alexarje's library 63 articles

Abstract

You have heard about how a musician loses herself in her music, how a painter becomes one with the process of painting. In work, sport, conversation or hobby, you have experienced, yourself, the suspension of time, the freedom of complete absorption in activity. This is "flow," an experience that is at once demanding and rewarding--an experience that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates is one of the most enjoyable and valuable experiences a person can have. The exhaustive case studies, controlled experiments and innumerable ...

Abstract

Vector base amplitude panning VBAP is a generic method for virtual source positioning. It generalizes the pair-wise panning paradigm to triplet-wise panning paradigm, which can be used in three-dimensional loudspeaker setups. The VBAP implementation in MAX MSP software presented in this paper is a powerful tool to produce spatialized computer music pieces that can be presented with different loudspeaker setups. Virtual sources are positioned by defining the virtual source directions as... ...

Abstract

What sensory feedback, tactile or auditory, is the more important for a musician when playing? In an attempt to answer this question, subjects were asked to play along with a metronome while the auditory feedback from their playing was manipulated. The preliminary results showed a tendency for matching sound with sound, i.e. players initiated strokes earlier as the delay increased. Increase in timing errors indicate a possible breakpoint around 55 ms. As the feedback was delayed even more... ...

Abstract

The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." ...

Abstract

Handwriting – one of the most important developments in human culture – is also a methodological tool in several scientific disciplines, most importantly handwriting recognition methods, graphology and medical diagnostics. Previous studies have relied largely on the analyses of handwritten traces or kinematic analysis of handwriting; whereas electromyographic (EMG) signals associated with handwriting have received little attention. Here we show for the first time, a method in which EMG signals generated by hand and forearm muscles during handwriting activity are reliably ...

Abstract

Much has been written about expressivity by philosophers, composers, musicologists, and psychologists, but little is known about how the musicians of tomorrow -- music students -- approach this subject. This paper reports an exploratory study in which 135 students from music conservatories in three countries (England, Italy, Sweden) filled out a questionnaire that addressed four themes: (a) conceptualizing expressivity, (b) expressivity in everyday practice, (c) expressivity in music teaching, and (d) novel teaching strategies. The results suggest that students define expressivity ...

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Modern management of Parkinson's disease (PD) aims to obtain symptom control, to reduce clinical disability, and to improve quality of life. Music acts as a specific stimulus to obtain motor and emotional responses by combining movement and stimulation of different sensory pathways. We explored the efficacy of active music therapy (MT) on motor and emotional functions in patients with PD. METHODS: This prospective, randomized, controlled, single-blinded study lasted 3 months. It consisted of weekly sessions of MT and physical ...

Abstract

Music offers a unique opportunity to better understand the organization of the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that seems specific to humans, and associated with a specific brain architecture. Yet unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain - and unlike language - music is a skill at which only a minority of people become proficient. The study of music as a major brain function has ...

Abstract

This paper illustrates our recent work on analysis and classification of expressive gesture in human full-body movement and in particular in dance performances. An experiment is presented which is the result of a joint work carried out at the DIST-InfoMus Lab, University of Genova, Italy, and at the Department of Psychology of the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in the framework of the EU-IST project MEGA (Multisensory Expressive Gesture Applications, www.megaproject.org). The experiment aims at (i) individuating which motion cues are mostly ...

Abstract

Listeners have enjoyed classical music recordings for more than a century, yet important issues about recorded performances have been little explored. What is the relationship between performance and recording? How are modern audiences affected by the trends set in motion by the recording era? What is the impact of recordings on the lives of musicians? In this wide-ranging book, Robert Philip extends the scope of his earlier pioneering book, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900-1950. Philip ...

Abstract

This stimulating Very Short Introduction to music invites us to really think about music and the values and qualities we ascribe to it. The world teems with different kinds of music-traditional, folk, classical, jazz, rock, pop-and each type of music tends to come with its own way of thinking. Drawing on a wealth of accessible examples ranging from Beethoven to the Spice Girls to Chinese zither music, Nicholas Cook attempts to provide a framework for thinking about all ...

Abstract

<p> Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In <i>Performing Rites</i>, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk ...

Abstract

First published in 1983, this book studies how people are tied together and yet isolated by hidden threads of rhythm and walls of time.  Time is treated as a language, organizer, and message system revealing people's feelings about each other and reflecting differences between cultures. ...

Abstract

Empirical data have recently begun to inform debates on the evolutionary origins of music. In this paper we discuss some of our recent findings and related theoretical issues. We claim that theories of the origins of music will be usefully constrained if we can determine which aspects of music perception are innate, and, of those, which are uniquely human and specific to music. Comparative research in nonhuman animals, particularly nonhuman primates, is thus critical to the debate. In this paper we ...

Abstract

The shape of three-dimensional cavities affects the timbral quality of sound sources located within them. Moreover, the resonances of the cavities may impress a sort of pitch to noise-like excitation sounds, and the pitch height is somehow related to the size of the cavity. It is interesting to investigate how differently-shaped enclosures give rise to different perceived pitches. From a first experiment, it seems that when comparing the pitch of a cube with the pitch of a sphere, subjects actually match ...

Abstract

The airborne sounds produced by freely vibrating hollow and solid bars were synthesized according to the equations of bar motion from theoretical acoustics, and were presented to listeners over headphones. In a two-interval, forced-choice task, listeners were asked to distinguish between the hollow and solid bar sounds as bar length was varied at random from one presentation to the next. All other physical properties of the bar were held constant across trials. Listener decision strategies for detecting hollowness in iron, aluminum, ...

Abstract

Although hearing is classically considered a temporal sense, everyday listening suggests that subtle spatial properties constitute an important part of what people know about the world through sound. Typically neglected in psychoacoustics research, the ability to perceive the precise sizes of objects on the basis of sound was investigated during the routine event of dropping wooden dowels of different lengths onto a hard surface. In two experiments, the ordinal and metrical success of naive listeners was related to length but not ...

Abstract

A psychophysical investigation of timbre was undertaken with the intent of deriving quantitative results that could be useful in musical applications. Recordings of metal objects being struck with percussion mallets were rated by subjects on a unidimensional perceptual scale of perceived mallet hardness. Four acoustical parameters of the attack portion (first 325 ms) were defined and evaluated as predictors of perceived mallet hardness rating. To measure these parameters, a critical-band filter bank was employed. Two curves were extracted from the filter-bank ...

Abstract

Three types of evidence are reviewed which cast doubt on claims that recovery of the speaker's articulations is an inherent part of speech perception: (a) Phonological data (e.g., universal tendencies of languages' segment inventories, phonotactic patterns, sound changes, etc.) show unmistakably that the acoustic-auditory properties of speech sounds, not their articulations, are the primary determinant of their behavior. (b) Infants and various nonhuman species can differentiate certain sound contrasts in human speech even though it is highly unlikely that they can ...

Abstract

The paper first distinguishes the two perceptual theories, the motor theory and the theory of direct perception, that nearly agree in the claim that listeners to speech perceive vocal tract gestures. Next it justifies the claim of the direct realist theory that listeners perceive gestures and consider some experimental evidence in its favor. Finally it addresses evidence and arguments judged by Ohala to disconfirm the theory. The argument is made that most of the evidence put forward by Ohala is irrelevant ...

Abstract

An analysis-based synthesis technique for the computer generation of musical instrument tones was perpetually evaluated in terms of the discriminability of 16 original and resynthesized tones taken from a wide class of orchestral instruments having quasiharmonic series. The analysis technique used was the heterodyne filter—which produced a set of intermediate data for additive synthesis, consisting of time-varying amplitude and frequency functions for the set of partials of each tone. Three successive levels of data reduction were applied to this intermediate data, ...

Abstract

An experiment was performed to evaluate the effects of spectral modifications on the similarity structure for a set of musical timbres. The stimuli were 16 music instrument tones, 8 of which were modified in pairs. This modification consisted of exchanging the shape of the spectral energy distribution between the two tones within each pair. The three-dimensional spatial representation of similarities among the 16 tones was obtained by multidimensional scaling techniques and compared to a previous scaling of the original 16 unmodified ...

Abstract

The dependency of the timbre of musical sounds on their fundamental frequency (F0) was examined in three experiments. In experiment I subjects compared the timbres of stimuli produced by a set of 12 musical instruments with equal F0, duration, and loudness. There were three sessions, each at a different F0. In experiment II the same stimuli were rearranged in pairs, each with the same difference in F0, and subjects had to ignore the constant difference in pitch. In experiment III, instruments ...

Abstract

The perceptual salience of several outstanding features of quasiharmonic, time-variant spectra was investigated in musical instrument sounds. Spectral analyses of sounds from seven musical instruments (clarinet, flute, oboe, trumpet, violin, harpsichord, and marimba) produced time-varying harmonic amplitude and frequency data. Six basic data simplifications and five combinations of them were applied to the reference tones: amplitude-variation smoothing, coherent variation of amplitudes over time, spectral-envelope smoothing, forced harmonic-frequency variation, frequency-variation smoothing, and harmonic-frequency flattening. Listeners were asked to discriminate sounds resynthesized with ...

Abstract

Three experiments tested listeners' ability to identify 70 diverse environmental sounds using limited spectral information. Experiment 1 employed low- and high-pass filtered sounds with filter cutoffs ranging from 300 to 8000 Hz. Listeners were quite good (>50% correct) at identifying the sounds even when severely filtered; for the high-pass filters, performance was never below 70%. Experiment 2 used octave-wide bandpass filtered sounds with center frequencies from 212 to 6788 Hz and found that performance with the higher bandpass filters was from ...

Abstract

Individual subjects with or without musical training made similarity judgments of pairs of tones on a nine-point scale. Each subject was run in three or four sessions of 351 trials each. The tones had structures like those of musical instruments, being made of all 27 combinations of three dimensions, each at three levels. In Experiment 1, the dimensions were fundamental frequency F0, envelope, and relative amplitudes of harmonics. In Experiment 2, the dimensions were number of harmonics, envelope, and onset rate ...

Abstract

Clapping is a little-studied human activity that may be viewed either as a form of communicative group behavior (applause) or as an individual sound-generating activity involving two “articulators”—the hands. The latter aspect was explored in this pilot study by means of acoustical analyses and perceptual experiments. Principal components analysis of 20 subjects' average clap spectra yielded several dimensions of interindividual variation that were related to observed hand configuration. This relationship emerged even more clearly in a similar analysis of a single ...

Abstract

Identification of the material of struck objects of variable size was investigated. Previous studies on this issue assumed recognition to be based on acoustical measures of damping. This assumption was tested, comparing the power of a damping measure in explaining identification data with that of several other acoustical descriptors. Listeners' performance was perfect with respect to gross material categories (steel-glass and wood-plexiglass) comprising materials of vastly different mechanical properties. Impaired performance was observed for materials within the same gross category, identification ...

Abstract

Sound can convey information about the materials composing an object that are often not directly available to the visual system. Material and geometric properties of synthesized impacted bars with a tube resonator were varied, their perceptual structure was inferred from multidimensional scaling of dissimilarity judgments, and the psychophysical relations between the two were quantified. Constant cross-section bars varying in mass density and viscoelastic damping coefficient were synthesized with a physical model in experiment 1. A two-dimensional perceptual space resulted, and the ...

Abstract

In the 20 years since publication of John Sloboda's landmark volume 'The Musical Mind', music psychology has developed as a vibrant area of research - exerting influence on areas as diverse as music education and cognitive neuroscience. This new book brings together 24 selected essays and reviews written by an internationally acclaimed authority on music and the mind. Chapters are grouped into four main areas of study. These are, cognitive processes (including music reading, memory and performance), emotion and motivation, ...

Abstract

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action (see Gallese, 2000b), as between the ...

Abstract

As you read this, at some level you're aware that you're reading, thanks to a standard human feature commonly referred to as consciousness. What is it--a spiritual phenomenon, an evolutionary tool, a neurological side effect? The best scientists love to tackle big, meaningful questions like this, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio jumps right in with <I>The Feeling of What Happens</I>, a poetic examination of interior life through lenses of research, medical cases, philosophical analysis, and unashamed introspection. Damasio's perspective is, fortunately, ...

Abstract

Challenging the traditional developmental sequence as well as the idea that issues of attachment, dependency, and trust are confined to infancy, Stern integrates clinical and experimental science to support his revolutionizing vision of the social and emotional life of the youngest children, which has had spiraling implications for theory, research, and practice. A new introduction by the author celebrates this first paperback edition. ...

Abstract

An exploration of the power of the profound but fleeting experiences at the root of interpersonal relationships. <P>Beginning with the claim that we are psychologically alive only in the <I>now</I>, readers are invited to reconsider their day-to-day experiences. Certain moments of shared immediate experience—such as a knowing glance across a dinner table—are paradigmatic of what Stern shows to be the core of human experience, the three to five seconds he identifies as "the present moment." This book offers a novel ...

Abstract

As the amount of information recorded and stored electronically grows ever larger, it becomes increasingly useful, if not essential, to develop better and more efficient ways to summarize and extract information from these large, multivariate data sets. The field of classification does just that- investigates sets of "objects" to see if they can be summarized into a small number of classes comprising similar objects.Researchers have made great strides in the field over the last twenty years, and classification is no longer perceived as being concerned solely with exploratory ...

Abstract

<P>This book comprises a series of "state-of-the-art" reviews on work relating music and mind. It offers a uniquely broad range of approaches within a single volume, ranging from the psychological, through the computational, to the musicological. Authors were selected from presenters at the Third International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (Liege, 1994) to illustrate the wide range of perspectives now being adopted in studying how humans make and respond to music.<br><br>The book is divided into four sections, each illustrating a ...

Abstract

This paper presents a framework called Music via Motion (MvM) designed for the transdomain mapping between physical movements of the performer(s) and multimedia events, translating activities from one creative domain to another-for example, from physical gesture to audio output. With a brief background of this domain and prototype designs, the paper describes a number of inter- and multidisciplinary collaborative works for interactive multimedia performances. These include a virtual musical instrument interface, exploring video-based tracking technology to provide an intuitive and nonintrusive ...

Abstract

Interactive systems, virtual environments, and information display applications need dynamic sound models rather than faithful audio reproductions. This implies three levels of research: auditory perception, physics-based sound modeling, and expressive parametric control. Parallel progress along these three lines leads to effective auditory displays that can complement or substitute visual displays. This article aims to shed some light on how psychologists, computer scientists, acousticians, and engineers can work together and address these and other questions arising in sound design for interactive multimedia ...

Abstract

WISEAR (Wireless Sensor Array) is a Linux based Embeddedx86 TS-5600 SBC (Single Board Computer) specifically configured for use with music, dance and video performance technologies. The device offers a general purpose solution to many sensor and gestural controller problems. Much like the general purpose CPU, which resolved many issues of its predecessor (ie., the special purpose DSP chip), the WISEAR box attempts to move beyond custom made BASIC stamp projects that are often created on a per - performance basis and ...

Abstract

A Sense of Dance: Exploring Your Movement Potential, Second Edition, is written for true beginners—students who are exploring the art form for the first time and are not likely to describe themselves as dancers. Through this text, students discover that dance is an accessible art form that can bring greater self-awareness and self-confidence. It helps new dancers learn how to express themselves through dance. <P>This second edition, based on an already-successful textbook, features three new chapters that add even more ...

Abstract

This book makes available five classic studies of the organisation of behaviour in face-to-face interaction. It includes Adam Kendon's well-known study of gaze-direction in interaction, his study of greetings, of the interactional functions of facial expression and of the spatial organisation of naturally occurring interaction, as recorded by means of film or videotape. They represent some of the best work undertaken within the 'natural history' tradition of interaction studies, as originally formulated in the work of Bateson, Birdwhistell and Goffman. Chapter ...

Abstract

For many years the Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research (Scherer and Ekman, 1982) has been an invaluable text for researchers looking for methods to study nonverbal behavior and the expression of affect. A successor to this essential text, The New Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research is a substantially updated volume with 90% new material. It includes chapters on coding and methodological issues for a variety of areas in nonverbal behavior: facial actions, vocal behavior, and body movement. ...

Abstract

Understanding and Crafting the Mix gives you clear and systematic methods for identifying, evaluating, and shaping the artistic elements in music and audio recording. The exercises throughout help you to develop critical listening and evaluating skills and gain greater control over the quality of your recordings. <br>William Moylan takes an inside look into a range of popular music, offering you insights into making meaningful sound judgements during recording. Sample production sequences and descriptions of the recordists roles as composer, conductor and ...

Abstract

<P>This collection of essays on electroacoustic music explores the creative possibilities to be found in various forms of musical analysis. Taking pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre as the four basic elements of music, the authors discuss electroacoustic works. In this analysis, they examine the applications of neumes, contemporary staff notation, Csound orchestra and score files, time-domain representations, and spectrograms. They take into consideration both the positive (preservation of the abstract) and negative (creative limitation) aspects of these analytical ...