Multiplicity manifolds as an opening to prescribe exponential decay : auto-regressive boundary feedback in wave equation stabilization

International audienceExploring a more than 70 years old idea about the minimization of the spectral abscissa of linear functional differential equations, a series of recent works highlighted the insights that multiple spectral values may bring in the characterization of the decay rate for the solution of such dynamical systems. In fact, it has been shown that a spectral value of sufficiently high multiplicity tends to be dominant, in what is now known as the multiplicity-induced-dominancy (MID) property. When it is valid, this property can be remarkably helpful in the control of dynamical systems governed by functional differential equations or even some classes of partial differential equations. Beyond its simplicity, what sets it from other control methods is the valuable quantitative advantage it provides by prescribing the exact solution's decay rate. Since then, many works have been dedicated to studying the extent of the MID as well as its use in practical control applications. In this paper, apart from the extension of the MID property to difference functional equations with multiple delays, we study the case when the MID fails. In fact, despite the invalidity of the MID property, we emphasize the interest of forcing a spectral value multiplicity to derive a sharp estimate of the corresponding rightmost spectral value. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we consider the stabilization problem of the wave equation with an auto-regressive boundary feedback. By using an appropriate finite element modeling, a numerical simulation of the boundary control for the wave equation case is performed to illustrate these results through the example of vibrations' control of a long drill pipe submitted to a shock-like disturbance. The time responses show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and mainly that the decay rate can be arbitrarily selected

Reconceptualising the learning of expressiveness in music performance: Malaysian undergraduate voices beyond Western traditions

Expressiveness learning in music performance within higher education has been predominantly shaped by Western classical music and conservatoire traditions, often privileging notation, stylistic correctness, and the composer’s intentions. In post-colonial contexts such as Malaysia, this dominance risks marginalising students’ culturally embedded, oral, embodied, and participatory musical knowledge. To date, limited attention has been given to the perspectives of non-Western students, including Malaysian students. Therefore, this study reconceptualises the learning of expressiveness in music performance through the voices of Malaysian undergraduate music education (BMus Ed) students. Situated within the Faculty of Music and Performing Arts at Sultan Idris Education University (FMSP, UPSI), this study interrogates the dominance of Western conservatoire norms. It explores how BMus Ed students understand expressiveness, how their prior and current learning experiences shape that understanding, and the strategies they employ to develop expressive performance in culturally hybrid settings. Framed by constructivist and phenomenological perspectives, this research positions expressiveness as a culturally mediated, student-constructed, and teachable competence. Therefore, a sequential mixed-methods design was employed to explore how students construct expressive knowledge through lived experience, reflection, and interaction. Study 1 involved a survey questionnaire (n = 66), generating descriptive and thematic insights into students’ conceptualisations and learning experiences of expressiveness. Moreover, Study 2 consisted of Video-Stimulated Recall Interviews (VSRI) (n = 10), enabling in-depth exploration of students’ strategies and decision-making of expressiveness in music performance. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively, while qualitative data were analysed by using Thematic Analysis (TA). The findings indicate that students conceptualise expressiveness as a multidimensional synthesis of emotional communication, musical meaning, technical mastery, personal interpretation, and embodied gesture. Previous learning experiences, often rooted in participatory, oral, improvisatory, and community-based traditions, provided intuitive and affective foundations for expressiveness. Current higher music education training has refined these foundations through technical, analytical, and ensemble-based practices, largely shaped by Western conservatoire models. Specifically, students’ learning strategies clustered into three interrelated domains: contextual understanding and emotional resonance (informed by previous experiences), technical proficiency and dynamics control (developed through current experiences in formal training), and adaptive practice that integrates both. These findings challenge transmission-based pedagogies that frame expressiveness as stylistic compliance or innate talent. Instead, Malaysian BMus Ed students actively negotiate and assemble hybrid expressive strategies, blending Western analytical tools with movement, ornamentation, improvisation, and narrative association drawn from local traditions. Thus, expressiveness emerges as emotionally grounded, culturally situated, and enacted through both technique and embodiment. Consequently, this study contributes to music performance pedagogy by articulating cross-cultural strategies that foreground students’ expressive agency. For Malaysian higher music education, it advocates curricula, assessment, and pedagogies that legitimise oral, embodied, and community-based knowledge alongside notation-based technique. Additionally, this research offers a framework for reconceptualising expressive learning beyond Western-centric paradigms, positioning students as active constructors of expressive artistry within diverse musical ecologies

Beyond tension and relaxation: optimizing antagonistic muscular co-contraction (AMCC) for skilled, healthy piano technique

Aims: This doctoral thesis sought to develop new understanding of antagonistic muscular co-contraction (AMCC) in the context of piano playing, to aid pianists facing playing-related challenges. Background: Playing the piano skillfully is an exceptionally complex task. Pianists are confronted by considerable obstacles when developing and maintaining their playing. Debate about the physiological mechanics of proper piano technique has continued across pedagogical and scientific fora for centuries, including disagreement over AMCC. A scientifically sound and pedagogically viable understanding of proper piano technique is overdue — which must clearly account for muscle activity, including AMCC’s effects and proper role. Methods: This thesis justifies its novel, integrative methodology by determining that prior scientific and practical inquiry has been unable to properly comprehend the complex phenomenon of AMCC, partly due to persistent theory-practice gaps. The thesis leads this approach by adopting and harmonizing previously untried methods. Chapter II’s scoping review establishes a science-based theoretical model of AMCC, which is applied and expanded in Chapter III’s systematic critical review of pedagogy. Chapter IV then generates a practice-led model and integrates this with the prior expanded model, culminating in a unified theory-practice model of AMCC in piano playing. Chapter V observes pianists’ AMCC via surface electromyography (sEMG), empirically validating key areas of this unified model. Results: The thesis’s unified model thoroughly and verifiably characterizes AMCC’s nature and effects on piano playing. AMCC is a fundamental contributor to human movement with broad and unique consequences, including a dualistic capacity for positive and negative effects both on sensorimotor task performance and musical expression — but prior AMCC research and pedagogy are fragmentary and often flawed, frustrating prolonged efforts at understanding and harnessing its potential. Conclusion: This thesis synthesizes multifarious perspectives on AMCC, arriving at a unified model of AMCC’s nature and effects on piano performance. Skilled, healthy piano playing requires considerable AMCC, due to its capacity for substantial, transcendent, and uniquely beneficial effects on the exceptional challenges of piano performance — but this AMCC must be implemented dynamically and organically within the broader context and expressive function of musical performance, otherwise becoming harmful rather than facilitative. The thesis concludes that pianists can and should train and use AMCC, which itself varies significantly between and among individuals — thereby illuminating clear avenues for future pedagogical transformation. These findings constitute a compelling resolution to centuries of debate, misunderstanding, and inconsistency regarding AMCC

Compressed Consecutive Pattern Matching

International audienceOriginating from the work of Navarro and Thankanchan [TCS 2016], the problem of consecutive pattern matching is a variant of the fundamental pattern matching problem, where one is given a text and a pair of patterns $p_1,p_2$, and must compute consecutive occurrences of $p_1,p_2$ in the text. Assuming that the text is given as a straight-line program of size $g$, we develop an algorithm that computes all consecutive occurrences of $p_{1}, p_{2}$ in optimal $O(g+|p_1|+|p_2|+output)$ time. As a corollary, we also derive an algorithm that reports all co-occurrences separated by a distance $d \in [a,b]$ in O(g+|p_1|+|p_2|+\occ) time and an algorithm that reports the top-$k$ closest co-occurrences in $O(g+|p_1|+|p_2|+k)$ time

Singing with strangers: the social significance of music

***** PLEASE NOTE: This material has been published in Journal of Consciousness Studies 33 (3-4), 2026 (pp. 78-100), the only definitive repository of the content that has been certified and accepted after peer review. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by Imprint Academic. This material may not be copied or reposted without explicit permission. Copyright © 2026 by Imprint Academic. ***** ABSTRACT: When people sing together, they are likely to experience a sense of enhanced closeness. This study explores the extent to which that feeling of closeness is affected by how in tune singers are with each other. Pairs of same-sex strangers (N=162) with a broad spread of backgrounds and singing abilities either sang a familiar song together (Happy Birthday) on first encounter or played a cooperative card memory game. Both activities resulted in an enhanced sense of connection between participants even though the singing bout (at ca 30 s) was significantly shorter than the card game. The quality of joint singing (in terms of fit between participants' tuning) did not significantly influence its bonding effects, suggesting that the social effects of singing can be independent of its quality. Singing together may be of more significance as a social act than as an appealing sound. ***** The appendices and dataset for this article are available on this repository at https://researchonline.rcm.ac.uk/id/eprint/2683/ and https://doi.org/10.24379/RCM.00002683 ****

Exploring isomorphic (para-)cinematic storytelling with music: a reflection from the composer's perspective

As a classically trained composer specialised in music for media, I have always been fascinated by the imagination that music can stir in audiences. Film music has acted as a catalyst for defining extra-musical content, with film composers devising and relying on effective musical formulas, here referred to as topics, to convey certain situations or emotions. Cinematic narrative has also affected how composers write music for media as opposed to the concert hall. Yet, the potential of cinematic storytelling with music has largely been neglected by music semioticians, with few exceptions in the last decades. My research seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by exploring working methods, narrative and musical strategies that define isomorphic cinematic storytelling with music, drawing upon my experience as a composer and scholar. I first acknowledge the existence of narrative devices in instrumental and vocal music, exploring how those have been modified or continued in film music, clarifying cinematic-specific narrative devices, and reviewing the literature around the concept of musical narrative. After elaborating upon the key concept of ‘para-cinematic’, I then clarify the scope of this research, by focusing on music that mirrors the cinematic narrative, here defined as ‘isomorphic’. I explain and contextualise the concept of para-cinematic used in the second group of works presented in this research, comprising programmatic works referring to an imaginary media. In this context, I aim to develop music that not only reflects the (audio-visual) narrative at hand but also the imagined editing techniques and camera movements, hence achieving an individual take on concert music by integrating film music strategies with traditional programmatic music, and thus going full circle from my starting point. My analysis and commentary of the works presented as part of this DMus submission divides them into two groups. The first group features cinematic commissions composed between 2012 and 2021, where music has predominant importance in storytelling, with little or no dialogue/voice-over. The second group includes para-cinematic works based on fairy tales. My conclusions then review the selected devices previously identified in the works presented, reflecting on how the techniques and narrative strategies have improved my composing skills and pointing to future ground for further research

Online piano lessons with young beginner students: a mixed-methods approach

Online teaching in music performance education has experienced notable growth in recent years, driven by technological advancements, increased internet access, and a rising demand for flexible learning options. While some studies support the effectiveness of online lessons, others question their suitability. This project focused specifically on teaching and learning in the context of online piano lessons for children aged five to nine - a group often overlooked in existing research. The main aim was to explore the factors that contribute to both satisfaction and dissatisfaction with online piano lessons, as perceived by teachers, parents, and students. The study also examined which teaching practices were perceived as most effective for young beginners in an online setting and the primary reasons for offering online piano lessons in 2024. This research employed an explanatory mixed-methods design. The first phase of the project included a survey completed by 107 teachers and 45 parents. The quantitative questions were analysed using multiple regression analysis, as well as descriptive statistics methods, while the open-ended questions were analysed using content analysis. The second phase consisted of semi-structured interviews with nine teachers, five parents, and seven students. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews. While the first phase focused on identifying the key factors influencing satisfaction, the second phase offered more in-depth explanations. The results indicated that children’s developmental readiness—expressed through their independence and ability to sustain focus—was strongly linked to satisfaction, with lower levels associated with dissatisfaction. Other factors included parental involvement, technological issues, teacher physical absence, and both student and teacher characteristics. Teachers and parents noted that younger beginners generally benefited less than older or more experienced students from online instruction. This study offers an original contribution by providing one of the first mixed-methods investigations in this area with young beginner students, with findings that can inform teacher training and curriculum design in digital instrumental instruction

New British musical theatre dataset 2010-2019 v.2.0

This dataset contains data relating to British musical theatre productions between 2010 and 2019. It has been collated by Sarah K. Whitfield and Clare Chandler

The neurodivergent musician: a methodology report on a Participatory Action Research study

ABSTRACT: According to estimates, the prevalence of various forms of neurodivergence is much higher among musicians than in the general population. Despite this fact, we know very little about the lived experiences of neurodivergent (ND) musicians in professional settings, such as educational institutions and places of employment. The lack of information leads to a lack of understanding, appropriate support, and inclusion of ND personnel in these spaces; therefore, it is crucial to gather accurate information directly from the population. A Participatory Action Research (PAR) study was planned and organised by ND musicians, which consisted of an in-person event and online follow-up conversations, where members of the community (ND musicians, music educators, music researchers, and neurotypical allies) were invited to discuss various aspects of their vocational education and professional lives. In alignment with the guiding principles of PAR, all participants were invited to contribute to the outputs to ensure their autonomy and utilise their unique expertise to the fullest. Given the quantity and richness of the data and the limited space, detailed discussions about the findings will be published separately. Here, we opted to focus on the methodological approach and procedure to provide a template for using PAR with adult ND communities. LAY ABSTRACT: There are more neurodivergent (ND) individuals among musicians than in the general population, yet we know very little about their experiences in musical settings, such as music schools or orchestras. This lack of information can potentially lead to a lack of support. In order to provide appropriate help for ND musicians to fulfil their artistic potential and support their wellbeing, we need to gather information directly from them. In this study, we (ND musicians, music educators, music researchers and neurotypical allies) organised a day-long event and online conversations to discuss our experiences, lives as musicians, and our support needs. All our conversations were recorded and analysed, and everybody was invited to contribute to the resulting manuscript. Here, we provide an initial report of the process of organising and running these conversations, to provide a roadmap for those who want to conduct research together with the community. We hope that our work will amplify the voices of ND musicians in this community and will inspire further research and policy change

Development of the Participatory Music Engagement for Mental Well-being (PaMEW) questionnaire: a pilot study with autistic adults

Research about autistic people’s subjective experiences with music and its impact on their well-being is limited, despite its common presence in public spaces and support services. To provide an empirical framework and tools for future research, we examined the relevance of the participatory music engagement for mental well-being model for autistic adults. The model outlines four pathways through which music supports well-being: managing and expressing emotion, providing respite, facilitating self-development, and facilitating connections. Based on the model, we developed a new questionnaire, the Participatory Music Engagement for Mental Well-being (PaMEW), and collected responses from 63 autistic adults. We found that most respondents believed the items were relevant to their experiences of the relationship between music and well-being, that the factorial structure of their responses aligned with the model, and that their comments reflected the four pathways; however, they also highlighted nuances not addressed by the model. The study underscores the need for nuanced tools that reflect the unique ways autistic individuals use music to support their well-being, suggesting future revisions of PaMEW in collaboration with the autistic community to enhance its relevance and clarity