Understanding Of Music Research Articles

The construction of ‘we’ empowering music practice in kindergarten

ABSTRACT Singing together fosters connections across social contexts. While this activity is expected to flourish in kindergartens and nurseries, studies from multiple countries have highlighted a growing decline in confidence in singing among both kindergarten teachers and students. To address this, Kulset and Halle [(2020). Togetherness!: adult companionship – the key to music-making in kindergarten.’ Music Education Research 22 (3): 304–314] introduced ‘we’, promoting adult companionship and collective music-making. This study deepens the ‘we’ concept and its practical implications. Using Cultural-historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we compared recent studies on self-concept in musicality among kindergarten teachers and students. While existing research emphasises the significance of nurturing musical skills and a theoretical understanding of musicality, our analysis suggests that practical engagement in music-making mainly as a collaborative effort could catalyse a transformative shift towards fostering musical togetherness. We propose adjusting music programmes in kindergarten teacher education to prioritise such collaborative music-making skills. Practical ‘we’ implementation could reverse declining confidence in singing, instead fostering musical companionship.

Score Images as a Modality: Enhancing Symbolic Music Understanding through Large-Scale Multimodal Pre-Training.

Symbolic music understanding is a critical challenge in artificial intelligence. While traditional symbolic music representations like MIDI capture essential musical elements, they often lack the nuanced expression in music scores. Leveraging the advancements in multimodal pre-training, particularly in visual-language pre-training, we propose a groundbreaking approach: the Score Images as a Modality (SIM) model. This model integrates music score images alongside MIDI data for enhanced symbolic music understanding. We also introduce novel pre-training tasks, including masked bar-attribute modeling and score-MIDI matching. These tasks enable the SIM model to capture music structures and align visual and symbolic representations effectively. Additionally, we present a meticulously curated dataset of matched score images and MIDI representations optimized for training the SIM model. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in advancing symbolic music understanding.

Community musicking and musical cognition among adungu music communities of the Acholi people from Awach, Gulu district, Northern Uganda

This ethnographic inquiry investigated the nature of musical cognition that engagements in the Ugandan Acholi people’s adungu music culture engender, what can be understood about musical cognition in nonwesternized oral community music-making experiences, and how this might inform school music education theory and practice. Schooling in Uganda mostly upholds colonial epistemes that separate cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains, and position the arts and culture at the periphery of school experiences. Through a thematic analysis of data from interviews, focus group discussions, and observations of Anyim Lac troupe music community engagements, this study found that sociomusical experiences engender musical cognition where the musical spirit, mind, body, and environment interactions birth musical understanding. Musical cognition was understood as a holistic process of reflecting, creating, recreating, and acting emotionally where these musical spirit, mind, body, and environment interactions are shaped by culture. Since humans perceive, perform, and learn music as the embodiment of the interaction between musical spirit, mind, body, and environment, educators might need to create contexts where learners engage in learning experiences in ways that embed awareness of the intertwined nature of musical spirit, mind, body, and environment in those meaning-making processes.

Research on the Pathways for Innovative Cultural Development of University Music Courses Based on Music Education Concepts

In order to improve the music education in colleges and universities for cultivating students' comprehensive quality and enriching students' cultural literacy. In this paper, firstly, we optimize the music teaching mode, based on the theory of multiple intelligences and centered on the characteristics of students' intelligence structure, we innovate the teaching mode of music courses in colleges and universities, and emphasize the authenticity and context of the teaching environment. Secondly, the ant colony algorithm is used to find the optimal solution of music course classroom-time. In the solution process, hard constraints and soft constraints are considered to set up a class schedule that teachers and students are satisfied at the same time. Next, the optimal results of music course scheduling without and with conflicts are calculated. The traditional teaching model was set as a control class, and the final validation found that the experimental class scored the highest 90.2 ± 9.4 for music knowledge mastery and was statistically significant. In terms of music composition and music understanding, the experimental class fully agreed with 43% and 48%, higher than 41.0% and 40% of the control class, and the innovative music teaching content was above the students' psychological acceptability, with an average cultural satisfaction score of 4.2487 and an average cultural recommendation score of 4.5347. Therefore, colleges and universities should base their curriculum on the concept of music education, constantly explore and innovate, improve the rationality of curriculum arrangement, and promote the dissemination and development of music culture.

Time-varying similarity of neural responses to musical tension is shaped by physical features and musical themes

The similarity of understanding is important for music experience and communication, but little is understood about the sources of this common knowledge. Although neural responses to the same piece of music are known to be similar across listeners, it remains unclear whether this neural response similarity is linked to musical understanding and the role of dynamic musical attributes in shaping it. Our study addresses this gap by investigating the relationship between neural response similarity, musical tension, and dynamic musical attributes. Using electroencephalography-based inter-subject correlation (EEG-ISC), we examined how the neural response similarity among listeners varies throughout the evaluation of musical tension in the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8. Participants continuously rated the degree of alignment between musical events and their expectations, while neural activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). The results showed that neural response similarity fluctuated in tandem with musical tension, with increased similarity observed during moments of heightened tension. This time-varying neural response similarity was influenced by two dynamic attributes contributing to musical tension: physical features and musical themes. Specifically, its fluctuation was driven by physical features, and the patterns of its variation were modulated by musical themes, with similar time-varying patterns observed across similar thematic materials. These findings offer valuable insight into the role of dynamic musical attributes in shaping neural response similarity, and reveal an important source and mechanism of shared musical understandings.

Hexachord Solmization in the Classroom: A Revival of Old Practices

This article proposes the practice of hexachord solmization as a component of a "histor ically informed" theory curriculum for early-music students. Many theory treatises and singing manuals from the sixteenth century and before start with a discussion of the gam ut, hexachords, the Guidonian hand, and solmization syllables. This strongly suggests that hexachord solmization was one of the principles of contemporary music education. Analyses of musical excerpts demonstrate that a hexachord is a meaningful melodic unit rather than a random set of six tones. Its solmization syllables illuminate the inherent tonal relations around the semitone mi–fa ; furthermore, they represent expressive tone qualities in themselves—for instance, the bright mi versus the soft fa. The hexachord sys tem was still in use in eighteenth-century Italy, apart from some adjustments with regard to the emerging major-minor tonality. Most likely, young apprentices at Italian conserv atories learned the syllables before they could read the pitches. Sets of solfeggi produced by the conservatory masters for their pupils show how plain solmization patterns form the basis of the melodic art of the period. In the classroom today, hexachord solmization offers both a useful tool for a non-verbal mode of musical understanding and a starting point for melodic improvisation.

Application of entertainment virtual technology based on network information resources in piano teaching

With the rapid development of digital technology, e-learning and robot technology are gradually applied in various fields. As an innovative form of traditional piano education, digital piano teaching is faced with the challenge of how to improve the learning effect and add interest. The purpose of this study is to explore the application of e-learning and virtual robot technology in digital piano teaching, so as to provide an effective teaching method and improve the learning experience and effectiveness of learners. This paper uses e-learning platform and virtual technology software to create a virtual piano learning environment. Through robotics, interaction with learners is achieved to simulate a real piano teacher. Design appropriate teaching content and assessment methods to ensure that learners can fully understand and master relevant knowledge and skills. The results show that the digital piano teaching method using e-learning and robot virtual technology can effectively improve learners' interest and participation, improve their piano playing skills and music understanding ability. Learners give positive evaluation to this new teaching method, and think that it is highly practical and innovative.

N-gram Unsupervised Compoundation and Feature Injection for Better Symbolic Music Understanding

The first step to apply deep learning techniques for symbolic music understanding is to transform musical pieces (mainly in MIDI format) into sequences of predefined tokens like note pitch, note velocity, and chords. Subsequently, the sequences are fed into a neural sequence model to accomplish specific tasks. Music sequences exhibit strong correlations between adjacent elements, making them prime candidates for N-gram techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP). Consider classical piano music: specific melodies might recur throughout a piece, with subtle variations each time. In this paper, we propose a novel method, NG-Midiformer, for understanding symbolic music sequences that leverages the N-gram approach. Our method involves first processing music pieces into word-like sequences with our proposed unsupervised compoundation, followed by using our N-gram Transformer encoder, which can effectively incorporate N-gram information to enhance the primary encoder part for better understanding of music sequences. The pre-training process on large-scale music datasets enables the model to thoroughly learn the N-gram information contained within music sequences, and subsequently apply this information for making inferences during the fine-tuning stage. Experiment on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and achieved state-of-the-art performance on a series of music understanding downstream tasks. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/CinqueOrigin/NG-Midiformer.

Research on the Hybrid Teaching Model of Piano in Normal Universities Based on “OBE + Politics Integrated Courses”

Abstract Teaching the piano, a vital element of artistic education is essential for developing students’ musical understanding and appreciation of beauty. Yet, conventional methods tend to focus excessively on technical proficiency, neglecting the development of students’ overall qualities. The challenge for educators is to incorporate ideological and political education into specialized courses. Outcome-Based Education (OBE) concentrates on the results of learning, highlighting the development of students’ competencies and the practical application of knowledge, while ideological and political curriculum education stresses the incorporation of ideological and political teaching into professional courses, fostering students’ awareness of social responsibility and historical duty. Based on these two educational concepts, this study designed an innovative piano teaching model and verified its effectiveness through teaching design, implementation, and effectiveness evaluation. Research has found that the experimental group students have significantly improved in basic skills, performance techniques, music understanding, expressiveness, learning attitude, and comprehensive evaluation. Students have a profound understanding of ideological and political education content, demonstrate a high level of interest, and possess the ability to integrate ideological and political education into daily learning.

Research on the Innovation Path of Music Education in Higher Vocational Colleges and Universities in the Context of the New Era

Abstract This study navigates the digital transformation challenges within music education at higher vocational colleges and universities, proposing an innovative approach that integrates modern technology to enhance student musicality. Employing a mixed-methods research framework that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses, we explore the impact of digital teaching tools, including artificial intelligence and multimedia resources, on students’ musical understanding and creativity. Our findings reveal that students engaged with our digital-enhanced educational model exhibit significant improvements in rhythmic sense (30% increase) and creativity (25% increase) compared to traditional settings. This synergy of music education and technology elevates teaching outcomes and fosters innovative thinking among students, suggesting new directions for the evolution of music education in higher education institutions.

Exploring the integration of Chinese nationalized piano education in modern music pedagogy

This study investigates the integration of Chinese Nationalized Piano Education into modern music pedagogy, aiming to enhance student's musical understanding and appreciation while fostering cultural connections. The introduction outlines the significance of cultural integration in music education and introduces the concept of Chinese Nationalized Piano Education, highlighting its unique pedagogical approach rooted in Chinese cultural heritage. The objective is to investigate and analyze the methods and outcomes of integrating Chinese Nationalized Piano Education into modern music pedagogy. The content and research site focus on educational institutions incorporating Chinese Nationalized Piano Education, with key informants including music educators and students. Data analysis involves qualitative techniques such as thematic coding and content analysis, complemented by quantitative methods for data visualization and statistical analysis. The research results reveal innovative teaching methods, holistic curriculum designs, improved student engagement, cultural awareness, and musical proficiency. Suggestions include adopting diverse teaching strategies, integrating cultural elements, providing immersive learning experiences, and promoting a global perspective in music education.

Pattern recognition study of musical rhythm perception based on multimodal deep learning

Abstract Rhythm perception is becoming more and more important in the field of music information processing and music understanding. The study first adopts signal processing methods to extract musical features, then uses feature fusion techniques to integrate features of different modalities into a single feature vector. Based on this model, the study identifies the rhythmic activation function of music and combines it with the hidden Markov model to infer the rhythm of the music. One of the key points of the study is to perform rhythm recognition on music containing drums, to explore the recognition effect. One of the focuses of the study is to recognize the rhythm of music containing drums to explore the recognition effect.In addition, the study also analyzes the Softmax output values of the music and compares the recognition effect of different models. The results show that the rhythm recognition of music using the multimodal deep learning method performs the best in terms of the F-Measure value, the Cemgil value, the Goto value, and the P-score value, with the respective 65.65%, 66.76%, 36.75%, and 36.75%. 66.76%, 36.75%, and 75.68%.Especially in the drum music recognition, the position of each drum music is accurately recognized, proving the model’s effectiveness in this paper. The research provides a new feasible method for the recognition and understanding of music rhythms and a valuable reference for the research in this field.

The Path of Cultivating Music Appreciation Ability in Piano Education in Colleges and Universities in the Internet Era

Abstract With the Internet and AI technology development, piano education in colleges and universities faces innovative challenges. This study explores the effectiveness of the Internet-based teaching mode in enhancing students’ music appreciation ability. The study adopts a teaching model based on the Internet and AI technology, combining automatic composition, arranging and piano concerto repertoire sessions, and AI+professional teachers’ collaborative evaluation. By implementing a creative thinking teaching module, including pre-course preparation, classroom training and presentation, and post-course communication, the study aimed to improve students’ music appreciation and creative thinking skills. The study results showed that students demonstrated significant improvement in music appreciation skills. The data showed that students who participated in the new teaching model showed an average of 25% improvement in music appreciation skills assessment. In addition, students’ creative thinking skills were also enhanced, with 85% of them demonstrating a high level of innovative music composition. The college piano education model integrating Internet and AI technologies significantly improves students’ music appreciation ability and creative thinking. This model enhances the interactivity and fun of teaching, provides students with a broader platform for musical understanding and practice, and offers new perspectives and methods for music education in colleges and universities.

The Stilling Response: From Musical Silence to Audience Stillness

This article introduces a hitherto undescribed pattern of audience motion during a classical music performance, wherein audience members collectively decrease their quantity of motion in coordination with shifts toward stillness in the music. This “stilling response” was observed in the audience body sway measurements from the MusicLab Copenhagen concert experiment, a research concert event in which the Danish String Quartet and over a dozen researchers collaborated to measure, analyze, and understand the experiences, physiology, and behavior of the coupled musician–music–audience system. Analysis of the performance identified over 250 “stilling points” in the music, such as rests, rubatos, and decrescendos. Most of these points were matched with measurable local decreases in movement across the majority of participating audience members. From this exploratory study, we posit that encultured classical music audiences exhibit a stilling response to suitable concert music, wherein they use their musical understanding to anticipate moments of stillness in a performance and cooperatively suppress their own movements to match. As audience stillness is recognized and valued by performers, this behavior may constitute a joint and tacit act of communication where the audience confirm their approval of and attention to the performance.

ПРОСТРАНСТВЕННО-ВРЕМЕННАЯ ПРИРОДА МУЗЫКАЛЬНОГО ПОНИМАНИЯ

The nature of musical understanding is currently being intensively investigated in both analytic and continental philosophy. Many authors point out that such understanding has an important intellectual component. This article studies the question of spatial components of musical understanding. B. Wharf drew attention to the fact that we often carry out spatial objectification in the mind. A. Bergson wrote about the same. Music has a motive, musical phrases, often a melody, and all that can be represented in the form of a drawing. To understand music means to understand the logic of the unfolding of the melody, and “unfolding” is a spatial phenomenon. Husserl writes of a temporal horizon when listening to music, but the horizon is also a spatial phenomenon. Furthermore, Husserl points out that the fluid meaning of music remains “the same”, and in order to see it, one must step out of the flow of time to some fixed point. Such an exit is virtual, but possible. However, those are not ordinary spatial representations. The term “quasi-space” is used for them, reminiscent of Husserl’s double intentionality. In that quasi-space the pattern or gestalt of music is formed. At the same time, there is a certain transcendental point, a limit to which our exit from the flow of time tends.

Black Music Aesthetics in General Music Part 1: Exploring Black Musics

Black Music Aesthetics (BMA), guided by conceptual approaches grounded in African belief systems, are found in the structure and performance practices of Black musics. Music education in American society leans strongly toward Western European aesthetics, which includes: the centrality of rhythm, pitch, and harmony to musical understanding; a reliance on written notation for preserving and sharing musical ideas; and a primary focus on sounds. While Black music and musicality can be explored using Western European aesthetics, they cannot be thoroughly explored in this way. In this series of articles, I draw on the work of ethnomusicologists to define BMA and provide concrete examples for incorporating them in general music. The first article in this series provides a historical foundation and definition for BMA and offers examples of how it can be centered in the study of Black musics.

장애학생들의 랩을 활용한 음악공연(랩 교가, 퓨전 합창) 경험에 관한 사례연구

Objectives This study aims to conduct a qualitative case study exploring the experiences of students with disabilities in musical performances utilizing rap.
 Methods At the ○○ Special School in Chungnam, a total of 38 participants engaged in the musical performance, which included four teachers covering roles such as accompanists, drummers, and vocals, alongside students from middle school to specialized courses. Rehearsals took place twice a week for two hours from April 16th to 27th, 2018. The primary participants in the study were six students with developmental disabilities, and secondary participants included seven individuals: administrators, educators, school superintendents, and local community members. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research delves into the students’ experiences with a learner-centered program that featured a rap school song and a fusion choral performance. Data collection mainly consisted of in-depth interviews conducted over eight sessions during the music performance preparation phase, supplemented with participant observations. To ensure the credibility and validity of the qualitative research, techniques such as peer reviews, expert meetings, and the triangulation method were employed.
 Results The findings are as follows. First, the introduction of rap through a rap school song and fusion choral signaled a turning point in education. Initially, administrators and faculty exhibited skepticism, deeming it unfeasible. However, students displayed a mix of unfamiliarity, curiosity, and preconceived notions about traditional music education, hinting at an impending challenge. Second, the dual concerto of empathy and tailored instruction served as a motivating factor to unleash the potential of students with disabilities. Significant changes were observed in trust and class participation levels when the teacher-student relationship harmonized (師弟同行). This musical reinforcement brought about improvements in autonomy, classroom attitude, expressiveness, prejudice reduction, enhanced interaction, and improved articulation skills, thereby demonstrating the possible within the impossible. Tailored, learner-centered education showcased its potential to transform negative aspects into positive elements for students, educators, and stakeholders alike. Third, through the bond of musical understanding, everyone came together in harmony, leaving a lasting warmth and fragrance. This became an opportunity to shift perceptions on disabilities from bias to equality. The music performance surpassed the expectations of all participants, marking a time of new challenges and achievements, leaving an indelible impact on the educational landscape.
 Conclusions The utilization of rap in the musical experiences of students with disabilities revealed the potential to bring about positive effects, showcasing the harmony of empathy and tailored instruction. Therefore, this study can provide a foundation and play a pivotal role in implementing learner-centered music education.

Harnessing the Power of Feedback to Improve Student Learning in Music

What does effective feedback look like in the music classroom? In this article, we explore a prominent perspective on feedback proposed by scholar John Hattie and his colleagues and then provide practical examples for application in music contexts. We begin by defining what feedback is and then explore what makes it effective and provide strategies for teachers to develop more effective feedback skills. Using this understanding of what makes feedback effective for learners, teachers can help students be active partners in the learning process and to achieve their goals with greater musical understanding.

Creating musical features using multi-faceted, multi-task encoders based on transformers

Computational machine intelligence approaches have enabled a variety of music-centric technologies in support of creating, sharing and interacting with music content. A strong performance on specific downstream application tasks, such as music genre detection and music emotion recognition, is paramount to ensuring broad capabilities for computational music understanding and Music Information Retrieval. Traditional approaches have relied on supervised learning to train models to support these music-related tasks. However, such approaches require copious annotated data and still may only provide insight into one view of music—namely, that related to the specific task at hand. We present a new model for generating audio-musical features that support music understanding, leveraging self-supervision and cross-domain learning. After pre-training using masked reconstruction of musical input features using self-attention bidirectional transformers, output representations are fine-tuned using several downstream music understanding tasks. Results show that the features generated by our multi-faceted, multi-task, music transformer model, which we call M3BERT, tend to outperform other audio and music embeddings on several diverse music-related tasks, indicating the potential of self-supervised and semi-supervised learning approaches toward a more generalized and robust computational approach to modeling music. Our work can offer a starting point for many music-related modeling tasks, with potential applications in learning deep representations and enabling robust technology applications.

Fine-Grained Position Helps Memorizing More, a Novel Music Compound Transformer Model with Feature Interaction Fusion

Due to the particularity of the simultaneous occurrence of multiple events in music sequences, compound Transformer is proposed to deal with the challenge of long sequences. However, there are two deficiencies in the compound Transformer. First, since the order of events is more important for music than natural language, the information provided by the original absolute position embedding is not precise enough. Second, there is an important correlation between the tokens in the compound word, which is ignored by the current compound Transformer. Therefore, in this work, we propose an improved compound Transformer model for music understanding. Specifically, we propose an attribute embedding fusion module and a novel position encoding scheme with absolute-relative consideration. In the attribute embedding fusion module, different attributes are fused through feature permutation by using a multi-head self-attention mechanism in order to capture rich interactions between attributes. In the novel position encoding scheme, we propose RoAR position encoding, which realizes rotational absolute position encoding, relative position encoding, and absolute-relative position interactive encoding, providing clear and rich orders for musical events. Empirical study on four typical music understanding tasks shows that our attribute fusion approach and RoAR position encoding brings large performance gains. In addition, we further investigate the impact of masked language modeling and casual language modeling pre-training on music understanding.