Western Music Research Articles

Maieutic: A Teaching and Learning Approach. As Applied to Western Music

Abstract In this article I discuss some considerations arising from eight years of professional experience in Thailand, as both performer and teacher of music. Working alongside students mainly from Asian countries, I have been led to reconsider deeply how western teaching methodologies can be efficient and valuable in non-western cultures. I have become convinced that music teaching (and learning) must be part of a cultural and artistic approach towards diverse heritage – the western legacy in this specific case – through study of music. The goal of a teacher is to show students the correct learning process, and to create for them the best conditions to facilitate awareness, understanding and appreciation of the music. Considering the undeniable relevance of ancient Greek influence in western arts and philosophy, I demonstrate the effectiveness of the Socratic method known as maieutics, as applied to the learning of music. By this method students are always forced to think-in-music, to understand what they are doing, to make responsible choices. A musical piece is a problem to solve, and classes are often based on dialogue with Q&A sessions, stylistic considerations, reflections on the meaning of the music, and understanding of the underlying meaning of the written notation, following which performance of the score is just a way to verify the validity of our proposed solution. Through this approach students are stimulated to find the truth within themselves, and thus have the opportunity to become artistically independent.

Universality and Domain Specificity of Emotion-A Quantitative Non Linear EEG Based Approach

Music has been present in human culture since time immemorial, some say music came even before speech. The effort to understand the wide variety of emotions evoked by music has started not long back. With the advent and rapid growth of various neurological bio-sensors we can now attempt to quantify various dimensions of emotional experience induced by music especially instrumental music – since it is free from any language barriers. In this study, we took eight (8) cross cultural instrumental clips originating mainly from Indian and Western music. A listening test comprising of 100 participants across the globe was conducted to associate each clip with its corresponding emotional valence. The participants were asked to mark each clip according to their perception of four basic emotions (joy/sorrow and anxiety/serenity) invoked by each instrumental clip. EEG study was then conducted on 10 participants to measure the response evoked by the same instrumental clips in the alpha and theta frequency regions. We took the help of latest non-linear multi-fractal analysis technique – MFDFA to estimate the change in multi-fractal spectral width (corresponding to alpha as well as theta waves) associated with each of the clips in frontal, temporal and occipital lobes. The response in the alpha domain reveals a hint in the direction of universality of music, while in theta domain we have culture specific response. Moreover, we tried to develop alpha as well as theta multi-fractal spectral width as a single parameter with which we can quantify the valence and arousal based effects corresponding to a particular musical clip. The results and implications are discussed in detail.

Turkish Reflections in Classical Western Music

Turkish Reflections in Classical Western Music

Leaving the Wolf’s Glen: Measuring Decanonization in the Digital Age

This essay explores the idea of “decanonization” in reference to the “Wolf’s Glen Scene” (the Act II Finale) of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz. It uses the presence of Der Freischutz excerpts in succeeding editions of the Norton Anthology of Western Music as an index of the opera’s centrality to the music-historical canon. While Weber’s opera seems to have maintained its relative position in the anthology, the very idea of music history as organized around a canon of works has been in steep decline.

Stevie Wonder의 음악이 K-POP에 끼친 영향

흑인음악은 미국 내에서 소박한 민요에서부터 '재즈','알앤비','소울','펑크' 음악을 포함하는 매우 포괄적인 개념이다. 5음 음계의 싱코페이션을 사용하는 독특한 아프리카적 특성과 가스펠의 영향을 받으면서 발전하게 된다. 흑인 음악 장르의 다양성은 인종차별에 대한 역사적 흐름과 지역적 특색과 더불어 백인들과의 음악적 퓨전에서 찾을 수 있다. 미국 흑인음악의 거장 '스티비원더'. 흑인음악의 아버지라는 타이틀과 함께 그에게는 신체적 특징이 있다. 그것은 장애를 극복하면서, 수많은 음반과 히트곡 그리고 수 없이 많은 상을 차지하며, 미국을 넘어 전 세계적인 인기를 구가하는 뮤지션이 됐다는 점이다. 실용 음악사에 놓칠 수 없는 '스티비원더' 의 삶과 음악 그리고, 정신을 계승, 발전시켜 나아가야 함은 이 시대와 앞으로의 우리들의 음악을 폭넓게 밝혀주는 주요한 요소 중의 하나일 것 이다. 스티비원더의 모험 정신과 천재성은 앞으로도 우리나라 대중음악 및 뮤지션에게 큰 영향을 주게 될 것이다. 본 논문에서는 흑인 음악의 거장 '스티비원더'의 작품을 분석하고 악기 구성과 리듬의 독특함이 우리나라의 대중음악 뮤지션에게 어떠한 영향을 주었는지 연구 한다. African-American music heavily influences a variety of musical genres, including folk music, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk music. The music derived from traditional African music with its unique syncopated rhythm using a five-note pentatonic scale, and has developed through significant influences from gospel music. African-American music has also evolved through historical social movements, such as eliminating the racial discrimination, and has been influenced by the personalities of different cities in the United States. Modern music features fusion with elements of Western music. One of the most influential and respected artists of the 20th century was Stevie Wonder, who was known as "Father of African-American music." He was an accomplished artist, winning numerous awards despite being disabled. He has become one of the most famous and respected artists worldwide. This study of Stevie Wonder's life, music, and spiritual strength, aims to highlight his significant achievements and contributions to pop music. This is a study based on an analysis of the work of Stevie Wonder and describes how elements of African-American music influences current Korean pop music and musicians.

Unsupervised grammar induction from music data

Music has a lot of similarities to language. Since most languages have clear syntactic structures (e.g., words should be arranged in the SVO order), many linguists have proposed various kinds of grammar theories by carefully and manually investigating language data. The situation is the same with Western music. Although a single musical note (cf. alphabet) has no meaning by itself, a cluster or pattern of multiple musical notes over the quantized time-frequency grid (cf. word) can invoke some impression and such short patterns are concatenated or superimposed (unique to music) to produce more complicated meaning (cf. sentence). We introduce several attempts to discover latent structures underlying music from acoustic or symbolic data (music signals and musical scores) in an unsupervised manner. Integrating statistical acoustic and language models as in speech recognition, for example, it is possible not only to transcribe music but also to discover that particular note combinations can form chords. A key feature of this approach is that both models are trained jointly only from acoustic data. Recently, we have attempted to induce music grammars from polyphonic scores by leveraging the state-of-the-art techniques of natural language processing. This would contribute to automatic music transcription and computational musicology.

Extracurricular arts: poverty, inequality and indigenous musical arts education in post-apartheid South Africa

The bifurcation of the musical arts education sector in South Africa into its public and private dimensions reproduces inequality along lines of class, race and geography. This article reviews policy and practice in the post-apartheid era to provide new insight into the crisis unfolding in public schools. An ethnographic case study of school musicking in the Ingwavuma district of KwaZulu-Natal describes some of the strengths and challenges associated with music education in rural areas. Indigenous musics are thriving, but teachers lack training in music literacy and have limited resources at their disposal. The 2012 National Curriculum Statement accords music a peripheral (and in some cases, optional) position in South Africa’s Basic Education syllabus (DBE 2012). Music is widely practised as an extracurricular activity that does not develop the skills in music literacy required for entry into tertiary education or the music industry. By contrast, students at private schools benefit from high-quality education in Western musics through independent examination boards. It is argued that an egalitarian approach to music education would return the study of music to the school curriculum in revised form.

WESTERN HARMONY IN THE PRACTICE AND EDUCATION OF TURKISH MAKAM MUSIC

In this paper, the interaction between Turkish Makam Music and Western Music who is composed from tampered sounds has been discussed and the interaction has been situated in a historical period. This interaction has been evaluated in three domains which are; education; performance and composition. The education on this two musical language has been done detachedly in Ottoman Empire and in Turkey as well and this fact may interrupt the formation of composers who can compose with both languages. As composition process is an individual process this two musical knowledge has to be given to one same person. At the other hand even the education goes detachedly the performers has used the western harmony with makam at the last 40 years. This has been showed with different examples from the albums of artists such as Zeki Muren, Baris Manco, Sezen Aksu, Inci Cayirli. All this examples has showed that this period starts at 1970’s. The multicultural character of this music has been underlined for showing how this music is able to adapt himself to a different culture. After adapting Arabic, Persian and Byzantine music characteristics to himself, this music can and should embrace western music harmony system at the end of 200 years of intense interaction.

Effects of musical training and culture on meter perception

Western music is characterized primarily by simple meters, but a number of other musical cultures, including Turkish, have both simple and complex meters. In Experiment 1, Turkish and American adults with and without musical training were asked to detect metrical changes in Turkish music with simple and complex meter. Musicians performed significantly better than nonmusicians, and performance was significantly better on simple meter than on complex meter, but Turkish listeners performed no differently than American listeners. In Experiment 2, members of Turkish classical and folk music clubs who were tested on the same materials exhibited comparable sensitivity to simple and complex meters, unlike the American and Turkish listeners in Experiment 1. Together, the findings reveal important effects of musical training and culture on meter perception: trained musicians are generally more sensitive than nonmusicians, regardless of metrical complexity, but sensitivity to complex meter requires sufficient exposure to musical genres featuring such meters.

The effect of harmonization on cortical magnetic responses evoked by music of rapidly changing tonalities

The act of shifting from one key to another is termed tonal modulation, which has been used to articulate emotion expressions and formal structures in Western music. The present study recorded cortical activity to examine how the auditory-evoked magnetic fields are affected by harmonizing music of rapidly changing tonalities. Participants were asked to covertly sing the pitch names of well-learned modulating melodies along with the harmonized or unharmonized melodies. In our musical stimuli, three flats were added to the key signature for every four beats. Such a rapid modulation is achieved by a chromatic inflection of the submediant tone between the third and fourth beats. Tonal modulations with such chromatic progressions are termed chromatic modulations. A major finding was that the amplitude of N1m (neuromagnetic response at approximately 110 ms after the onset of a stimulus) was significantly reduced by harmonization only when a modulation occurred. We also observed that harmonization enhanced the P2m (neuromagnetic response at approximately 200 ms after the onset of a stimulus) amplitude. The results provide evidence of the impacts of harmonization on attention efforts and pitch categorization.

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation.

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name or produce an isolated musical note without the aid of a reference note. One skill thought to be unique to AP possessors is the ability to provide absolute intonation judgments (e.g., classifying an isolated note as "in-tune" or "out-of-tune"). Recent work has suggested that absolute intonation perception among AP possessors is not crystallized in a critical period of development, but is dynamically maintained by the listening environment, in which the vast majority of Western music is tuned to a specific cultural standard. Given that all listeners of Western music are constantly exposed to this specific cultural tuning standard, our experiments address whether absolute intonation perception extends beyond AP possessors. We demonstrate that non-AP listeners are able to accurately judge the intonation of completely isolated notes. Both musicians and nonmusicians showed evidence for absolute intonation recognition when listening to familiar timbres (piano and violin). When testing unfamiliar timbres (triangle and inverted sine waves), only musicians showed weak evidence of absolute intonation recognition (Experiment 2). Overall, these results highlight a previously unknown similarity between AP and non-AP possessors' long-term musical note representations, including evidence of sensitivity to frequency.

Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception.

by biology remains debated. One widely discussed phenomenon is that some combinations of notes are perceived by Westerners as pleasant, or consonant, whereas others are perceived as unpleasant,or dissonant. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is central to Western music and its origins have fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Aesthetic responses to consonance are commonly assumed by scientists to have biological roots, and thus to be universally present in humans. Ethnomusicologists and composers, in contrast, have argued that consonance is a creation of Western musical culture. The issue has remained unresolved, partly because little is known about the extent of cross-cultural variation in consonance preferences. Here we report experiments with the Tsimane'--a native Amazonian society with minimal exposure to Western culture--and comparison populations in Bolivia and the United States that varied in exposure to Western music. Participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane' rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance,albeit to a lesser degree than US residents. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. The observed variation in preferences is presumably determined by exposure to musical harmony, suggesting that culture has a dominant role in shaping aesthetic responses to music.

The effect of tactile cues on auditory stream segregation ability of musicians and nonmusicians.

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Western music is often composed of multiple melodic streams that combine to produce a complex structure that gives a particular piece its unique depth and quality. In order to appreciate the interplay of melodic streams, listeners need to be able to first segregate them. Unfortunately, people with hearing loss typically experience great difficulty in doing so primarily due to an impoverishment of their perceptual cues (Oxenham, 2008). This makes music appreciation very challenging for these listeners. For hearing-impaired people whose auditory pathway is fundamentally limited, such as those who use a cochlear implant, it is important to explore sensory substitution as a possible means of enhancing stream segregation and music perception. Recent studies have shown that visual cues can aid hearing-impaired people, and more specifically cochlear implant listeners, in better segregating two musical streams (Innes-Brown, Marozeau, & Blamey, 2011; Marozeau, InnesBrown, Grayden, Burkitt, & Blamey, 2010). We therefore hypothesize that tactile information can be used in a similar way. This paper describes a first study which tests the effect of tactile cues on segregation ability in normal hearing listeners as function of their musical background.Segregation of a melodic stream is made possible by both bottom-up and top-down processes. Bottom-up processes are derived from perceptual cues such as pitch, timbre, and loudness (Bregman, 1990; Marozeau, Innes-Brown, & Blamey, 2010). Topdown processes are derived from cognitive processes involving memory, expectation, musical training, and attention (Carlyon, Cusack, Foxton, & Robertson, 2001). Auditory stream segregation can also be influenced by cross-modal interaction (Carlyon, Plack, Fantini, & Cusack, 2003). Marozeau et al. (2010) have demonstrated that visual cues can improve the streaming ability in both musicians and nonmusicians. Carlyon et al. (2003) has also demonstrated both cross-modal and nonsensory influences on auditory streaming.It is not uncommon for a listener to describe the sensation of feeling Tactile information can add to temporal cues emphasizing the rhythm within a piece (Fraisse, 1981), and can generate a strong sensation of rhythm on its own (Brochard, Touzalin, Despres, & Dufour, 2008). Huang, Gamble, Sarnlertsophon, Wang, and Hsiao (2013) demonstrated that meter is perceived similarly well (70%-85%) when either tactile or auditory cues are presented alone, and that in bimodal mode auditory and tactile cues are integrated to produce coherent meter percepts. It might therefore be hypothesized that tactile information can have an effect on the perception of the musical streams.Musical training is known to have a positive effect on segregation ability (Strait, Kraus, Parbery-Clark, & Ashley, 2010). The effect of cross-modal information on stream segregation can therefore interact with musical training. In order to isolate and understand the interaction between tactile cues and auditory stream segregation ability normal hearing listeners with and without musical experience were assessed.MethodParticipantsTwenty-four participants (12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians, with approximate age average of 27 years old, ranging from 21 to 35 years old) were recruited using social networks in the musician and nonmusician communities. All musicians were full-time professional performers. Nine of them had a formal tertiary education in music and could read music proficiently. The other three were professional flamenco players with an expert level of musicianship but a weaker ability to read music. All the nonmusician participants were unable to play an instrument, and had limited musical training. All participants reported normal hearing and had hearing thresholds at octave frequencies from 125 Hz to 8 kHz below 20 dB HL. Participants also reported normal tactile sensation in their fingertips. …

Re-designing Liberal Arts Course <Western Music History> as in a Flipped Learning Class

Re-designing Liberal Arts Course <Western Music History> as in a Flipped Learning Class

The North Korean Piano Music : Relations to the Modern Nationalism in the Western Music History

The North Korean Piano Music : Relations to the Modern Nationalism in the Western Music History

Lack of musicality? Explaining anomalies in some senior Korean Christians’ hymn singing

AbstractThis article launches an inquiry into the ways in which some senior Korean Christians sing Protestant hymns at a Korean church in Cleveland, OH. The majority of the church members sing hymns as they are written; several older members (aged 65 or over) born in rural Korea, however, systematically transform them. The older singers tend to turn any diatonic hymn into a pentatonic melody, lowering fa down to mi and pulling ti up to do. Drawing on a variety of disciplines such as music theory, psychology, ethnography, and cultural history, I propose categorical perception as a key to understanding melodic transformation. Even though the piano accompanist at the church—who is rigidly Western music oriented—criticizes the older singers for their lack of musicality, numerous psychological studies suggest that the older Korean singers transform the hymns, precisely because they are musically trained, albeit in regional Korean folk singing practices. My fieldwork at the Annual Hymn Competition and my interv...

European Art Music and Its Role in the Cultural Interaction between Japan and the East Asian Continent in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract The fact that much of what the Japanese regard as part of their culture originally came to Japan from the Asian continent in ancient and medieval times is well known and has been extensively researched. For the period after 1868, however, the attention of scholars has tended to concentrate on Japan’s comprehensive importation of Western civilization. This exploratory article suggests a different perspective. Taking music in modern Japan as an example and based in part on the author’s research for her recent book Not by Love Alone: The Violin in Japan, 1850-2010, the author will argue that music is a particularly rewarding fi eld for examining transnational fl ows. Research on music in modern Japan has tended to privilege the introduction of European art music from the West and this was undoubtedly one of the most important developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are, however, aspects to this development that merit more attention than they have received so far, including the relationship between Western music and other musics practised in Japan in the nineteenth century and the interactions between Japan and non-Western countries and in particular its East Asian neighbours. In this article, four general themes for further enquiry are introduced: 1. The possible relation between Meiji statesmen’s and intellectuals’ kangaku education and their views on the role of music in the modern state. 2. The Chinese origins and the place of minshingaku (Ming and Qing music) in the musical culture of nineteenthcentury Japan. 3. Japan’s role in the dissemination of Western Music in East Asia. 4. The role of the East Asian continent (particularly the cities of Shanghai and Harbin) as a place of encounter between Asia and Europe.

Harmonic context influences pitch class equivalence judgments through gestalt and congruency effects

The context in which a stimulus is presented shapes the way it is processed. This effect has been studied extensively in the field of visual perception. Our understanding of how context affects the processing of auditory stimuli is, however, rather limited. Western music is primarily built on melodies (succession of pitches) typically accompanied by chords (harmonic context), which provides a natural template for the study of context effects in auditory processing. Here, we investigated whether pitch class equivalence judgments of tones are affected by the harmonic context within which the target tones are embedded. Nineteen musicians and 19 non-musicians completed a change detection task in which they were asked to determine whether two successively presented target tones, heard either in isolation or with a chordal accompaniment (same or different chords), belonged to the same pitch class. Both musicians and non-musicians were most accurate when the chords remained the same, less so in the absence of chordal accompaniment, and least when the chords differed between both target tones. Further analysis investigating possible mechanisms underpinning these effects of harmonic context on task performance revealed that both a change in gestalt (change in either chord or pitch class), as well as incongruency between change in target tone pitch class and change in chords, led to reduced accuracy and longer reaction times. Our results demonstrate that, similarly to visual processing, auditory processing is influenced by gestalt and congruency effects.

Consonance preferences are not universal: Indifference to dissonance among native Amazonians

In Western cultures, some combinations of musical notes are consonant (pleasant) and others are dissonant (unpleasant). Although the aesthetic contrast between consonance and dissonance is commonly thought to have biological roots, and thus to be universally present in humans, a definitive test has remained elusive. Here we report experiments with the Tsimane’—a native Amazonian society with minimal exposure to Western culture—and comparison populations elsewhere in Bolivia and the USA that varied in exposure to Western music. Participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like preferences for several other aesthetic contrasts, and Western-like discrimination abilities, the Tsimane’ rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. In contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance, albeit to a lesser degree than U.S. residents. The results indicate that consonance preferences dramatically vary across cultures, and can be fully absent in some cases. The observed variation in preferences is plausibly determined by exposure to Western music, suggesting that culture plays a dominant role in shaping aesthetic responses to consonance.

Revising the musical equal temperament

Western music is predominantly based on the equal temperament with a constant semitone frequency ratio of 21/12. Although this temperament has been in use since the nineteenth century and in spite of its high degree of symmetry, various musicians have repeatedly expressed their discomfort with the harmonicity of certain intervals. Recently it was suggested that this problem can be overcome by introducing a modified temperament with a constant but slightly increased frequency ratio. In this paper we confirm this conjecture quantitatively. Using entropy as a measure for harmonicity, we show numerically that the harmonic optimum is in fact obtained for frequency ratios slightly larger than 21/12. This suggests that the equal temperament should be replaced by a harmonized stretched temperament as a new standard.