Musical Settings Research Articles

Mistuning perception in music is asymmetric and relies on both beats and inharmonicity

An out-of-tune singer or instrument can ruin the enjoyment of music. However, there is disagreement on how we perceive mistuning in natural music settings. To address this question, we presented listeners with in-tune and out-of-tune passages of two-part music and manipulated the two primary candidate acoustic cues: beats (fluctuations caused by interactions between nearby frequency components) and inharmonicity (non-integer harmonic frequency relationships) across seven experiments (Exp 1: N = 101; Exp 2: N = 63; Exp 3a: N = 87; Exp 3b: N = 28; Exp 3c: N = 69; Exp 4: N = 160; Exp 5: N = 105). Mistuning detection worsened markedly when removing either beating or inharmonicity cues, suggesting important contributions from both. The relative importance of the two cues varied reliably between listeners but was unaffected by musical experience. Finally, a general asymmetry in sensitivity to mistuning was discovered, with compressed pitch differences being more easily detected than stretched ones, thereby demonstrating a generalization of the previously found stretched-octave effect. Overall, the results reveal the acoustic underpinnings of the critical perceptual phenomenon of dissonance through mistuning in natural music.

Numerical Evaluation of Aerosol Propagation in Wind Instruments Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

This paper examines aerosol propagation in wind instruments through numerical analysis, focusing on particle trajectories within five types of wind instruments: saxophone, clarinet, flute, oboe, and trumpet. Using a computational fluid dynamics approach, it is found that larger particles are deposited within the instruments, while smaller micron-sized particles predominantly exit through the bell. The impact of the instrument’s geometry on aerosol dynamics is quantified; cylindrical instruments (clarinet, flute) show an increased rate of small droplet deposition or escape through tone holes compared to conical instruments (saxophone, oboe). Instruments with steep turnings, such as the trumpet, exhibited significant particle deposition. The study suggests that deposited particles are likely to move towards re-emission points, driven by gravity and airflow, especially in straight-shaped instruments. Integrating computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a complementary approach to traditional experimental methods provides insights into aerosol transmission mechanisms in musical settings. This methodology not only aids in understanding aerosol behavior but also supports the development of safer musical and educational environments, contributing to the field.

Analisis Pemasaran Sosial Media Melalui Perkembangan Teknologi Terhadap Produk Smartwatch

Something that is quite significant about smartwatches today is their role in helping users monitor health and fitness, by carrying various superior features ranging from measuring heart rate, measuring oxygen pressure in the blood, footsteps, running distance, GPS features, calculating sleep hours, notifications. cell phone, music settings and answering incoming calls. What is no less interesting about smartwatches is that their internal devices are very modern for users ranging from teenagers to adults. This research was carried out through monitoring social media and conducting research in the research office area located in Ruko Apartment Puncak Bukit Golf No. 1. The influence of using social media is sufficient to function as an effective platform for promoting smartwatch products, which provides direct interaction between sellers and buyers.

A “set” of ancient bronze bells excavated in Changsha, Hunan Province, China

This article explores the criteria used to ascertain whether or not, and how, ancient Chinese bronze bells might form sets of musical instruments, thus clarifying their original intended use by ancient musicians. The focus is on ten bells unearthed from Changsha city in Hunan province in China, which date to the twelfth century BCE. A range of diverse relationships between these bells provide valuable insights that can be explored. Debate is ongoing among music historians regarding the nature of the bells. Some argue that the ten bells do not constitute a set of musical instruments because their designs and acoustic properties lack sufficient similarity and correlation. Conversely, another group of historians suggests that nine of the ten bells could indeed be seen as a set, but with the tenth bell being an outlier due to its distinct design. The third group of historians contends that the ten bells should be considered a musical set because of their organized sequence of consecutive semi-tones, while the design differences of the bells are less significant and can be overlooked if we focus on their musical functions. In this study, we scrutinize the assumptions made by these music historians, including their definitions of design similarity and the sequence of progressive pitches. Further previously overlooked criteria, such as the geographical proximity of these ten bells and others found in neighboring areas, and the incremental changes in the bell sizes, are also considered. Through the use of these criteria we aim to explore a wide range of relationships between ancient Chinese bells and to reassess what other new evidence the bells may offer to the study of ancient Chinese musical concepts. The concept of the chromatic scale discovered by ancient Chinese musicians was embodied on the casting of bronze bells.

Editorial: Community music and ‘making easy’

Facilitation is a key aspect of community music. While only two of the articles in International Journal of Community Music (IJCM) 17.2 have the word ‘facilitators’ explicitly in the title, all the articles in this issue speak, in their distinct ways, to facilitation/facilitators in community music. Most direct in this regard is the systematic review of research on group singing facilitators by J. Yoon Irons and associates. Other articles in this issue study the activities of the Ostend Street Orkestra in Belgium (Verneert et al.), the Pizzicato Effect in Hume, Australia (Smith et al.), Tàlaidhean Ùra – a Scottish implementation of The Lullaby Project (Tanner, Wilson and Wight), the theatre troupe Sex Worker’s Opera (Flower) and the DocSong method used at in an all-male minimum- and medium-security state prison in the United States (Kirchner). Taken together, the articles in issue 17.2 add to the growing research base on facilitation in community music settings.

The Effect of Musical Environments on Designers' Attention: Persistent Music Listening Interferes with Attention.

Research indicates that music can influence human cognitive functions. Diverse musical settings can affect alertness, orientation, and executive control of attention in various populations. Exploring the relationship between designers with highly creative thinking and music environments can provide new research perspectives for the cognitive field. A total of 94 students, consisting of 61 design majors and 33 non-design majors, completed the Attention Network Test (ANT) on a computer under three test environments: cheerful music, melancholic music, and silence. The study results indicated that the alerting network effect between the design professional group and the control group was marginally significant. However, there were no significant differences between the groups in the orienting subsystem and the executive control subsystem. Within the design professional group, the attentional network data indicated that participants showed improved performance in alerting and orienting attention in a music-free environment compared to cheerful and melancholic music environments (pa = 0.028, po = 0.008). Nevertheless, executive control attention did not show significant differences across the music environments. In conclusion, existing research confirms that designers are more susceptible to distraction from external stimuli; thus, music-free environments assist them in concentrating.

Modern Band in Elementary Music

Modern band programs have spread throughout the United States to create learner-centered and culturally affirming school music experiences for children. The four key concepts of modern band, (1) approximation and scaffolding, (2) decision-making, (3) iconic notation, and (4) culturally sustaining (music education), are congruent with many elementary general music philosophies and pedagogies. This article examines intersections of modern band and general music practices and demonstrates how typical classroom instruments (e.g., unpitched percussion, ukuleles, xylophones, and metallophones) can be used to implement key modern band concepts in an elementary school general music setting.

An observation of a negative effect of social cohesion on creativity in musical improvisation

Although various social factors can significantly impact creative performance, it is still unclear how social cohesion (i.e., how close we feel to others) influences creativity. We therefore conducted two studies exploring the association between social cohesion and creativity within the domain of musical improvisation, a prime example of creative performance, which usually plays out in social contexts. The first study (n = 58 musical novices) showed that music-induced synchrony facilitates social cohesion. In our second study (n = 18 musical novices), we found that in two out of three experimental conditions, increased social cohesion is associated with less creative musical outcomes, as rated by nine expert musicians. In our subsequent analysis we related measures of social cohesion and creativity. This approach highlights how, within a musical setting, creativity unfolds in the context of social contingencies as social cohesion and related factors.

Women’s Perceptions of Advancement Opportunities in Higher Education Music Settings: A Mixed Methods Study

Women’s Perceptions of Advancement Opportunities in Higher Education Music Settings: A Mixed Methods Study

Exploring the determinants of users' co-creation behavior on music streaming platforms in China.

Music streaming platforms have recently become one of the latest innovative music devices used to replace traditional music sets. In order to examine users' behavior on music streaming platforms, this study proposes an extended research model based on flow theory and investigates the relationship between flow experience and co-creation behavior. A partial least square methodology was employed to test the proposed model and corresponding hypotheses on data collected from 390 survey samples. The results showed that flow experience has a significant influence on users' co-creation behavior. Among the three antecedents, only perceived skill and perceived interactivity have the strongest effects on flow experience, while perceived control has little effect on flow experience. This study discusses some valuable theoretical implications and offers insights useful for both researchers and practitioners.

Sounding passions and therapeutic performance in Thomas Weelkes’s songs

Abstract This article explores a group of Thomas Weelkes’s songs where the usually light-hearted, playful and often suggestive fa-la refrain is juxtaposed with melancholic lyrics. The contrasting passions in these texts provide inspiration for typically madrigalian musical expression, often involving chromatic writing for melancholic passages; however, the nonsense syllables in the fa-la refrains function differently. With no semantic text, the expression of these passages depends on the musical setting and the decisions taken by the performers, which might align or jar with prior expectations of fa-la refrains. Such passages are ambiguous and malleable, and the signification of the fa-las might change from stanza to stanza. Weelkes’s experimentation with how fa-la refrains might communicate a range of passions engages with contemporary debates about the extent to which music’s affective powers were reliant on, amplified by, or independent of text. Moreover, several of Weelkes’s songs enact a therapeutic purging of melancholy attributed to non-verbal or instrumental music. Given Weelkes’s interest in exploring sonic effects which are both onomatopoeic and utilize conventions of musical expression, these songs can be interpreted as not merely representations of the passions but as potential acts of musical therapy.

Correction to: Naamyam, Creative Music, and Immigrant Act: Meditations on Jon Jang’s Musical Setting of Genny Lim’s “Burial Mound”

Correction to: Naamyam, Creative Music, and Immigrant Act: Meditations on Jon Jang’s Musical Setting of Genny Lim’s “Burial Mound”

Screenwriting sound and music: Towards a new field of study

Extensive research in film and media studies on film music and sound has delved into various aspects of their role in cinema, recognizing their significance. However, a crucial element in film production – the screenplay – has often been overlooked in the exploration of sound and music integration. Concurrently, studies on screenwriting have displayed limited interest in the acoustic dimensions of film, creating a research gap where film music studies intersect with screenwriting studies. This Special Issue aims to address this gap by emphasizing the screenplay’s importance in comprehending the role of sound and music in film. This introduction showcases the diverse ways in which music and sound are integrated into screenplays. The ongoing exploration of screenplays for the analysis of sound and music sets the stage for future research endeavours. The editors and authors of this Special Issue advocate for the screenplay as a valuable resource in film music studies, providing innovative insights into the film production process.

Music as Magic

Music as Magic

Naamyam, Creative Music, and Immigrant Act: Meditations on Jon Jang’s Musical Setting of Genny Lim’s “Burial Mound”

Abstract Jon Jang, an American composer, bandleader, and activist of Chinese descent, begins his five-movement Island: The Immigrant Suite No. 1 (1995) with a musical setting that is sonically and stylistically unconventional. He introduces a curious adaptation of naamyam (“southern tones”)—a Cantonese genre of narrative singing that originated in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong—into this musical setting of Genny Lim’s Chinglish poem “Burial Mound” so as to make audible the politics of representation concerning Sinophone Americans of particular ancestries, generations, and immigration histories. Not only does he associate this setting with Chinese laborers of the transcontinental railroad and naamyam in American Chinatowns, he also demonstrates in this setting his embrace of “creative music” as an American framework of cultural performance.

Orienting a Nation: The Turkish National Anthem Controversies

As Turkey’s ruling elite founded a nation from the collapsed Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, competitions for the Turkish national anthem’s lyrics and musical setting did not immediately yield clear winners. The original winning composition by Ali Rıfat Çağatay draws on Ottoman-era musical and literary conventions; however, the anthem was redacted six years after selection and replaced in 1930 by the current national anthem by Osman Zeki Üngör, a work iconic of European anthems yet infamous for its “broken” prosody. The anthem’s prosodic errors and enigmatic selection process have fueled national debates since its adoption. I argue that the Turkish ruling elite’s selection of a national anthem reflects the challenges of a broader nation-building project premised on rejecting a presumed Ottoman past and oriented towards the modernity associated with the imagined West. More broadly, I assert that understanding the anthem genre requires interrogating the Eurocentrism of non-European anthems that would seem to seek to emulate European exemplars. Exploring nearly a century of anthem controversies in Turkish media and film illuminates how prosodic errors have served as an innocuous proxy for politically sensitive topics, including tensions over religion in public life and governance as well as the Turkey-US relationship since the Cold War. On the other hand, the many-layered meanings within the anthem as well as its iconicity of the nation have enabled those acting in the name of the state to deploy the anthem as a tool of violent state coercion to discipline nonconforming subjects.

Divertimento Sextet

In 2000, I took part in a project performing all of W.A. Mozart’s (1756-1791) Salzburg divertimentos for strings and winds in the quaint town of Delft in the Netherlands. In attempting to keep true to authentic performance practices we played on period instruments with one player to a part and most significantly the bass line was to be performed solely on the double bass; thus, no cello and no cello/double bass doubling of the bass line.1 Some of my colleagues involved in this project found this to be quite a ‘radical’ idea, for in chamber music settings many musicians are accustomed to the cello as the bass instrument of choice, and depending on the repertoire, a double bass might double the line, but double bass alone…impossible! Indeed most recordings I have heard of these pieces have been performed by a chamber orchestra or as chamber music with the bass line performed by a cello and double bass.

MoMusic: A Motion-Driven Human-AI Collaborative Music Composition and Performing System

The significant development of artificial neural network architectures has facilitated the increasing adoption of automated music composition models over the past few years. However, most existing systems feature algorithmic generative structures based on hard code and predefined rules, generally excluding interactive or improvised behaviors. We propose a motion based music system, MoMusic, as a AI real time music generation system. MoMusic features a partially randomized harmonic sequencing model based on a probabilistic analysis of tonal chord progressions, mathematically abstracted through musical set theory. This model is presented against a dual dimension grid that produces resulting sounds through a posture recognition mechanism. A camera captures the users' fingers' movement and trajectories, creating coherent, partially improvised harmonic progressions. MoMusic integrates several timbrical registers, from traditional classical instruments such as the piano to a new ''human voice instrument'' created using a voice conversion technique. Our research demonstrates MoMusic's interactiveness, ability to inspire musicians, and ability to generate coherent musical material with various timbrical registers. MoMusic's capabilities could be easily expanded to incorporate different forms of posture controlled timbrical transformation, rhythmic transformation, dynamic transformation, or even digital sound processing techniques.

METHODOLOGY OF TEACHING EMOTIONALLY COLORED METAPHORS IN SONG DISCOURSE

In cultural and linguistic analysis, a modern song text is considered as an integral verbal and musical set, which is an element of modern (verbal and musical) culture and includes a verbal (linguistic) component. As linguoculturologists note, “culture generally exists in the form of texts - iconic works of human spiritual activity.”A person joins a culture in the process of appropriating “foreign” texts that make up this culture. However, it is necessary to note the fact that a text is a cultural object only to the extent that “our relationship with it reproduces or for the first time gives rise to human possibilities in us ... seeing and understanding something in the world and in ourselves. “It is culture that is the “second nature” of a person and therefore acts as a kind of global socio-regulatory mechanism for adapting a person and society to the conditions of the natural and social environment.A person thinks and is aware of the society at the moment when he thinks and realizes the world around him with cultural texts (in particular, modern song lyrics), thereby turning to other representatives of culture, satisfying the requirements of cultural communication. According to culturologists, there are two social forms of culture: mass culture and elite. The song text is a cultural product and is part of mass culture.It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. It is the culture of everyday life, presented to the widest audience through various channels, including the media and communications.The song text is a complex cultural text, embodied at the verbal-melodic, behavioral and mental level. These levels are interconnected, they are mutually determined and complement each other, which is very important for linguoecology. In the study of the linguistic component of the song text, we turn to the environment that forms, explains and complements the content of the verbal component (musical component, extralinguistic factors of mass culture).

Engaging with Religious History and Theological Concepts through Music Composition: Ave generosa and The Song of Margery Kempe

This article explores the intersections among music composition, religious history and spiritual texts, with their attendant concepts. It focuses on two works with medieval sources—the concert piece Ave generosa (1996) and the chamber opera The Song of Margery Kempe (2008)—which were featured in the online Gallery of the conferences in 2021 and 2022, respectively, of the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT). Through the lenses of semiotics and intertextuality, it explores the ways by which theological concepts and spiritual contexts can be evoked and ‘translated’ into musical sound, both instrumental and vocal. A sampling of the literature on medieval monasticism and St Hildegard of Bingen, whose corpus forms the source of Ave generosa, supports a musical exegesis of its ‘spiritual programme’. In the case of The Song of Margery Kempe, recent scholarship on the text frames examples of the multiplication of meanings provided by dramatisation and musical setting. Art in general and music composition in particular are presented as a commentary, or gloss, on both religious history and enduring spiritual themes, and a different way of thinking about religion and spirituality.