Sound Gestures Research Articles

Future Teachers’ Musicality and Their Competence in Integrating Music into the Classroom

The study aims to determine the interrelationship between future primary school teachers’ confidence in their musicality and the competence to integrate types of musical activity into other subjects. The study included 78 (n=78) part-time students enrolled in the professional bachelor study programme offered by the University of Latvia. The study was based on a quantitative research design in which measurements were made according to three research scales: (1) musicality, (2) self-expression skills using types of musical activity and (3) competence in integrating musical activity types into other subjects. The SPSS 22.0 program was used for data processing, and the results were produced according to the research questions raised in the study. The study revealed that future primary school teachers are confident about their emotional response to music and sense of rhythm. The students are confident in their skills to chant and perform rhythm exercises with and without sound gestures. Confidence in musicality and self-expression skills using different musical activity types are not related to age and teaching experience. Confidence in skills to express oneself using types of musical activity is connected with the competence to integrate them into other subjects. Future primary school teachers are more competent in integrating musical games and listening to music into other subjects than playing musical instruments. The study findings can be used to improve the professional training of future primary school teachers.

Distinguishing between straight and curved sounds: Auditory shape in pitch, loudness, and tempo gestures.

Sound-based trajectories or sound gestures draw links to spatiokinetic processes. For instance, a gliding, decreasing pitch conveys an analogous downward motion or fall. Whereas the gesture's pitch orientation and range convey its meaning and magnitude, respectively, the way in which pitch changes over time can be conceived of as gesture shape, which to date has rarely been studied in isolation. This article reports on an experiment that studied the perception of shape in uni-directional pitch, loudness, and tempo gestures, each assessed for four physical scalings. Gestures could increase or decrease over time and comprised different frequency and sound level ranges, durations, and different scaling contexts. Using a crossmodal-matching task, participants could reliably distinguish between pitch and loudness gestures and relate them to analogous visual line segments. Scalings based on equivalent-rectangular bandwidth (ERB) rate for pitch and raw signal amplitude for loudness were matched closest to a straight line, whereas other scalings led to perceptions of exponential or logarithmic curvatures. The investigated tempo gestures, by contrast, did not yield reliable differences. The reliable, robust perception of gesture shape for pitch and loudness has implications on various sound-design applications, especially those cases that rely on crossmodal mappings, e.g., visual analysis or control interfaces like audio waveforms or spectrograms. Given its perceptual relevance, auditory shape appears to be an integral part of sound gestures, while illustrating how crossmodal correspondences can underpin auditory perception.

Visual and sound gesture in dance communication

ABSTRACT The present study addresses the impact of multimodal complexity in the transmission of a dance exercise. This study examined what kind of temporal correspondence favors the clarity of a teaching instruction in the context of a dance class. From an autoethnographic perspective, we describe a real learning situation in which a teacher marks (bodily demonstration and verbal counting) a movement exercise for a dancer. We analyze (microanalysis) the components of this marking, considering the model of the visual spatial indicator and the zero velocity and the prosodic components of the voice. It was hypothesized that when the emphasis of the movement and the emphasis of the voice are synchronized in phase this favors the clarity of the instruction. Seventy-five participants – dancers; musicians; non-musicians-non-dancers – evaluated dance exercises (audiovisual clips) with different modes of synchronization between voice and movement following two testing strategies. We found that in-phase exercise markings are significantly easier to follow and understand than when they are not. The work aims to show that a neglect in the multimodal organization of the instruction can generate distortion (noise) between the conceptualization and the perception of the message, putting at risk the result of the communication.

THE MANAGEMENT OF SPEAKING INSTRUCTION AT SMA MODAL BANGSA, ACEH PROVICE

The purposes of this research are (1) to find out how the teachers make preparation for managing speaking instruction, (2) to find out how English teachers design classroom management for teaching speaking skill, and (3) to find out how the teachers make as assessment of speaking instruction. The subject of this research is all teachers of SMA Modal Bangsa who teach English especially speaking skill and there are four subjects. The design used in this research is descriptive research and it belongs to qualitative research. Thus, this research is conducted to analyze a management of speaking instruction at the school. Data needed were gotten through observation, interview, and documentation. Data gotten are analyzed by narration procedure and discussing. The result of the research shows that the teachers prepare classroom management of reading instruction by preparing lesson plan, materials, and conducive environment for instruction process. Next, the teachers usually use six methods namely: asking opinion, debate, roll play, discussion, problem solving and speech in managing speaking instruction. Furthermore, the teachers evaluate the students in teaching English speaking skill in two kinds of tests namely on going process test and final test. The tests of English speaking skill were orally. The tests are parted into six categories, there are: fluency of speaking, pronunciation, grammar, sound gesture and content

С. ПРОКОФЬЕВ «МИМОЛЕТНОСТИ»: ХОРЕОГРАФИЧЕСКОЕ ПРОЧТЕНИЕ ФОРТЕПАННОГО ЦИКЛА

The article analyzes two versions of choreographic interpretation of S. Prokofiev's piano cycle "Fleeting Moments". The first one belongs to the outstanding Russian ballet master K. Ya. Goleizovsky, the second — to the German choreographer of American origin J. Neumeier. Both compositions are considered in the context of such a trend as "plastic interpretation of non-ballet music". There is a special demand for S. Prokofiev's works (not only ballet scores, but also "non-ballet" opuses) among choreographers, who are attracted by the theatrical nature of the composer's talent: brightness and sharpness of musical characteristics, reliance on "sound gesture", ability to reproduce rhythmic intonation of mood. The "Fleeting Moments" cycle as a whole and in terms of individual pieces is analyzed from the standpoint of openness to choreographic embodiment and compliance with canonical ballet forms and situations. It is underlined that in Goleizovsky's ballet a deeply felt emotion is brought to the fore. Due to the precise adherence to the logic of musical development, conceived as chamber-like this composition embodies the prototype of choreographic symphonism. In Neumeier's ballet, on the contrary, the dramatic plot is emphasized. The choreographer achieves an extraordinary impact by combining classical and modern elements in choreographic vocabulary, supplementing them with movements of free plasticity.

READING TEACHING WITH THE HELP OF SOUND GESTURES FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN WITH MENTAL DEVELOPMENT DISORDERS

The native language, its skills, understanding and sense are important to every member of society, it puts thinking, communicating, and text creating into order, and it indicates to educatedness. Literacy as a key skill in everyday life is essential for acquiring and implementing the nowadays’ life skills.There are situations where pupils have not yet acquired reading skills for several years, and the issue becomes topical on how to teach to read in their age and form group, and at different levels of psychological development. One of the options is to start intensive reading learning with the help of sound gestures, where each sound or letter is represented by a gesture. This approach allows pupils starting to read and understand what they read.The purpose of the study is to research the literature on reading learning possibilities and to develop didactic materials for reading teaching with the help of sound gestures for the primary school children with mental development disorders.Study methods: literature analysis, document study, observations, questionnaire, data collection and statistical processing.Based on theoretical knowledge and analysis of literature, the author of the paper has developed didactic materials for reading teaching with the help of the sound gestures for the primary school children with mental development disabilities. Taking into account the principles of special pedagogy and speech therapy, the process of reading teaching with the help of sound gestures focuses on the difficulty levels during reading, deliberate avoidance of difficulties.The research includes the seven primary school children with mental development disorders and three teachers from the mentioned school, 30 respondents from different educational institutions.At the conclusion of the research, evaluating the effectiveness of the didactic material developed, it was concluded that it is possible to contribute to reading teaching through sound gestures for the primary school age children with mental development disorders.

Исполнительский жест как театрализованное отражение новых жанрово-стилевых контекстов в современной фортепианной музыке

The article deals with the expressive role of gestures in the art of piano performance in relation to both classical and contemporary music. According to theoretical analysis, it is demonstrated that the issue of the performance gesture in contemporary music, in connection with the theatricalization of performance, as well as due to the fact that performance in many cases acquires the features of visual play-acting, stands out from the overall issue of artistry. The general provisions of the artistic gesture in contemporary piano music are complemented by multiple positions related to the art of playing the clusters, strings, pedals, using sound gestures, as well as theatricalization of the performed musical material. The article provides a detailed description of the categories of gestures adopted in the practice of modern music. They are: gestures related to performance of clusters; interspersed with verbal sounds in the process of playing the piano, the so-called verbal and sound gestures; related with playing on the strings by using fingers, sticks or other items; associated with playing pedals; theatricalized gestures. In conclusion: the expansion of the boundaries of musical language, and the emergence of performances and theatricalized compositions in performance practice has led to the expansion of the thesaurus of performance gestures’ and of its informative functions. In contemporary music gesture has become a bearer of meaning and forms one of the strata providing meaning to composition.

The formal method in Germany and Russia: the beginnings of European psycholinguistics

Abstract German–Austrian psychology is a direct source of the European formalism movement both in the German context (Germany, Austria) as well as in Russia. This interest of the formalists in the corporeal component of linguistic and literary production has resulted in a particular research stream, which could be defined as a ‘linguo-somatic orientation’. In particular, this is the case of Alois Riegl’s [1] perceptive ‘tactile–optical’ method; Adolf von Hildebrand’s [2] architectonic conception; Konrad Fiedler’s [3] ‘sensorial aesthetics’; W. Wölfflin’s [4] ‘basic concepts’ of the art history, W. Worringer’s [5] psychological arts typology as well as Oskar Walzel’s sound-corporeal poetics elaborated during 1920 [6]. Within Russian formalism, psychological notions (such as ‘representation’, ‘sensation’, ‘apperception’, ‘series’, ‘clear and dark zones of consciousness’, ‘verbal gestures’ and ‘sound gestures’) are fundamental in nearly all the formalist conceptions (Viktor Šklovskij, Evgenij Polivanov, Lev Jakubinskij, Osip Brik, Boris Eixenbaum and Jurij Tynianov). This psychological background constitutes a rather heterogeneous constellation composed of psychological aesthetics and psychological linguistics of the second half of the 19th century. Independently of its intrinsic theoretical values, the formalist way of thinking about language and literature is based on the implicit dominance of psychology, which takes its sense only with respect to the German cognitive tradition, appropriated by the Geisteswissenschaften of this time. In this respect, European formalism participates in the large movement of psychologisation of the humanities. To this extent, the case of Russian formalism is really representative: it invites the rethinking of the genealogy of European structuralism in general. This accumulation of conceptual tools borrowed from the German psychological tradition also reveals a cognitive charge of the formalist theories. The latter constitute a conceptual link between the properly psychological past of the European Geisteswissenschaften and the ‘cognitive’ future of the actual research programmes. Beyond the borrowing of conceptual tools from the psychological trend, the formal method has found in psychology its inspiration for producing new models of analysis. This intrinsically cognitivist dimension of the formalist programme explains its late success during the 1950s–1960s, the period often and abusively called the period of the cognitivist revolution. In reality, it deals with the re-emergence of the research programme of the cognitivist sciences, rather exhaustively formulated by the German psychological tradition..

Nuovi approcci per godere la musica d’oggi. Un progetto didattico

This article presents the first results of the project “Nuovi approcci per godere la musica d’oggi” (New approaches to enjoying today’s music), developed within the SagGEM workgroup with the collaboration of composer Alessandro Solbiati. The aim is to fine-tune coherent, well-planned didactic modules based on the 20th and 21st-century repertory, through very close interaction between the acquired knowledge and tools of musicology and music pedagogy, and field work based on direct interaction with students. In particular, the article reconstructs didactic activities carried out on the compositions of Gyorgy Ligeti, Poeme symphonique pour 100 metronomes and Lux aeterna. These pieces belong to the early maturity of the Hungarian musician, and require that listeners develop new perceptual strategies, since they are conceived and built around music parameters that used to be regarded as secondary, such as ‘texture’, timbre and sound gesture.

Atoms and errors: towards a history and aesthetics of microsound

Microsound is an emerging approach to music composition and analysis which places emphasis on extremely brief time-scales, usually a tenth of a second or less, as well as an integration of this micro-time level with the time-levels of sound gestures, sections, movements and whole pieces. This paper summarises some of the technical issues involved in microsonic analysis/composition, traces a history of microsonic techniques in contemporary music, and examines some of its aesthetic implications in a social context.