Musical Voice Research Articles

Vest , Lisa Cooper Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music (review)

REVIEWS 559 of their creative vision accessible to non-specialist, non-Russophone readers for the first time. Many Strugatskii readers know that the fantastical research institute, NIICHAVO, parodied in the brothers’ early novel Ponedel´nik nachinaets v subbotu (Monday Begins on Saturday, 1965), was informed by the Pulkovo Observatory where Boris Strugatskii worked between 1955 and 1964. It is less well known that antisemitic student quotas prevented Boris from undertaking further study in physics, thus channelling him towards Pulkovo and astronomy; or that poor supervision of his graduate dissertation (on binary stars) led him to accidentally duplicate results already proven by another astronomer. Consequently, Boris became a technician rather than a researcher; later, he and Arkadii repurposed their astrophysical expertise in their writing. Combining these biographical insights with wide-ranging literary analysis, Celestial Hellscapes is an outstanding asset to scholars of science fiction. Reese’s book is particularly timely now, as the Strugatskiis’ best novels are finally re-translated and re-issued in English. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Vest, Lisa Cooper. Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music. California Studies in 20th-Century Music. University of California Press, Oakland, CA, 2020. xiv + 263 pp. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00: £54.00. In 1962 Polish composer Bogusław Schäffer brought a lawsuit against fellow composer Henryk Górecki, alleging that he had plagiarized his experimental style of music notation. Schäffer had previously been hostile to the question whether there was even a Polish avant-garde at all, but he had by this point changed course and wished to position himself as the originator of the movement. After numerous meetings, and testimony from experts, the case was thrown out. In this strange episode, we find a microcosm of the argument of influence versus innovation laid out in Lisa Cooper Vest’s brilliant study, Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music. Polish music had been shattered by World War Two, along with most walks of life in the country. Before the war, there had been a nascent national wave, led by Karol Szymanowski. Following the war, Poles sought to establish their own corner of modern music, though with some interference from the Soviet Union. Vest’s book provides a detailed overview of the key questions surrounding this period, but with an angle rarely encountered in Anglophone scholarship on the subject, which usually frames Polish music ‘as a direct response to Soviet political repressions and the subsequent cultural Thaw’ (p. 1). More specifically, SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 560 Vest asserts that ‘we cannot fully understand the specific arc of Polish musical avant-gardism through the periodicity of the Cold War’ (p. 3). Instead, Vest draws heavily on the documents and transcripts from discussions between Polish composers and music critics, illustrating how they drew on two key concepts to explain their predicament: lack (brak) and lag (opóźnienie). These terms encapsulate the ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ of Vest’s title: how fears of comparison with West-European counterparts combined with a sense of ‘being out of time’ to give a genuine urgency to the search for a new musical voice that could be seen as legitimate and equal to international contemporaries. Vest lays out how Szymanowski was constructed as a ‘foundation’ of Polish music after his death, similar to Adrian Thomas’s study on the same period (Polish Music since Szymanowski, Cambridge and New York, 2005), which orients itself as ‘post-Szymanowski’. Szymanowski’s vision brought its own issues: the composer believed that ‘to generate progress in Polish music, composers would need to turn simultaneously inward and outward, backward and forward’ (p. 15). Following the war, ‘the perpetuation of a Polish musical tradition took on a new urgency’ (p. 23). Vest expertly focuses on how the major trends of modernity and experimentalism were still active during Polish music’s short-lived engagement with socialist realism (which still had echoes of Szymanowski’s vision of nationalism and accessibility). In lucid detail, she traces how Polish composers protested against the aesthetic imposition, claiming they couldn’t write music ‘for the people’ if they weren’t confident in their own compositional techniques (p. 48). In this section, Vest restores agency to...

The Music Behind the Mask: Rossini’s Uncanny Salon

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In these works, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” This paper establishes how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a musical “exhumation,” with his compositional activities functioning as a site for broader discourses about disease, aging, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex shed light on changing attitudes toward the composer, which coincided with broader aesthetic shifts taking place at the time. The tensions engendered by Rossini’s precarious status as both living and dead, and his nostalgic relationship to the past, constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential that has not yet been duly acknowledged.

Tracking Musical Voices in Bach's The Art of the Fugue: Timbral Heterogeneity Differentially Affects Younger Normal-Hearing Listeners and Older Hearing-Aid Users

Auditory scene analysis is an elementary aspect of music perception, yet only little research has scrutinized auditory scene analysis under realistic musical conditions with diverse samples of listeners. This study probed the ability of younger normal-hearing listeners and older hearing-aid users in tracking individual musical voices or lines in JS Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Five-second excerpts with homogeneous or heterogenous instrumentation of 2–4 musical voices were presented from spatially separated loudspeakers and preceded by a short cue for signaling the target voice. Listeners tracked the cued voice and detected whether an amplitude modulation was imposed on the cued voice or a distractor voice. Results indicated superior performance of young normal-hearing listeners compared to older hearing-aid users. Performance was generally better in conditions with fewer voices. For young normal-hearing listeners, there was interaction between the number of voices and the instrumentation: performance degraded less drastically with an increase in the number of voices for timbrally heterogeneous mixtures compared to homogeneous mixtures. Older hearing-aid users generally showed smaller effects of the number of voices and instrumentation, but no interaction between the two factors. Moreover, tracking performance of older hearing aid users did not differ when these participants did or did not wear hearing aids. These results shed light on the role of timbral differentiation in musical scene analysis and suggest reduced musical scene analysis abilities of older hearing-impaired listeners in a realistic musical scenario.

Artificial intelligence and music: History and the future perceptive

Several music software programs have been developed that use AI to produce music. Like its applications in other fields, the A.I. in this case also simulates mental tasks. A prominent feature is the capability of the A.I. algorithm to learn based on information obtained such as the computer accompaniment technology, which is capable of listening to and following a human performer so it can perform in synchrony. Artificial intelligence also drives the so-called interactive composition technology, wherein a computer composes music in response to the performance of a live musician. There are several other A.I. applications to music that covers not only music composition, production, and performance but also the way it is marketed and consumed. Apart from programs that use AI to produce music, several music player programs have been developed to use voice recognition and natural language processing technology for music voice control.

POLYPHONIC MUSIC AND ASPECTS OF ITS PERCEPTION

This paper presents several different studies which suggest that music in more musical voices (voice multiplicity) tends to be perceived more positively. These empirical studies emphasize the importance of horizontal organiztion on music perception. According to the author Vinoo Alluri (Alluri, 2012) the polyphonic timbre has been found to be a significant perceptual component of music, especially in studies that involve tasks such as genre identification, categorization, or emotional affect attribution.

“Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo

Reviewed by: “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo Elizabeth Hewitt “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture. By Sandra Runzo. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. viii + 255 pp. $27.95. With the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson is the American artist most beloved and fetishized by contemporary popular culture. Her image and poetry are emblazoned on countless T-shirts, tote bags, and necklaces. Her life has been reimagined in novels, plays, movies, and recently in the Apple TV+ television series Dickinson. That show, and other recent biographical films about Dickinson, have set out to transform the old stereotype of the poet as a frigid hermit into a passionate and vibrant member of her community. This rewriting has also been the central project of Dickinson scholarship over the last three decades, and Sandra Runzo’s work is a crucial part of this endeavor. “Theatricals of Day” constitutes a major project to document Dickinson’s consumption of “popular entertainments of her time” and to calibrate how this popular media manifested itself in her poetry (1). Runzo begins with P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, focusing particularly on the exhibits Barnum marketed as “What Is It?” She calls particular attention to Joice Heth, the supposedly 161-year-old enslaved woman and nursemaid to George Washington, and to William Henry Johnson, the man Barnum marketed [End Page 172] as a cross between human and orangutan. Runzo does not claim that we find allusions to either Heth or Johnson specifically but suggests instead that Dickinson’s poetry resembles the circus by exhibiting a range of personae and experiences that challenge easy classification. Her verse presents “spectacle and conundrum” (26). But unlike Barnum, Dickinson does not exploit these ambiguous identities through her poetry—she identifies with them and “explore[s] her affiliation with the alien and fantastical” (44). Runzo follows a similar kind of analogic analysis in the next three chapters. She argues that we can see evidence of Dickinson’s appreciation for the Hutchinson Family Singers, an extremely popular antebellum singing group, not only because she owned sheet music of their songs but also because of other kinds of thematic affinities: “prominent references to graves, liberty, captivity, diminutiveness, desolation, yearning, and betrayal” (55). Similarly, the influence of minstrel songs on Dickinson is indicated by the elements of minstrelsy—song, dance, masquerade, riddles, satire—found in abundance in her poetry. And we can see the importance of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Circumstance” by observing the frequency with which Dickinson’s poetry narrates stories of crisis similar to that in Spofford’s tale: “a speaker encounters a demon, a monster, a goblin, a ghost . . . [and] the ghastly and the familiar live side-by-side” (127–28). Runzo meticulously works through Dickinson’s corpus to identify what is indisputably true: Dickinson’s poetry is laced with allusions to popular entertainments. But I did find myself less persuaded by some of the more sweeping claims made by the book, which threaten an overdetermined reading of the very influences Runzo skillfully uncovers. She certainly proves that the Hutchinson Family Singers influenced Dickinson’s work, but I am less persuaded that what Dickinson appreciated about their music was the “rebellious energy” and “threat of tumult” (63). While I appreciate Runzo’s desire to push back against scholarship that reads Dickinson’s poetry as racist or apolitical, the fact that Dickinson owned sheet music by the Hutchinsons does not, for me, “evince [Dickinson’s] interest in the musical voices of the abolitionist movement” (68). They were extremely popular musicians, so it is not surprising that an avid sheet music collector like Dickinson would own their music. And, as Runzo says, her collection did not include the Hutchinson’s most celebrated abolitionist song, “Get Off the Track.” Runzo argues on behalf of Dickinson’s anti-racism because she owns sheet music for “Old Dan Tucker” and several other antebellum minstrelsy songs. I am unsure why, however, Runzo reads Dickinson’s ownership of the Hutchinson sheet music as approbation of their reformist politics but offers a very different account of Dickinson’s ownership of minstrel music...

Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson

Reviewed by: Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson Frederick Key Smith Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland. By Árni Heimir Ingólfsson. (Music, Nature, Place.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xi, 383 p. ISBN 9780253044044 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780253044051 (paperback), $38; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, works list, bibliography, index. My first exposure to the music of Jón Leifs (1899–1968) occurred early in my graduate studies as an aspiring musicologist. Having been attracted to Norse mythology since childhood and becoming reacquainted with it during my undergraduate years, the interrelationship between myth and music seemed a natural direction for my musicological studies. Coincidentally, it was not one of Leifs’s myth-based works to which I was first exposed, but his monolithic tone poem Hekla, op. 52 (1961) on the disc Earquake: The Loudest Classical Music of All Time (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Leif Segerstam, Ondine OND 824 [1997], CD). Though I initially considered the work a cacophonous oddity, it turned out to be an invaluable discovery. A few years later, during work on my doctoral dissertation on Leifs and related contact with the Icelandic Music Information Center, I had the privilege of engaging in several conversations with the Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson (b. 1973). At that time, Ingólfsson was working on what would become one of the first major biographies of Jón Leifs in Icelandic, Jón Leifs: Líf í tónum ([ Jón Leifs: A Life in Music] Reykjavik: Mál og Menning, 2009), which had been anticipated by music critic Alex Ross (New Yorker, 23 August 2004, 48–53, 55–59) and nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize (Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunin) the year it appeared. Ten years later, Ingólfsson brings his notable scholarship on perhaps the most original composer of modern Nordic art music to the English-speaking world in Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland. As much a biography of Leifs’s complex life and personality as it is an analysis of the composer’s distinct musical voice and compositional output, Ingólfsson’s highly accessible work also provides historical insight into Iceland’s development from “virtually a ‘land without music’ ” (p. 9) to that of a significant contributor to Nordic musical heritage. Over the course of nine lengthy chapters and a brief epilogue, Ingólfsson paints the portrait of a tortured artist who struggled with both his identity and legacy in a rapidly changing Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. As is emphasized by the author, Leifs desired to be not only Iceland’s foremost composer but also a major influence on his country’s cultural and political development, despite living much of his career as an expatriate in Germany. Ingólfsson’s book describes in detail the many professional roles that Leifs played throughout his life, including that of composer, conductor, amateur ethnomusicologist, advocate for artists’ rights, and radio music director. First and foremost a nationalist, Leifs himself stated, “I stand or fall as an Icelander, I can only be understood as an Icelander, for I have always, as long as I remember, loved Iceland more than anything else in the world, almost more than my art or my family” (p. 34). As a Nordic composer, Leifs essentially parallels his more famous nationalist colleagues Edvard Grieg of Norway, Jean Sibelius of Finland, and Carl Nielsen of Denmark. But unlike each [End Page 67] of these composers, for whom romanticism was a compositional foundation, Leifs was a staunch modernist, though he did not completely disavow tradition. Indeed, as Ingólfsson makes clear on several occasions, Leifs was enamored with Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music he began learning as a teenager and who was “the only composer for whom he expressed unqualified affinity and admiration in his adult years” (p. 109). Aside from his orchestral Variazioni pastorale, op. 8 (1920–30) and a few cases of inspiration, however, Leifs’s music bears no discernable resemblance to that of Beethoven. It was instead the heroic character of Beethoven—specifically his life, music, and aesthetic principles—with...

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the Trajectories of Mental Illness in Musicals

Abstract In the four-season musical television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, mental illness—as in real life—is insidious, lurking in plain sight, hidden only by our willingness to be distracted by the hilarity of the series’ deftly rendered musical numbers, which continually project dark subjects through a camp lens. While Crazy Ex-Girlfriend borrows from earlier musicals dealing with mental illness (Lady in the Dark, Anyone Can Whistle, Man of La Mancha, next to normal) by giving “crazy” a musical voice, it avoids some of the pitfalls of these models, gesturing toward but then denying easy resolutions and idealization. Rather, the series uses its extended scale to consider a fuller spectrum of “crazy,” relishing the musical number’s capacity to play both sides of the crazy-inspirational divide while allowing the trajectories of mental illness to emerge more fully than in a stage musical.

Assistive Model to Generate Chord Progressions Using Genetic Programming with Artificial Immune Properties

In Western tonal music, tension in chord progressions plays an important role in defining the path that a musical composition should follow. The creation of chord progressions that reflects such tension profiles can be challenging for novice composers, as it depends on many subjective factors, and also is regulated by multiple theoretical principles. This work presents ChordAIS-Gen, a tool to assist the users to generate chord progressions that comply with a concrete tension profile. We propose an objective measure capable of capturing the tension profile of a chord progression according to different tonal music parameters, namely, consonance, hierarchical tension, voice leading and perceptual distance. This measure is optimized into a Genetic Program algorithm mixed with an Artificial Immune System called Opt-aiNet. Opt-aiNet is capable of finding multiple optima in parallel, resulting in multiple candidate solutions for the next chord in a sequence. To validate the objective function, we performed a listening test to evaluate the perceptual quality of the candidate solutions proposed by our system. Most listeners rated the chord progressions proposed by ChordAIS-Gen as better candidates than the progressions discarded. Thus, we propose to use the objective values as a proxy for the perceptual evaluation of chord progressions and compare the performance of ChordAIS-Gen with chord progressions generators.

कवितेची रूपबंधात्मक मीमांसा (The Morphological Theory of Poetry)

Marathi Abstract: आधनिक काळात कावयाचया सरवागीण मीमासला विशष गती मिळाली. एक मलभत वाङमयपरकार महणन जगातील सरवच भाषातन एकाचवळी कावयरपाची सरवसपरशी मीमासा होत गली. कविता ही आसवादरप असत. कविता वाचावी लागत किवा ऐकावी लागत. तयाशिवाय तिच सौदरय लकषात यत नाही. कविता ही सगीतमय वाणी आह. तिचयात शबदाच, तयाचया उचचाराच खप महततव आह. आज आधनिक काळात मातर मदरणाचया शोधामळ कविता रसिकासमोर परामखयान मदरित सवरपात यत. आता कवी उचचारणातील परयोगापकषा लखनात परयोग करतो आह. जोपरयत एखादी कविता रसिकाचया मनापरयत पोचन आसवादित होत नाही, तोपरयत ती कविता निरजीव असत. कविता हा असा कलापरकार आह, जो निरमितीनतरही रसिकाचया मनात पनःनिरमित होत रहातो आणि तयाची आसवादन परकरियाही निरतर चाल राहत. भावकवितच ‘पयअर पोएटिक एनरजी' अस वरणन करणयात यत. भावकवितचया सफट आकाराच नात तिचयात असललया विशिषट परकारचया उतकटतशी असत. कोणतयाही तऱहची तीवरता वा उतकटता ही मनाची अलपकाळ टिकणारी अवसथा असत, ह एक मानसशासतरीय सतय होय. साहजिकच भावकवितच रप आकारान छोट घडविणयात या उतकटतचा महततवाचा सहभाग असतो. English Abstract: In modern times, the overall theory of poetry has gained special momentum. As a basic literary genre, all the languages of the world at the same time became a comprehensive study of the form of poetry. Poetry is a form of taste. Poetry has to be read or to be listened. Without it its beauty is not realized. Poetry is a musical voice. The words and their pronunciation are very important in poetry. Today, in modern times, however, the invention of printing has brought poetry to the fore in printed form. Now the poet is trying to experiment in writing poetry rather than experimenting with pronunciation. As long as a poem does not reach the hearts of the aficionados, it must be said that the poem is inanimate. Poetry is a form of art, which continues to recreate in the minds of the aficionados even after its creation, and the process of its enjoyment continues unabated. Poetry is described as 'pure poetic energy'. The eloquence of rhetoric is related to the specific kind of passion it has. Any kind of intensity or passion is a short-lived state of mind. This is a psychological truth. Naturally, this passion plays an important role in making the form of rhetoric smaller in size.

Discovering Essential Voices in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Solo Instrumental Suite Movements

This video-article presents the concept of “essential voices” in Bach’s solo instrumental works, which explains how notes can be connected together or implied so as to form continuous musical voices that support the solo part. The contrapuntal lines that essential voices highlight are often repeated in transformed ways within movements to relate different thematic rotations and heighten the musical drama. The video concludes with an analysis and performance of the intriguing Sarabande from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, BWV 1011, accompanied by a four-part setting of essential voices for cello ensemble.

Exploring the lived experiences of teenagers in a children’s home participating in a choir: A community music therapy perspective

This study explored the lived experiences of teenagers in a children’s home who participated in a choir that was facilitated from a community music therapy perspective in Pretoria, South Africa. Sixteen weekly choir sessions were held. These included a variety of interactive vocal techniques. A performance marked the end of the process, where songs selected by the teenagers were performed. Qualitative data were collected through fourteen semi-structured individual interviews at the end of the process. All interview transcripts were analysed through utilizing interpretative phenomenological analysis. The study concluded that participation in this community music therapy choir offered the teenagers perceived meaningful intra- and interpersonal experiences. At an intrapersonal level, the participants experienced discovering their musical voices; accessing inner strength to take action both in the here-and-now and in the future; increased self-awareness, self-esteem and self-confidence; as well as expressing and regulating emotions. In terms of interpersonal experiences, the teenagers experienced growth in relationships; improved social skills; and greater connection with the broader community.

Символизм Андрея Белого в эпоху джаза – контрапункты двух философий (на примере «Котика Летаева»)

ABSTRACTThe connection between jazz philosophy, pre-jazz genres and Belyj’s creational method is analyzed in this paper through cultural-historical, comparative and mythopoetic methods. The tunes of jazz predecessors (spirituals, blues, ragtime, working songs) had started to spread in Russian since the beginning of the 20th century. Andrej Belyj also could have become acquainted with jazz culture in Europe during his frequent journeys. The most prominent features of jazz are difficult rhythms originated in African drums playing style, the influence of European musical harmony, but at the same time dedication to dissonances, accents on weak beats, “blue mood,” “call-and-response pattern,” scat, falsetto break from working songs and many others. The novel Kotik Letaev could be called the most jazz-inspiring work of the author. Despite the fact that this novel has been created at the dawn of “jazz era,” there are a lot of features that connect this work to jazz philosophy. Belyj sensed the mood of his time, the jazz pulsation of the century. Returning to the ancient African drums rhythm in jazz has its reflection in Belyj’s novel through the resurrection of the myth, remembering the “inner form” of words which was used by the first speaking man on the Earth, rebirth of the word through the child speech. Kotik Letaev is rhythmically complex text decorated with alliteration – the scat analogy.Every character in Kotik Letaev has their own melody and musical voice. “Blue mood” is also a prominent feature in this novel: fear and anxiety (“blue tonality”) govern the text. It could be attributed to Kotik Letaev’s feeling of dread after the escape from the chaotic pre-existence and his attempts to find his place in new cosmos. The main elements of the novel’s inner structure are dissonance and ambivalence. Improvisation in word, sound and symbol creation is used in the novel, which also reminds us about jazz intention to overcome any previous boundaries in music in order to express inexpressible.

‘[A] single, true, certain authenticity’: The authenticity wars in English twentieth-century folk and medieval music revivals

At intervals throughout the twentieth century, serious disputes about authentic musical values arose amongst performers, collectors, scholars, directors, reviewers, and audiences in the folk and medieval music spheres. Analysis of these controversies offers insights into the deep emotions, fantasies, and desires in arguments around authenticity in medievalism. This essay considers two examples of English musical revivalism, one exemplified by the folk song collector Cecil Sharp, the other by Christopher Page, the medieval literature and music scholar and director of music group Gothic Voices. In the writings of both men, emotional concerns about the purity of English musical traditions reveal the role music is given in the maintenance of English nationalism, and more generally in defending notions of identity and social order against feared sources of contamination.

Directivity of the musical instruments and voice in a real situation using beamforming techniques

Musical instruments are considered natural sound sources with specific directivities. Each instrument unique directivity needs to be identified and implemented in auralization of sound in room acoustic designs. This paper shows detailed directivity measurements on selected musical instruments, human voice, and impulse sources used in room acoustics design under realistic conditions. This work presents results that are measured using acoustic beamforming techniques. Measurements are based on simultaneous recording using a hemispherical array of 120 microphones. The directivity data are measured and analyzed in the time, and frequency domain, and effects in the near field of musical instruments are explored. Dynamic variations in the musical instruments’ directivity relative to sound power, loudness (intensity, pressure), projection, and the apparent size of the sound or volume are presented. Recorded data are presented in static or dynamic mode as well as in both 2- and 3-dimensional format using the beamforming software as well as Math lab algorithm. The results of this work are applicable toward improvement in the quality of auralization of musical instrument in simulation tools and vocal production studies and room acoustic sound filed. Evaluation of their projected radiations’ pattern contributes to a more realistic acoustic design simulations or virtual reality applications.Musical instruments are considered natural sound sources with specific directivities. Each instrument unique directivity needs to be identified and implemented in auralization of sound in room acoustic designs. This paper shows detailed directivity measurements on selected musical instruments, human voice, and impulse sources used in room acoustics design under realistic conditions. This work presents results that are measured using acoustic beamforming techniques. Measurements are based on simultaneous recording using a hemispherical array of 120 microphones. The directivity data are measured and analyzed in the time, and frequency domain, and effects in the near field of musical instruments are explored. Dynamic variations in the musical instruments’ directivity relative to sound power, loudness (intensity, pressure), projection, and the apparent size of the sound or volume are presented. Recorded data are presented in static or dynamic mode as well as in both 2- and 3-dimensional format using the beamf...

Staying Together: A Bidirectional Delay-Coupled Approach to Joint Action.

To understand how individuals adapt to and anticipate each other in joint tasks, we employ a bidirectional delay-coupled dynamical system that allows for mutual adaptation and anticipation. In delay-coupled systems, anticipation is achieved when one system compares its own time-delayed behavior, which implicitly includes past information about the other system's behavior, with the other system's instantaneous behavior. Applied to joint music performance, the model allows each system to adapt its behavior to the dynamics of the other. Model predictions of asynchrony between two simultaneously produced musical voices were compared with duet pianists' behavior; each partner performed one voice while auditory feedback perturbations occurred at unpredictable times during live performance. As the model predicted, when auditory feedback from one musical voice was removed, the asynchrony changed: The pianist's voice that was removed anticipated (preceded) the actions of their partner. When the auditory feedback returned and both musicians could hear each other, they rapidly returned to baseline levels of asynchrony. To understand how the pianists anticipated each other, their performances were fitted by the model to examine change in model parameters (coupling strength, time-delay). When auditory feedback for one or both voices was removed, the fits showed the expected decrease in coupling strength and time-delay between the systems. When feedback about the voice(s) returned, the coupling strength and time-delay returned to baseline. These findings support the idea that when people perform actions together, they do so as a coupled bidirectional anticipatory system.

Making Voices

This article is an examination of contemporary practices of pitch correction and what is called the Auto-Tune effect (TATE) on pop music voices. I argue that the split initiated by digital pitch correction softwares, which came to market in 1998, of the labor of precise pitch from the labor of singing more generally leaves in its wake a redoubled emphasis on the supposed truth of emotional delivery. Yet pitch corrected and Auto-Tuned voices are not understood to sound emotion in the same way, and instead rely upon and often reproduce hearings of voices as gendered and raced. I examine the status of pitch correction softwares (PCS) and the sometimes blunt, sometimes subtle ways they intersect with the statuses of marked identity and embodied vocality. These intersections inform ways of knowing emotion, creating epistemic relationships between emotion, body, voice, and work. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2018 in Los Angeles and New York, I engage the specifics of the gendered labor involved creating pop voices, and the implications of the reality of that labor on the potentials the pop “cyborg” voice.

Music and human voice in the context of mood

Music and human voice in the context of mood

“How Beautiful It Sounds!”: The Lieder and Sonntagsmusiken of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Throughout her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was primarily known as the sister of the musical genius, Felix Mendelssohn, as the daughter of her distinguished parents, Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn and as the wife of her artistic husband, August Wilhelm Hensel. Today, Hensel is remembered for her remarkable musical talents and a wide breadth of compositions. Though often passed over as a woman in the nineteenth-century, Fanny Hensel played a key role in the musical life of the city of Berlin. Hensel’s musical voice was defined by her comprehensive musical education and through her Sonntagsmusiken (translated “Sunday Musicales”). In the next generation, British author Virginia Woolf shed light on the obstacles to a female artist’s life. In the essay, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf outlined the main elements necessary to create art: financial security and a room to one’s self. For Hensel, financial security was ensured through her family, yielding for her a rich musical education. Hensel was given a private space for her creative work in an adjacent building called the Gartenhaus. This paper investigates how Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s educational and performance opportunities shaped her compositional voice and circumscribed her influence on nineteenth-century Berlin musical society.

An emerging local musical voice at Grahamstown Anglican Cathedral: experiments in localisation

ABSTRACTThis article is an introduction to and analysis of experiments in localisation at Grahamstown Anglican Cathedral. To this end, three songs are presented, each composed or arranged by the junior choristers of the cathedral choir. The method of composition/arrangement is loosely based on experimental workshops conducted by David Dargie in the 1970s and 1980s with people across Southern Africa. The texts and music of the songs are analysed, with the express purpose of determining to what extent Southern African cultures have interacted with western cultures. A method of categorisation, derived from models developed by Huib Schippers and Akin Euba, is used to determine the depth of cultural contact. The author finds that in two of the songs there is evidence of creative and meaningful mingling of local and western cultures. The third song, being simply an arrangement of a local song, is more obviously Southern African, although it too shows influence of western harmonic conventions, albeit more superficially.