Ordinary Listeners Research Articles

Expression, Perception, and Induction of Musical Emotions: A Review and a Questionnaire Study of Everyday Listening

In this article, we provide an up-to-date overview of theory and research concerning expression, perception, and induction of emotion in music. We also provide a critique of this research, noting that previous studies have tended to neglect the social context of music listening. The most likely reason for this neglect, we argue, is that that most research on musical emotion has, implicitly or explicitly, taken the perspective of the musician in understanding responses to music. In contrast, we argue that a promising avenue toward a better understanding of emotional responses to music involves diary and questionnaire studies of how ordinary listeners actually use music in everyday life contexts. Accordingly, we present findings from an exploratory questionnaire study featuring 141 music listeners (between 17 and 74 years of age) that offers some novel insights. The results provide preliminary estimates of the occurrence of various emotions in listening to music, as well as clues to how music is used by listeners in a number of different emotional ways in various life contexts. These results confirm that emotion is strongly related to most people's primary motives for listening to music.

Rush to judgment: Burlesque, tragedy, and hierarchal alchemy in the rhetoric of America's foremost political talkshow host

To account for the success of Rush Limbaugh as radio talkshow communicator and gauge something of his relevance to recent political history in the United States, Kenneth Burke's notion of genres of drama and hierarchal identification were applied to 21 consecutive broadcasts of the Rush Limbaugh Show in October and November, 1996. Limbaugh was deemed a skilled and generically appropriate spokesman for the conservative restorationist movement that came to dominance, or near dominance, in the 1980s and 1990s. Limbaugh articulated his message in the burlesque accents that usually accompany restorationist politics. Employing tragic‐frame discourse as well, coherently mixing dramatic genres it would appear, Limbaugh lifted his ordinary listeners to heights of symbolic identification with the values and achievements of capitalism's “superior class,” the rhetorical ingredient that seems to have made him a uniquely appealing conservative polemicist.

Good pitch memory is widespread.

Here we show that good pitch memory is widespread among adults with no musical training. We tested unselected college students on their memory for the pitch level of instrumental soundtracks from familiar television programs. Participants heard 5-s excerpts either at the original pitch level or shifted upward or downward by 1 or 2 semitones. They successfully identified the original pitch levels. Other participants who heard comparable excerpts from unfamiliar recordings could not do so. These findings reveal that ordinary listeners retain fine-grained information about pitch level over extended periods. Adults' reportedly poor memory for pitch is likely to be a by-product of their inability to name isolated pitches.

OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE SURVEYS OF OPERA HOUSE ACOUSTICS: EXAMPLE OF THE GRAND THEATRE DE BORDEAUX

This paper deals with the relationships between objective and subjective results of an acoustic survey in the historical opera house of Bordeaux, called the Grand Theatre de Bordeaux. The comparison of the ordinary listeners' answers with the objective results shows that the auditive sensations are fitting with the measured criteria obtained in the opera configuration with the opened pit and sceneries on the stage. The aim of this study was to test in real conditions of performance a questionnaire designed for ordinary listeners. The obtained results allow us to accord a good reliability to the questionnaire.

Gestures convey substantive information about a child’s thoughts to ordinary listeners

The gestures that spontaneously occur in communicative contexts have been shown to offer insight into a child’s thoughts. The information gesture conveys about what is on a child’s mind will, of course, only be accessible to a communication partner if that partner can interpret gesture. Adults were asked to observe a series of children who participated ‘live’ in a set of conservation tasks and gestured spontaneously while performing the tasks. Adults were able to glean substantive information from the children’s gestures, information that was not found anywhere in their speech. ‘Gesture‐reading’ did, however, have a cost – if gesture conveyed different information from speech, it hindered the listener’s ability to identify the message in speech. Thus, ordinary listeners can and do extract information from a child’s gestures, even gestures that are unedited and fleeting.

Acoustics of the historical opera house of Bordeaux: Comparison between the results of objective and subjective surveys

This paper deals with the relationships between objective and subjective results of an acoustic survey in the historical opera house of Bordeaux. The investigations were conducted with ordinary opera-goers during four performances of ‘‘Traviata’’ in order to have available statistical population answers. The results of an earlier experiment [C. Semidor, Proc. IOA 19, Part 3, 29–38 (1997)] carried out in a dual-purpose hall with a test questionnaire built with simple words which explain the sensations of the listeners, have shown that the questions are correctly understood. The comparison of the ordinary listeners’ answers with the objective results shows that the auditive sensations are fitting with the measured criteria obtained in the opera configuration with the opened pit and sceneries on the stage. For example, for the majority of people asked, the sound in this hall seems clear and coming directly from the stage (no surrounding by the sound sensation), and the sound attack impression is very clear, which is correlated by the weak values of reverberation time and EDT. In spite of comfort defects due to the age of the opera house, such as the lack of space between the seats, the architecture of the Grand Theatre of Bordeaux is very well appreciated.

Mark DeBellis. Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii, 163 pp. ISBN 0-521-40331-6 (hardcover)

Mark DeBellis. Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii, 163 pp. ISBN 0-521-40331-6 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 18, numéro 2, 1998, p. 1-134) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Charisma's Realm: Fandom in Japan

Most studies of Japanese social organization focus upon structural elements of duty and obligation. This study of Japanese fan clubs uses concept of charisma to analyze voluntary bonds that connect individuals to one another. The concept of charisma recognizes individual choice, transcendental affect, and role of exceptional. Moreover, this study examines charisma within context of popular music. Charisma here becomes not mystical enigma, but manipulable tool of big industry and fan alike. (Japan, consumption, popular culture, charisma) Weber (1968:xviii) defines charisma as a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional qualities. Charisma, however, only exists within particular set of relationships between leader and those for whom that leader's magnetism finds resonance. One cannot, therefore, speak of charisma without referring to an intrinsically social relationship founded upon ties of transcendent appeal. Most studies of charisma focus on religious movements and political leadership. This article, however, explores relationship between charismatic performer and audience, which is cultivated on stage and screen and ritualized fan clubs. The ways which an ordinary listener becomes an ardent fan strikes at core of charisma-based human interaction and formation of resultant social groups. This essay explores that core context of fan clubs for popular singers of enka, sentimental musical genre Japan that appeals primarily to older adults. As genre which reputedly sings of and from the heart/soul of Japanese, enka not only expresses what are considered traditional values, but also exemplifies them its patterning of fandom. The organization of fandom by and around commercial industries Japan does not lessen emotional grip among members or invalidate its community of ardent fans. The charisma of popular singer may (or may not) be individually derived, but its maintenance by profit-seeking music industry forms basis of fandom Japan. The questions addressed here are: 1) What is patterning of fandom Japan? 2) How is charisma-based relationship between performer and audience cultivated by music industry? and 3) What is nature of community created by fan clubs? Most studies of Japanese social organization focus on structural elements of duty and obligation. This study of fan clubs uses concept of charisma to analyze voluntary bonds that connect individuals to one another. The concept of charisma recognizes individual choice, transcendental affect, and role of exceptional. These elements have been long neglected within anthropological studies of Japan. Moreover, this study examines charisma within context of popular music (clearly charisma for profit); that is, charisma which is industrially produced, culturally sanctioned, and economically deployed. Charisma here becomes not mystical enigma, but manipulable tool of big industry and fan alike. THE CULTURAL PATTERNING OF FANDOM IN JAPAN Fandom United States is often denigrated as social pathology, as a psychological symptom of presumed social dysfunction (Jenson 1992:10). Fans are negatively viewed as passive victims of manipulation who have easily fallen prey to seductive powers of mass media. Fandom is perceived as symptomatic of lack people's lives, as action which rests upon filling an emotional void with fantasized parasocial relationship (cf. Horton and Wohl 1956). Indeed, Weber (1968:333) describes charismatic relationships as those born in times of psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, political distress. A fan is someone lacking individuality to stand on his or her own. To be fan is to be follower, without independent ideas or an inner core of one's own, without control over one's actions. …

Music critic listening experiment at Dallas’ Meyerson Symphony Center—A progress report

Professional music critics often pass judgment on concert hall acoustics in their reviews. Because of the wide circulation given to their reviews, music critics may strongly influence public perceptions of the acoustical merits of concert halls. Surprisingly, no systematic study has been reported comparing critics’ acoustical judgments with those of musicians and of ordinary listeners in the same hall, despite its potential value to both acoustical and critic communities. For this reason, the ASA launched a cooperative effort with the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA). Its first step was an informal experiment at Dallas’ Meyerson Symphony Center during MCANA’s June 1994 meeting. The critics’ meeting provided a potential opportunity to obtain acoustical assessments from a significant number of critics attending symphony concerts in the same hall. Standard survey forms and instructions were placed in the registration packets of about 75 music critics at check-in, and were distributed randomly to about 1000 volunteers attending concerts on two consecutive nights. Disappointingly, of 138 survey forms returned so far, only about 10 are from critics. This could improve by presentation time. Survey results and lessons learned will be reported. [Work supported with private donor and TCAA Technical Initiative Funds.]

On psychoanalytic listening: language and unconscious communication.

The authors review past and recent perspectives on psychoanalytic listening, then present a synthetic model founded on psycholinguistics and semiotics. They argue that the analytic listening process can be broken down into nonlinguistic communications and--most important--linguistic categories pertaining to narrativity, symbolic reference, form, and interactive conventions. In each of these areas of signification, the authors present the ways in which the technique of psychoanalytic listening attends to unconscious meanings, thereby differing from ordinary listening which "hears," at best, only denotative and connotative meanings.

Music, imagination, and culture

It is a common experience that words are inadequate for music; there seems always to be a disparity between how music is experienced, and how it is described or rationalized. This book is a study of musical imagination. Musicians imagine music by means of functional models which determine certain aspects of the music while leaving others open. This means that there is inevitably a gap between the image and the experience that it models, and this gap can be a source of compositional creativity. Different musical cultures embody different ways of imagining sound as music, and thus every culture creates its own distinctive pattern of discrepancies between image and experience - discrepancies which are reflected in theoretical thinking about music. Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Nicholas Cook makes a clear distinction between the province of music theory and that of aesthetic criticism. In doing so he affirms the importance of the 'ordinary listener' in musical culture, and the validity of his or her experience of music.

Categorization of Musical Patterns by Self-Organizing Neuronlike Networks

Simulations of self-organizing neuronlike networks are used to demonstrate how untrained listeners might be able to sort their perceptions of dozens of diverse musical features into stable, meaningful schemata. A presentation is first made of the salient characteristics of such networks, especially the adaptive- resonance-theory (ART) networks proposed by Stephen Grossberg. Then a discussion follows of how a computer simulation of a four-level ART network—a simulation dubbed L'ART pour l'art—independently categorized musical events in Mozart's six earliest compositions. The ability of the network to abstract significant voiceleading combinations from these pieces (and in fact to detect a possible error in the New Mozart Edition) suggests that this approach holds promise for the study of how ordinary listeners process music's multidimensional complexity. In addition, the categorizations produced by the network are suggestive of alternative conceptualizations of music's hierarchical structure.

In Search of the Listener

Can music really be said to exist without someone to listen to it? Anyone reading the works of musicologists – and even of social historians of music – might be forgiven for thinking so. Listeners had no place on Guido Adler's original agenda for musicology and they have had little attention since. While we have learnt much about composers and composition, performers and performing practice, patrons and impresarios, publishers and publishing, the ordinary listener has hardly had a look-in. (William Weber's pioneering work,Music and the Middle Class, is an important exception.) In the current vogue for analysis they are replaced by a kind of ideal listener, or in effect disappear altogether; whatever else it is, analysts' music is not music as it is heard by most actual listeners, with their ‘favourite passages’ and emotional reactions. And if not simply ignored, listeners are often regarded as pitiably unadventurous, indifferent to ‘form’, easily seduced by catchy tunes, extra-musical programmes and flamboyant personalities; the notion that music history is made by listeners as well as by composers and performers seems almost perverse. Almost the only audiences which have been studied with anv degree of sophistication are those for rock and pop. We have learnt much about the producers of music; the listeners remain a great unknown.

These Are Our Voices: The Story of Oak Ridge (review)

Taxes. You name it, and here it came. There was a visiting symphony orchestra AtHotSprings School andtheywentflashingby Fiddling the "Storm" movementofBeethoven's Sixth. Even more remarkable than this storm, however, was Uncle Girton and "the famous beard he had been working on for forty years or more." When first seen the beard is tucked into Uncle Girton's bib overalls. I shall leave itto thereaderto find outwhathappenedtoit, butsufficeitto say that the outcome establishes Fred Chappell as a first-rate fabulist. The story I liked best in the book, however, was "Blue Dive." It takes a theme Chappell touches upon in other places-the isolation of the intellectual or artist-andlooks atitfromtheviewpoint of an old black bluesman named Stovebolt Johnson, whose playing still touches the hearts of ordinary listeners, even if it doesn'tsubscribetothe"urbancontemporary " formulas of those who would employ him. Different readers, I'm sure, will prefer otherparts ofthis anthology. The editors, forexample,haveincludedtwointeresting unpublished storieswhich arequitedifferent from anything I have so far described. The first of these, "Linnaeus Forgets," is an "historical" short story represented elsewhere in the volume by such pieces as "Mrs. Franklin Ascends" and "Moments of Light," the description of a meeting whichjustmighthavetakenplacebetween Franz Josef Haydn and the astronomer William Herschel. The second unpublished story features a nonhuman protagonist . After reading it, I have to say that if anyone knows where cats are coming from, it must be Fred Chappell. Iamlesstaken with the anthology'sfulllength novel, the gothic horror story entitled Dagon. The book is obviously a "master piece," in the sense that it shows how Chappell can handle the tools of the novelist as well as anybody. But I found the technical apparatus getting in the way of the story. Barely after he started, for example, Chappell had to permit the mindless slaying of Sheila, the only sympathetic character he had so far created . This was necessary, I guess, to advance the overall theme, which escaped me no matter how many times I reread Peter's sermon and the last chapter. The French must have gotten the point, however , because they awarded Dagon a prize as best foreign novel the year it was published. You'd expect it of them, though-they like Edgar Allan Poe, too, and for probably the same reasons. I personally found the suffering pointless, and had she lived I think my friend Sheila would have agreed with me. Atanyrate,Dagon is anearly work, and Chappell no longer has to let form master his storytelling because he has long since demonstrated his mastery over form. I believe he has donejust that. I recommend , as proof, that people read "The Overspill,' andparticularly the final paragraph of that evocative and tender story. I could quote the paragraph here, but I d rather you went out and got the book and read it for yourself. I think you'll appreciate my asking you to. -Harry Robie James Overholt, editor. These Are Our Voices: The Story of Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Children's Museum of Oak Ridge, 1987. $19.95. 535 pages. This book is a unique community production . But then, Oak Ridge is an unusual community. The editor, a historian, has been thedirectorofthe Regional Centerof the Children's Museum since 1982. But most of the 44 contributors of the 66 essays that make up this volume, are Oak Ridgers of much longer experience in "Nuclear City." Most remember Oak Ridge'sfirstdecade,andmanyessaysdeal with various aspects of that expenencethe families that were displaced, the excitement of building the "secret city," the 64 work in the plants, the Army's plans, and the kind of community that developed. Aboutone halfofthe 535 pages, however, deals with thecomplexpost-WorldWar? community that emerged from the original , single-purpose "atomic city." Some of the essays deal with how the Army's town was sold to private householders ; describe how the governmentoperated community became a self governing town, and how the town's original scientific base was broadened culturally with the formation of a library, an art center, an orchestra and a dynamic school system. Theseandotherstoriesaretoldby a broad array of essayists, from wellknow , national figures such as the scientists , William G. Pollard and Alvin Weinberg ; poets Jim Wayne Miller...

Recognizing Melodies: A Dynamic Interpretation

Two experiments explore hypotheses about rhythm and contour in recognition of simple pitch strings (melodies). Target melodies that differed with respect to pitch relationships (interval and contour pitch differences) and rhythm, were presented to ordinary listeners who were told to learn the melodies (Phase I). In a subsequent recognition test (Phase II), listeners had to recognize these same target melodies although they were transposed to a different musical key. In recognition, target melodies appeared in the original rhythm or in new rhythms that simulated some pause properties of the original rhythm. Target melodies were interspersed with decoy melodies that either preserved the pitch contour of targets or did not; all appeared in the original rhythm and in new rhythms. Results indicated that a new rhythmic context lowered recognizability of target melodies, and that decoys were most confusing when they possessed the same “dynamic shape” (contour-plus-rhythm) as targets (Experiment 1). Also, target recognition improved with Phase I familiarity (Experiment 2), although rhythmic shifts remained detrimental across levels of target familiarity. Confusions based on “dynamic shape” accounted for a relatively high proportion of errors where familiarity with targets is low. Findings were interpreted in terms of a theory of context-sensitive dynamic attending in which remembering is assumed to involve recapitulation of the original rhythmical activities involved in attending to melodies.

Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920). Observations on Stravinsky's Organic Construction

I did not, and indeed I could not, count on any immediate success for this work. It lacks all those elements that infallibly appeal to the ordinary listener, or to which he is accustomed. It is futile to look in it for passionate impulse or dynamic brilliance. It is an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments. I fully anticipated that the cantilena of the clarinets and flutes frequently taking up their liturgical dialogue and softly chanting it would not prove sufficiently attractive for a public which had so recently shown me its enthusiasm for the 'revolutionary' Rite of Spring. This music is not meant to 'please' an audience, nor to arouse its passions. Nevertheless, I had hoped that it would appeal to some of those persons in whom a purely musical receptivity outweighed the desire to satisfy their sentimental cravings. (Igor Stravinsky: Chronicle of my Life. London, Gollancz, 1936.)

Pitfalls between Spanish and Carioca Portuguese

T IS often said that if one has a good background in Spanish, he will find it easy to get along in Portugal or Brazil. Some even go so far as to describe conversations in which one person speaks his native Spanish, while the other speaks Portuguese, apparently with little or no loss of understanding between the two. Last summer I had the opportunity to see at first hand whether or not this was so. I went to Rio de Janeiro with the definite purpose of becoming as fluent in Portuguese as a brief four months' stay would allow. Several years previously I had taken a speeded-up one semester course in Portuguese, and for months before my departure had been spending spare moments listening to all the Portuguese radio programs I could locate. The listening side of it was relatively simple, as I am fairly fluent in Spanish; however, the differences in pronunciation were quite obvious, and at times trying. On arriving in Rio, it was about as I had expected; by listening very carefully to what was said, and making a special effort to compose my Portuguese sentences carefully, the first few weeks passed without great difficulty. Inevitably, of course, Spanish words would find their way into my sentences, try as I might to avoid them. It became quite obvious that only one or two Spanish words unconsciously allowed to enter the sentence could render it quite unintelligible to the ordinary Brazilian listener. It didn't take long for me to realize that a mixed conversation with Spanish on one side and Portuguese on the other was not as practical as it is often thought to be. On the other hand, I have observed a few cases where there was adequate understanding on both sides. It seems to be more a question of education, intelligence and willingness to cooperate on both sides. On the cog

Walford Davies and the Ordinary Listener

Walford Davies and the Ordinary Listener

The Evolution of Melody

I am going to speak to you this afternoon upon a subject of universal interest. Music as a science, as an intellectual power, or as an expression of the indefinite and indefinable forces which dominate the soul of the artist and crave for outlet, may not appeal with any great measure of certainty or directness to the popular mind. So many and various are the claims of more tangible things in this busy world of ours that very few can find time to study the historical development of a complex abstract subject. The scope of my present paper, however, is confined, as far as possible, to melody—and this is not at all a forbidding word ! To the great majority of ordinary listeners, indeed, melody is the one quality in music which really counts; a composition in which melody is obscure, or not of paramount importance, is voted dry and uninteresting. Moreover it is a quality concerning which every listener considers himself competent to express an opinion. And the musician himself, no matter how well-tutored he may be, can never afford to lose sight of those elements in music which strike straight home to everybody—which elicit sympathetic response not only from the musically educated, but from those who, without technical knowledge, are keenly perceptible to the influence of beauty. The development of harmony, of musical forms, of instrumentation, and so forth—these are subjects for the initiated to sit in judgment upon, or squabble about; but melody is “enthroned in the hearts” of men, and I am inclined to think that the composer who fails to recognise its potent power, or proves himself incapable of making a direct appeal by means of its employment, has mistaken his vocation and misunderstood the elementary functions of music.