected with bracelets. Analyses on the data demonstrate significant relationships between music preference, mood, and bracelet contexts. Furthermore, we propose a novel Multi-task Ubiquitous Music Recommendation model (MUMR) to predict personalized music preference with bracelet contexts as input and mood prediction as an auxiliary task. Experiments show significant improvement in music recommendation performances with MUMR. Our work demonstrates the possibility of ubiquitous personalized music recommendations with smart bracelets data, which is an encouraging step towards building recommender systems aware of physical-world contexts.

The Decay of Singing: Remembering the Castrato

AbstractThe advent of a new political regime in Italy in the 1790s led to decrees banning castrati from the stage and the closure of the singing academies where they taught. But seventy years later the composer Gioacchino Rossini looked back to the castrati as the last adepts of the art of bel canto: “As to the castrati, they vanished, and the usage disappeared in the creation of new customs. That was the cause of the irretrievable decay of the art of singing.” This essay focuses on the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti—friend of Charles, Frances, and Susan Burney, idol of William Beckford—and on the efforts of the novelist and critic Stendhal to “remember” Pacchierotti’s lost voice. Stendhal never heard Pacchierotti in his prime, but in his 1824 Vie de Rossini he declared that the art of bel canto had reached its apogee with Pacchierotti in 1778: five years before the writer’s own birth. Stendhal sought to demonstrate that the lost voice could be remembered by way of both historical evidence and the textual and viva voce “recordings” of earlier listeners: Beckford, the Burneys, and the singer Gabriel Piozzi. In Stendhal’s erotics or mnemonics of musical sensation, such textual and performative recordings allow us to remember the sensations elicited by an absent voice as vividly as the phonographic or digital recordings on which later listeners would rely.

Project-based learning through sensor characterization in a musical acoustics course.

Project-based learning engages students in practical activities related to course content and has been demonstrated to improve academic performance. Due to its reported benefits, this form of active learning was incorporated with an ongoing research project into an introductory, graduate-level Musical Acoustics course at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. Students applied concepts from the course to characterize a contact sensor with a polymer diaphragm for musical instrument recording. Assignments throughout the semester introduced students to completing a literature review, planning an experiment, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting results. While students were given broad goals to understand the performance of the contact sensor compared to traditional microphones, they were allowed independence in determining the specific methods used. The efficacy of the course framework and research project was assessed with student feedback provided through open-ended prompts and Likert-type survey questions. Overall, the students responded positively to the project-based learning and demonstrated mastery of the course learning objectives. The work provides a possible framework for instructors considering using project-based learning through research in their own course designs.

You Can Tell a Prodigy From a Professional Musician

According to Feldman (1993), musical prodigies are expected to perform at the same high level as professional adult musicians and, therefore, are indistinguishable from adults. This widespread definition was the basis for the study by Comeau et al. (2017), which investigated if participants could determine whether an audio sample was played by a professional pianist or a child prodigy. Our paper is a replication of this previous study under more controlled conditions. Our main findings partly confirmed the previous findings: Comparable to Comeau et al.’s (2017) study (N = 51), the participants in our study (N = 278) were able to discriminate between prodigies and adult professionals by listening to music recordings of the same pieces. The overall discrimination performance was slightly above chance (correct responses: 53.7%; sensitivity d’ = 0.20), which was similar to Comeau et al.’s (2017) results of the identification task with prodigies aged between 11 and 14 years (approximately 54.6% correct responses; sensitivity approximately d’ = 0.13). Contrary to the original study, musicians and pianists in our study did not perform significantly better than other participants. Nevertheless, it is generally possible for listeners to differentiate prodigies from adult performers—although this is a demanding task.

Playing Upon the Blue Guitar: Toward Re-imaginings of the U.S. National Anthems

Drawing upon Maxine Greene’s concepts of wide awakeness and social imagination, I argue for the necessity of re-imagining “The Star-Spangled Banner” (U.S. national anthem) to account for a plurality of American perspectives and to de-legitimize ways in which racism and White privilege have dictated “correct interpretations” of the anthem throughout U.S. history. Toward these ends, in this essay I explore the patriotic re-imaginings of the U.S. national anthem by Black musicians Jimi Hendrix, René Marie, and Jon Batiste—two of whom incorporated “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” otherwise known as “the Black national anthem,” into their musical renderings. I also look reflexively at my experience with the song as a White American music teacher striving to work toward anti-racist pedagogy and engagements with patriotic music in the classroom. While there are a variety of musical recordings linked throughout the essay, I recommend that the reader view the three video recordings list below before reading the essay.

Gender Participation in Audio Engineering in Nigeria: A Case Study of Street Recording Studios in Anambra State, Nigeria

In studio recording, sound engineers are, along with producers and musicians, a vital part of the creative process. The sound engineers exercise powers from the control room, where the sound from the studio is recorded and manipulated. They operate either professional audio mixing consoles or computers with specialized software suites to manipulate and voice the sound for analogue or digital. Many women are seen playing instruments and singing, and women have broken into many careers, but audio engineering is a field still very much dominated by men. This paper focuses on gender issues in audio music recording to find reasons behind the rareness of female sound engineers in Nigeria, especially in Anambra State. The study made use of the descriptive survey method to collect data. Articles and books were selected and studied to find a consensus on the existing problems of prejudice and inequities women face in the industry. Information was elicited through oral interviews with some studio engineers from 26 street recording studios in Anambra state. This paper argues that women sound engineers face entry-level and on-the-job gender discrimination- the technological tools in use are seen as being at odds with femininity. The power exercised within music production is not equally accessible to women; this factor, among many, upholds gender inequality in the music industry. Therefore, it recommends combating the prejudices and inequities women face in the industry. There is a need for more women to enroll in formal schooling on how to become a recording engineer and to acquire technical ability, interpersonal skills, and musical understanding and creativity.

Transfer Learning for Audio Waveform to Guitar Chord Spectrograms Using the Convolution Neural Network

Automatic chord recognition has always been approached as a broad music audition task. The desired output is a succession of time-aligned discrete chord symbols, such as GMaj and Asus2. Automatic music transcription is the process of converting a musical recording into a human-readable and interpretable representation. When dealing with polyphonic sounds or removing certain limits, automatic music transcription remains a difficult undertaking. A guitar, for example, presents a greater challenge, as guitarists can play the same note in a variety of places. The study makes use of CNN functionality to generate the guitar tab; initially, the constant-Q transform was used to turn the input audio file into short time spectrograms that the CNN model utilises to analyse the chord. The paper developed a method for extracting chord sequences and notes from audio recordings of solo guitar performances. For intervals in the supplied audio, the proposed approach outputs chord names and fret-board notes. The model described here has been refined to achieve an accuracy of 88.7%. The model’s ability to properly tag audio clips is an incredible advancement.

From “Sound” to “Sound and Audiovisual”

IASA emerged in 1969 from IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres. The interests of IAML’s members largely focused on music as manuscript or score, and musical sound recordings were dealt with in the Record Library Committee. IASA was founded to consider additional types of sound recordings, including research and oral history. From the frst years of IASA’s existence, the question of the organisation’s relationship to the moving image arose, represented by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). But as early as 1979, a delegate from the United States also brought video into play. With independence from IAML in the late 1980s, an intensive discussion began about the future of IASA and the expansion of the scope of the association to include audiovisual documents. Finally in 1999, the constitution and the name of the association were adapted. The transformation process triggered by this name change is still underway today. It could prove to be an advantage for IASA because it opens possibilities of adaptation to the rapidly changing world of audiovisual production due to digitisation and online media.

Don’t Go Changing to Try and Please Me: Firms Market Expansion and Professionals’ Mobility

We investigate whether, and how, firms changing their market position affects their likelihood of losing professionals. We posit that market expansion is a strategic change that can divert firms’ attention and resources from existing categories to new ones, damage social relationships through internal structure reorganization, and disrupt current routines. These can constrain professionals’ career advancement, triggering mobility events within the firms. Using data of the music recording industry between 1963 and 1999, we find that record labels’ adopting new genres, and greater number of those, increases the likelihood that they lose artists to other labels. The detrimental effect of genre adoption is amplified for record labels that have larger genre portfolio and that tend to maintain longer relationships with their artists. Our findings bridge the literature of category and turnover by uncovering the effect of market category expansion on mobility events within firms.

The Interconnection of Text-Melody in Selected Works of Newlove Kojo Annan’s Choral Writings

As much as scholars of music composition in Ghana identify the prerequisite for intellectual dialogue so far as analytical study is concerned, very little attention has been paid regarding melodic structures and their relationship to text in vocal music. Consequently, upon further study of the melodic and textual structure of the choral writings of Newlove Kojo Annan’s music, I consider it necessary for a discussion since the introduction of word-based phraseology which was crafted from this paper, and other stimulating practices such as the proper use of stressed and unstressed syllables, speech and song melody, and few others have been detected in the construction of the text-melody relationship. In summary, this article presents an analytical work revealed from both music scores and recordings (audio visual) of the selected works, which gives a panoramic view, and serve as a guide for advance study and research in music composition. From my frame of reference and vantage, few recommendations are made in the structure of the works. The study discusses three selected (at random) works of Newlove Kojo Annan.

The Interconnection of Text-Melody in Selected Works of Newlove Kojo Annan’s Choral Writings

As much as scholars of music composition in Ghana identify the prerequisite for intellectual dialogue so far as analytical study is concerned, very little attention has been paid regarding melodic structures and their relationship to text in vocal music. Consequently, upon further study of the melodic and textual structure of the choral writings of Newlove Kojo Annan’s music, I consider it necessary for a discussion since the introduction of word-based phraseology which was crafted from this paper, and other stimulating practices such as the proper use of stressed and unstressed syllables, speech and song melody, and few others have been detected in the construction of the text-melody relationship. In summary, this article presents an analytical work revealed from both music scores and recordings (audio visual) of the selected works, which gives a panoramic view, and serve as a guide for advance study and research in music composition. From my frame of reference and vantage, few recommendations are made in the structure of the works. The study discusses three selected (at random) works of Newlove Kojo Annan.

Pragmatic Expression of Bedhaya Sukma Raras: a Reactualization of Holisticity in Life

The Bedhaya Sukma Raras dance by Hadawiyah Endah Utami, presented at a gathering of choreographers, was inspired by the journey of human life as it moves towards death. The complementary forms of verbal and nonverbal components in Bedhaya Sukma Raras implicitly offer a concept encased in the aesthetic expression of the dance about human awareness of doing good throughout the transient life in this world, in order to welcome an afterlife that is immortal and full of joy. This research uses a qualitative methodology. The data collection strategies include a library study, interviews, a visual study of dance recordings, an audio study of music recordings, documentation and study of archives of verbal transcripts of literature about songs and vocabulary of dance movements. The results show that in principle human life must seek to preserve a balance between the world and the hereafter. This means that microcosmically, in fulfilling their daily needs, human beings must work hard, prioritize virtue, and pray for God’s guidance so that macrocosmically, in the afterlife their sins will be forgiven and they will enter the heaven of the Creator.

STUDY ON THE SENSITIVITY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF FUJIAN OPERA AND TAIWAN OPERA AND THE CHANGES OF WORKING EMOTION AND BEHAVIOR OF THE TROUPE

Abstract Background Yangqin was introduced into China in the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty. With the flow of musicians, it spread all over the world. It is not only used for folk God welcoming games, birthday celebrations, literati self entertainment or music clubs, but also the most eye-catching musical instrument in private collections, government and business and children's Museum music clubs. From the leisure and entertainment stage of “song” popular in the Qing Dynasty to the commercial rap of “selling medicine” and “sweeping the floor”, it absorbs the nutrition of performance forms such as car drum array, Siping opera, Tea Picking Opera and juggling, and adds the “opera in the play” of hand and foot dance to show the footprints of Yangqin. Xiangju opera, developed from Taiwan songs, is a mixture of Zhangzhou Xiangjiang generation folk music. Hunan Opera (Gezai Opera) is the only common local opera on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In 2005, Hunan opera was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list. It is deeply influenced by Southern Fujian culture and has distinctive Southern Fujian characteristics. It has played a positive role in promoting cross-strait cultural exchanges, which is reflected in the frequent exchanges between relevant researchers and troupes on both sides of the Strait. The excellent repertoire of Hunan opera has been widely praised at home and abroad. Research Objects and Methods This study adopts the methods of literature analysis and field investigation to collect and sort out the research data. Literature analysis is mainly the collection, comparison and classification of historical data. Fieldwork is the author's fieldwork for more than ten years and his contact with folk artists and musicians of Gezai Opera. Starting from the Yangqin proposition, the master's thesis began to study and collect data, collect and read Taiwan Local Chronicles, newspaper documents, Shengzhi diaries, oral history and fieldwork for more than ten years, and copy the existing music manuscripts, photos, sound recordings and audio materials in the public sector. At the same time, it is selected from the emotional experience report form compiled by Ekman, freisen and ancoli (1980), which has been modified many times by gross and widely used. There are 10 adjectives in the emotional experience report form. Each emotion was assessed by the 9-point Likert scale, “0” means no, “8” means very strong, and the subjects were required to choose the corresponding number according to their actual emotional experience. 2.2.4 questionnaire on the degree of implementation of guidance. The questionnaire consists of 6 questions. Using the 6-point Likert scale, “0” indicates complete non-compliance, and “5” indicates complete compliance. The purpose is to check whether the subjects adjust their emotions according to the instructions of the main test when watching emotional movie clips, and ask the subjects to answer truthfully according to their actual situation. Results Performance knowledge comes from objective analysis. Performers practice and change the objective world and themselves through psychological thinking such as perception, imagination and emotion. With the progress of the times, Hunan opera is facing the dual pressure of economic and cultural inheritance. Economically, the income of the troupe's actors is unstable, which gradually weakens the actors' enthusiasm for the cause of Hunan opera. In terms of cultural inheritance, the older generation of Hunan opera is relatively old. The emergence of new culture has reduced the interest of contemporary young people in Hunan opera and led to the crisis of the inheritance of Hunan opera. In the process of the influence of life events on anxiety, they play an intermediary role through economic response. The higher the economic level, the stronger the emotional regulation ability of the troupe personnel. Among them, the mediating effect of anxiety can be adjusted through psychological elasticity. That is, economic level can regulate the pressure of life events, and coping style can be used as an intermediary factor of emotional regulation to regulate the impact of life events on anxiety through coping style. Conclusion Facing the challenge of traditional art inheritance and survival, driven by the cultural environment and multicultural environment of the global village, this is a problem that many traditional arts must think about if they want to survive. The government needs to take various measures to change the current situation and make the excellent traditional culture of Hunan opera continue to flourish. Through more bilateral exchanges and communication, cross-strait cultural inheritance and innovation, strengthen cross-strait cultural and artistic exchanges and cooperation, jointly play the piano art for the opera troupe, and work together for the in-depth development of both sides. Acknowledgments This paper is the general project of Fujian Social Science Planning Project Art Fund in 2019: Fujian Taiwan Gezai Opera (Xiang Opera). Phased achievements of Yangqin Development Research (Project No.: fj2019b029).

The Social Life of Jewish Music Records from 1948 Czechoslovakia by Hazzan Josef Weiss

This article traces transnational “life” trajectories of two rare Jewish religious music records from 1948 Communist Czechoslovakia and of their main performer Josef Weiss (ca. 1912, Veľké Kapušany – 1985 Netanya), who was a hazzan (cantor) in synagogues in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Jerusalem, Ramat Gan, Manchester, and New York, but has remained mostly unknown to music history. It shows how these two 78-rpm records stand at the core of Weiss’s grandson’s family / music / memory project, which has revealed and pre­pared to reissue 52 audio recordings to preserve his grandfather’s legacy. While following these and other digitized and technologically modified recordings of Weiss on their recent path between the Czech Republic, Israel, Hungary, and the US, the article sheds light on how this case fits into the broader framework of the social life of things and the context of musical remembrance. Already put to use during the life-cycle rituals of Weiss’s children and grandchildren, as well as in a museum exhibition – this family project constructs a fragment of a Jewish sonic past for the present needs of its actors, while being entangled with the current practice of Jewish memory institutions, as well as with the activities of private record collectors and of one ethnomusicologist (myself).

Microtonal Guitar Culture in Turkey

The main objective of this article is to analyze the development and the contemporary artistic milieu of microtonal guitar culture in Turkey. With a particular focus on the adjustable microtonal guitar developed by Tolgahan Çoğulu, we examined musicians’ experiences and the ways that they relate to this musical instrument. We used qualitative research methods and conducted in-depth interviews with our key informant and adviser Tolgahan Çoğulu as well as eight musicians who specialize in microtonal guitar. We utilized Bennett and Peterson’s definition of ‘scene’ to discuss microtonal guitar culture in Turkey. After briefly presenting the development of guitar music and questioning the nature of its representation in Istanbul, we analyzed the themes that emerged in conversation with the guitar players. We determined that our interviewees, who are educated, enthusiastic and committed musicians, are all influenced by Tolgahan Çoğulu’s efforts to shape the microtonal guitar world and are driven by their own artistic motivations. We found that musicians shared views on the innovative and promising qualities as well as certain live performance-related difficulties of this instrument –including the need to hammer new frets for different tuning systems on stage and the necessity of sharing microtonal guitar music recordings or videos using new media technologies. Although musical pieces in the microtonal guitar repertoire are mainly rooted in Turkish music, many consider this instrument to be an attempt towards overcoming the generally accepted distinctions between Western and Eastern music. We aim to contribute to further analysis of this flourishing music culture through our discussions on future implications of the current situation and our projections for the growing interest in microtonal music in Turkey.

One Year on: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Lives of Freelance Orchestral Musicians in the United Kingdom.

Before the drastic disruption caused by the sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, 85% of the United Kingdom’s 14,000 orchestral musicians were self-employed freelance workers, engaged in busy and varied portfolio careers comprising a combination of orchestral, West End theatre, chamber music, and commercial recording work. Between May and June 2020 we carried out a first study examining the impact of the pandemic on the lives of 24 self-employed orchestral musicians, all established freelancers. Twelve were mid-career and 12 were late-career (described in that study as “seasoned”). They all reported having lost their much-loved performing careers, missing music making and colleagues, and being anxious about the future of the music profession. However, there were some differences between the two groups: the late-career participants demonstrated greater financial and emotional resilience, while the mid-career musicians reported distress, confusion, and anxiety about their identity as musicians. In the present follow-up study, we aimed to examine the impact of the first year of the pandemic on the lives of 21 of the same musicians. We found that while all the mid-career participants remained committed to their performing careers, many late-career participants aged 54–59 had developed interests in non-performing music work, and the older late-career participants, aged 65 and over, feared that they might already, de facto, have retired. We discuss the findings with reference to the precarity of freelance orchestral musicians’ lives, lifespan models of musicians’ careers, self-determination theory and post-traumatic growth, and their implications for music colleges and musicians’ support organizations.

Improved Feature Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network for Effective Recognition of Music Scores

Music written by composers and performed by multidimensional instruments is an art form that reflects real-life emotions. Historically, people disseminated music primarily through sheet music recording and oral transmission. Among them, recording music in sheet music form was a great musical invention. It became the carrier of music communication and inheritance, as well as a record of humanity's magnificent music culture. The advent of digital technology solves the problem of difficult musical score storage and distribution. However, there are many drawbacks to using data in image format, and extracting music score information in editable form from image data is currently a challenge. An improved convolutional neural network for musical score recognition is proposed in this paper. Because the traditional convolutional neural network SEGNET misclassifies some pixels, this paper employs the feature pyramid structure. Use additional branch paths to fuse shallow image details, shallow texture features that are beneficial to small objects, and high-level features of global information, enrich the multi-scale semantic information of the model, and alleviate the problem of the lack of multiscale semantic information in the model. Poor recognition performance is caused by semantic information. By comparing the recognition effects of other models, the experimental results show that the proposed musical score recognition model has a higher recognition accuracy and a stronger generalization performance. The improved generalization performance allows the musical score recognition method to be applied to more types of musical score recognition scenarios, and such a recognition model has more practical value.