Music Research Research Articles

Trends and Pedagogical Implications in Practical Music Research: Focusing on Content Analysis and Topic Modelling of KCI-listed articles

Trends and Pedagogical Implications in Practical Music Research: Focusing on Content Analysis and Topic Modelling of KCI-listed articles

Exploring the Integration of Chinese Music in Western Musicological Literature: Trends, Gaps, and Multicultural Perspectives

The purpose of the article is to analyse Western musicological literature to identify key trends and gaps in existing research on Chinese music as an integral part of the contemporary multicultural educational space. The research methodology is based on content analysis, comparative analysis, and bibliographic review. The primary method is content analysis, involving a systematic review of academic articles, monographs, reviews, and other publications on Chinese music in Western musicological literature. Comparative analysis is used to compare Western research on Chinese music with scholarly work from China and other countries. Bibliographic review helps to identify scientific gaps and trends in Chinese music research. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the comprehensive analysis of Western musicological literature on Chinese music to reveal key trends and gaps in existing research. The use of content analysis, comparative analysis, and bibliographic review allows for the first systematic organisation and comparison of approaches to studying Chinese music in different cultural contexts. The study also provides new insights into the role of Chinese music in the contemporary multicultural educational space, contributing to its integration and popularisation. Conclusions. Over the past three decades, publications on Chinese music within the context of multicultural music education have been irregular. Although the number of studies is not large, it shows moderate activity in the 1990s and early 2000s, with a noticeable increase after 2007 and periods of decline between 2010 and 2014. This indicates the need for further analysis of the reasons behind this dynamic and a deeper exploration of the integration of Chinese music into the Western educational context. The literature review shows that research covers a broad range of educational contexts, from early childhood to higher education and teacher professional development, indicating the potential for integrating Chinese music at various levels of formal education. The review also reveals that research on Chinese music often has a Eurocentric approach, evaluating it through the lens of Western music theory. This limits the full understanding and integration of Chinese musical traditions, highlighting the need for a deeper and more comprehensive approach that would foster an understanding of Chinese music in its own context.

Uncovering children’s experiences of emergent learning difficulties in the instrumental music studio

When children commence instrumental music tuition, learning difficulties can emerge to disrupt predictable learning processes and impact musical development. However, children’s experiences of learning difficulties, including how they present, are managed and can be supported, are rarely examined in music research. This longitudinal, qualitative study used Participatory Action Research and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodologies to examine the lived experience of fourteen 7-year-old beginner cellists. It focussed on how children’s learning difficulties emerged in the music studio and affected their continued engagement, and how the instrumental music teacher supported children with difficulties. Unexpectedly, half ( N = 7) of the young learners encountered challenges, including memory and processing difficulties, impulse, attention and focus issues, intrusive synaesthesia, fine motor skill difficulty, dyslexia and persistent anxiety. Children’s highly individualised experiences of their learning difficulties were impacted by their motivations, self-perception and ratio of skill acquisition. A reflexive pedagogical approach by the teacher, together with pragmatic support and emotional guidance from parents, influenced the children’s learning behaviour and continued investment, contributing to their longer-term musical engagement. This study offers a unique contribution to the literature by providing a rare investigation of children’s emergent learning difficulties, as revealed in the instrumental music studio.

The Effects of Music on Activity Rates, Time in Activity, and Levels of Enjoyment in Junior High School Basketball

Music is a tool physical education (PE) teachers can use to help motivate students to greater physical activity (PA) rates during class activities. Music research in the PE context has found music to in-crease PA rates in the junior high school context (Brewer et al., 2016), that music increases the enjoyment of the PE experience for students (Barney et al., 2016) and can serve as a distraction during certain workouts (Higginson et al., 2019). This study aimed to examine the effects of music on physical activity rates (steps taken and time in activity) via pedometers of junior high school students in basketball gameplay. For this study, 270 junior high school students (157 males and 113 females) from eight intact seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade classes participated. The male and female participants attended differ-ent schools. Generally, it was found that the female participants were more active than their male counterparts when music was playing.

Instrumentale Melodieanfänge und ihr Verhältnis zur Form am Beispiel historischer und gegenwärtiger ungarischer Tanzmelodien

AbstractThe aim of this study is to analyze the beginning of different dance tunes in connection with variously performed dance tunes. The purpose of this paper is also to draw attention to the need for micro-analysis, which has been neglected for a long time in instrumental folk music research, in order to better understand instrumental musical melody creation. The selected musical examples come from different (partly historical) eras and different geographical areas of Western Transdanubian and Transylvanian Hungarian folk music collections. Typical starting elements (fifth-forth changes, direction of moving of scales, etc.) are related to dance music with different names. The analysis ignores the evolution of tempo and variation throughout the piece, as well as the ensemble's “Primas” ornamentation, timbre, harmonies and unique solutions of the accompaniment. At the same time, the author paid attention to the form and structure of the entire piece in addition to the beginnings of the melody. The study was written in honor of the 100th birthday of Walter Deutsch, the creator of modern Austrian ethnomusicology.

A Literature Review on the Theme of Female Music in the Accompanying Marriage Songs in Jiahe County, China

The accompanying marriage songs in Jiahe County (hereinafter referred to as JHAMS) are rare female music examples in Chinese folk wedding rituals. They are particularly precious and special for Chinese music research, which does not pay much attention to gender research. This paper uses a qualitative systematic literature review method to search, screen, classify, analyse, and compare the existing gender research literature on JHAMS. It is found that the proportion is only 10.53%, and the research topics are mainly "female psychology" and "female roles." It can be seen that further increasing and deepening the gender research on JHAMS has important exploratory significance and academic value.

Book Review: Aaron Williamon, Jane Ginsborg, Rosie Perkins and George Waddell, Performing Music Research: Methods in Music Education, Psychology, and Performance Science

Book Review: Aaron Williamon, Jane Ginsborg, Rosie Perkins and George Waddell, <i>Performing Music Research: Methods in Music Education, Psychology, and Performance Science</i>

가야금병창 연구 동향 연구 －국내 석사학위 논문을 중심으로－

The purpose of this study is to examine the trends and future directions of esearch on gayageum byeongchang, focusing on master’s theses published from 1982 to February2024, and to derive socio-educational implications, explore under-researched areas, and propose future research directions. A total of 148 master’s theses on gayageum byeongchang were selected and examined by period, school, and topic. Looking at the trends in gayageum byeongchang master’s theses and graduate school research by period, it was found that research on gayageum byeongchang became more active over time, with a total of 7 theses in the 1980s, 49 theses in the 2000s, 66 theses in the 2010s, and 24 theses from the 2020s to February 2024. In terms of schools, Central University had the most master’s theses on gayageum byeongchang with 32, followed by the Korea National University of Arts with 21. When classified into major categories such as musical research, educational research, and other research, it was found that musical research accounted for 75% of the total, with most studies focusing on person-centered musical analysis or comparisons between gayageum byeongchang and other genres. Educational research accounted for 33% of the total, mainly focusing on teaching methods and instructional plans by target audience, while other topics accounted for 3% of the total. Based on the results of this study, I would like to suggest the following directions for future research on Gayageum Byeongchang: First, research topics should be expanded from various angles to develop new research topics that align with the current educational environment or trends in society, integrating with other subjects or disciplines to actively respond to societal changes. Second, to enhance the quality of theses and improve musical research, it is necessary to establish systematic classification criteria for accurate writing systems or notation formats based on the creativity and diversity of research topics. Third, research should be expanded to include various target audiences. While studies targeting teachers, the general public, high school students, middle school students, and elementary school students are visible, there is a lack of studies targeting the elderly, infants, or students with disabilities. Systematic teaching methods and textbooks tailored to the developmental stages and characteristics of the target audience should be actively developed and researched to ensure a balanced representation of research subjects without bias. Fourth, educational materials development and programs should be developed and studied so that systematic education suitable for each age-specific development stage can be achieved. Fifth, research and development of Gayageum musical instruments should be carried out for public distribution. If reasonably priced Gayageum musical instruments are distributed, Gayageum Byeongchang education will be more active. These results are expected to help understand the current status of master’s theses on gayageum byeongchang, suggest future research directions, and contribute to the qualitative improvement of master’s theses.

Affective Turn, or Return?

The ‘affective turn’ suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and toward richer forms of contextual analysis by studying how bodies – human and otherwise – ‘act and are acted upon’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1). The ‘affective turn’ requires sensitive attention to a host of cognate terms and concepts – sentiment, emotion, reverberation, resonance, atmosphere, and far beyond, including the more specific trans-category of ‘affective politics’ as well as affective reinterpretations of the social. Music has long been recognized as a site where affective politics play out. However, existing scholarship often view Baruch Spinoza, Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi as the founding fathers of affective thinking at the expense of related work in the broader tradition of music philosophy. We address this lacuna by discussing the relationship between music, affect, and politics in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Qian Sima, Johannes Tinctoris, René Descartes, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Theodor Adorno, Antoine Hennion, and Tia DeNora, as we aim to broaden, nuance, sharpen, and situate contemporary understandings of affective politics in music studies. In doing so, we discuss whether the affective turn is, perhaps, better understood as a ‘return’ to cross-disciplinary music research that situates the understandings of affective politics, relational agency, and political emotions within a longer history of music philosophy that, taken together, provide a more robust theoretical argument for the social and political force of musical sounds.

Research On Guqin Composition In Mainland China In The 1950s And 1960s: Some Works Of Yu Shaoze [喻绍泽

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, a group of guqin players from the folk were integrated into official music research and educational institutions. Under the guidance of the cultural policies advocated by the new regime, they created a considerable number of new guqin compositions that reflected the characteristics of the times. This paper primarily focuses on the historical and morphological study of nine guqin pieces composed by Yu Shaoze [喻绍泽] (1903-1988), the earliest professional guqin music teacher in the west China, between 1956 and 1966.In the historical research section, the article examines the historical context of these works from two perspectives: the personal circumstances of the guqin player and the socio-political atmosphere in China. In the musicological research section, the article studies these works within the author-work relationship to investigate how the guqin player's performance experience shaped the forms of these compositions. Simultaneously, it explores how the author responded to the political demands and tastes of the Chinese authorities regarding music compositions during the 1950s and 1960s in his creative process.

From Music Scores to Audio Recordings: Deep Pitch-Class Representations for Measuring Tonal Structures

The availability of digital music data in various modalities provides opportunities both for music enjoyment and music research. Regarding the latter, the computer-assisted analysis of tonal structures is a central topic. For Western classical music, studies typically rely on machine-readable scores, which are tedious to create for large-scale works and comprehensive corpora. As an alternative, music audio recordings, which are readily available, can be analyzed with computational methods. With this paper, we want to bridge the gap between score- and audio-based measurements of tonal structures by leveraging the power of deep neural networks. Such networks are commonly trained in an end-to-end fashion, which introduces biases towards the training repertoire or towards specific annotators. To overcome these problems, we propose a multi-step strategy. First, we compute pitch-class representations of the audio recordings using networks trained on score–audio pairs. Second, we measure the presence of specific tonal structures using a pattern-matching technique that solely relies on music theory knowledge and does not require annotated training data. Third, we highlight these measurements with interactive visualizations, thus leaving the interpretation to the musicological experts. Our experiments on Richard Wagner's large-scale cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen indicate that deep pitch-class representations lead to a high similarity between score- and audio-based measurements of tonal structures, thus demonstrating how to leverage multimodal data for application scenarios in the computational humanities, where an explicit and interpretable methodology is essential.

중국 작곡가 조원임의 예술가곡 ‘비를 듣다(听雨)’의 가창 방법 연구

Zhao Yuanren was a famous Chinese linguist and composer in the early 20th century. While studying the Chinese language, he began to create art songs with Chinese national characteristics, and achieved great results. Not only that, he was also one of the first Chinese composers to use western music creation techniques. Zhao Yuanren used his language research results and music research results. He combined Chinese folk music with Western creative techniques and created a new Chinese art songs. As a result of all these aspects of his achievements. Artists like Xiao Youmei called him Oriental Schubert. This research is based on "Listening to the Rain 听雨" in Zhao Yuanren's early art song. We find that "Listening to the Rain 听雨" is Zhao Yuanren's reading style of Chinese opera poetry. At the same time, on the basis of Chinese folk music, combined with western music creation techniques, the songs of early Chinese artists were born. During the course of this study, I analyzed the overall structure and music of this art song. According to the results of Zhao Yuanren's linguistics research, I also analyzed the pronunciation method of the lyrics. It also analyzes the singing version of the famous Chinese singers. Finally, I suggested how to sing the song. In order to objectify the results of this study, I discussed with three Chinese singers and university professors. The study results are presented as follows. The study results are presented as follows： First, keep your breathing at about 50%. The breath of the voice is not shaken. Make full use of the diaphragm to sing. In this way, singing can keep the same feelings from beginning to end. Second, the song does not have significant mood changes and timbre differences. The rhythm is very steady. The vibration frequency of the sound should be very soft, concise, delicate, just like the feeling of leaves falling in the breeze. Third, in the timbre, the voice can not be heavy, relax to sing. Make the voice feel soft. But the sound should distinguish between bright and dim. Fourth, rather than a strong emotional engagement. More need to have a hazy feeling and missing the feeling. Sing this song with sad feelings. Fifth, this song is an art song created based on the new poems as the lyrics. So sing like a poem.Therefore, we should pay special attention to the tone of Chinese Chinese and the rhythm of reading after singing. And perfect correspond to western music. So be sure to use the rules of pronunciation lyrics invented by Zhao Yuanren. Chinese art songs have now become one of the central genres of Chinese vocal music."Listen to the Rain" is a song of early Chinese artists, and it is the basis of understanding the whole Chinese art song. But now due to the western sound and pronunciation, it can not fully show the beauty of Chinese art songs. I hope that the research results will have a meaningful impact on famous Chinese singers and also on students learning Chinese music.

Capturing differences in perception and aesthetic judgment of live or medially presented music: development of a self-report instrument.

Nowadays there are multiple ways to perceive music, from attending concerts (live) to listening to recorded music through headphones (medial). In between there are many mixed modes, such as playback performances. In empirical music research, this plurality of performance forms has so far found little recognition. Until now no measuring instrument has existed that could adequately capture the differences in perception and aesthetic judgment. The purpose of our empirical investigation was to capture all dimensions relevant to such an assessment. Using 3D-simulations and dynamic binaural synthesis, various live and medial situations were simulated. A qualitative survey was conducted at the Department of Audio Communication of the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). With the help of the repertory grid technique, a data pool of approximately 400 attribute pairs was created and individual rating data were collected. Our first study served to create a semantic differential. In a second study, this semantic differential was evaluated. The development of the semantic differential was carried out by first using a mixed-method approach to qualitative analysis according to grounded theory. Thereafter, a principal component analysis reduced the attribute pairs to 67 items in four components. The semantic differential consists of items concerning acoustic, visual and audio-visual interaction as well as items with an overarching assessment of the stimuli. The evaluation study, comprising 45 participants (23 male and 22 female, M = 42.56 years, SD = 17.16) who rated 12 stimuli each, reduced the items to 61 and resulted in 18 subscales and nine single items. Because the survey used simulations, the social component may be underrepresented. Nevertheless, the questionnaire we created enables the evaluation of music performances (especially for classical concerts) in a new scope, thus opening many opportunities for further research. For example, in a live concert context, we observed not only that seating position influences the judgment of sound quality but also that visual elements influence immersion and felt affect. In the future, the differential could be reviewed for a larger stimulus pool, extended or used modularly for different research questions.

TrumpetNet: A Convolutional Neural Network with Self-Attention Mechanisms for visual detection of trumpet fingering

Visual detection of fingering on the trumpet is an increasingly interesting topic in music research. The ability to recognize and track the movements of the trumpet player’s fingers during the performance of a musical piece can provide valuable information for analyzing and improving instrument technique. However, this is a largely unexplored task, as most works focus on audio quality rather than instrument fingering techniques. Developing techniques for identifying essential finger positions on a musical instrument is crucial, as poor fingering techniques can harm instrument performance. In this work, we propose the visual detection of this fingering using convolutional neural networks with a proprietary dataset created for this purpose. Additionally, to improve the results and focus on the essential parts of the instrument, we use self-attention mechanisms by extracting these features automatically.

Grammy Museum grants for music research and preservation

Grammy Museum grants for music research and preservation

Keep it locked (down): how Melbourne’s community radio stations performed scene functions in the context of the coronavirus pandemic

ABSTRACT While community radio scholars have been astute in documenting the democratic and socio-political value of community radio, there has been a lack of analysis towards its specifically musicalized role and the influence that has on local music scenes. Comparably, popular music research has tended to focus on physical, ‘bounded’ spaces such as band rooms and clubs. But what happens when these spaces cannot be accessed? By positioning Melbourne’s six COVID-19 response lockdowns as an ‘unbounded’ context, this article sets out to uncover which, and to what extent, scenic functions are performed by the city’s community radio stations. Focusing on three of the FM community broadcasters – PBS, 3RRR, and 3MBS – it draws on both community radio studies and scene theory to identify conceptual overlaps as well as a gap in pre-existing scholarship between the two. Scene and community are discussed in conjunction with the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘empowerment’, which I argue pertain equally to community radio studies and the scene concept. Based around these frameworks, an ethnographic study was conducted in order to collect qualitative data and best determine the scenic responsibilities upheld by community radio across Melbourne’s 267 days in lockdown.

Developing community music in Italy: The journey

This article deals with the relationship between community music and scholarly research within the context of Italian community life, cultural politics, conditions and history. Community music theory and practice activities provide participants with opportunities for growth, development and collaboration, ranging from specific musical skills to social and cultural outreach and the positive challenge of increasing self-awareness and empowerment. After discussing the links between community music projects and social work, music therapy or arts education, the article locates community music in the landscape of Italian music research and, especially, musicology. It summarizes the current state of community music and the efforts to create an Italian network of community music scholars as well as establish a dialogue with similar international networks. The aim is to create the conditions for the establishment of an academic and theoretical framework for community music in Italy that can work as a pathway between music for social change, musicology and music education.

Situating language and music research in a domain‐specific versus domain‐general framework: A review of theoretical and empirical data

AbstractWhile many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive (neuro‐)science. This research has led to many and diverse findings, making comparisons difficult. In the current review, we propose a framework within which to organise past research and conduct future research, suggesting that past research has assumed either domain‐specificity or domain‐generality for language and music. Domain‐specific approaches theoretically and experimentally describe aspects of language and music processing assuming that there is shared (structure‐building) processing. Domain‐general approaches theoretically and experimentally describe how mechanisms such as cognitive control, attention or neural entrainment can explain language and music processing. Here we propose that combining elements from domain‐specific and domain‐general approaches can be beneficial for advances in theoretical and experimental work, as well as for diagnoses and interventions for atypical populations. We provide examples of past research which has implicitly merged domain‐specific and domain‐general assumptions, and suggest new experimental designs that can result from such a combination aiming to further our understanding of the human brain.

Preference of Chinese pre-service music teachers and schoolteachers for three culturally diverse musical pieces.

Using three musical pieces as musical stimuli from Romania, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia, this study extended Fung's study by examining Chinese pre-service music teachers' (n = 115) and schoolteachers' (n = 131) personal preferences and external preferences for orchestral, folk, and popular music pieces. Two groups of participants were asked to select their preferred music from three pieces and to provide verbal descriptions of the reasons for their selections. The results showed (a) no significant differences in personal preference between the two groups but statistical significances in external preferences between the two groups; (b) the highest preference rating by both groups of teachers was folk music and the highest forced-choice preference was popular music; (c) statistically significant correlations between personal preference and external preference were evident in both groups across all three pieces; and (d) frequent descriptions by both groups of participants of the pieces in terms of musical characteristics were shared. The implications of this study are as follows. (1) Psychologists and music researchers gain insights about Chinese young adults' listening preferences, which might offer implications for future research in the field of psychology; and (2) By enhancing multicultural awareness, music education teachers and researchers should combine different music styles to broaden students' music horizons.

(IN)SUFFICIENT RESEARCH ON MUSIC AND ITS MANAGEMENT

Guy de Maupassant has said: A strange art – music – the most poetic and the precise of all forms of arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra. An attempt to describe and carry out research in the field of music often seems like a description of a scent – music simply exists, it exists on its own – seems that it evades the rational thinking processes. Still music and its consumption is affected by the possibility of its technical reproduction, visualisation, virtuality, differentiated lifestyles, economisation of spheres of life and commercialization. Music research opens possibilities in terms of attention and experience. The same applies to the use of music in advertising, sponsoring, audio brand management. Shifts in the domain of music management in terms of space, format and environment is a challenge. The research methods applicable in management are many-sided: model of conductor and orchestra creating a management model, role of jazz mindset or jazz thinking of a nowadays manager. Music offers a wide range of possibilities in terms of its value research. Especially in economic, symbolic, and social viewpoint. The currently popular trend of city planning is working with the sound of the city in forming a creative environment. Comparing music to literature, painting and cinema has several advantages. Especially unifying is the musical experience obtained in a publicly performed concert, where many people are fully engaged in the same participation. This subject deserves deeper research.