The cognitive organization of music knowledge: a clinical analysis

Despite much recent interest in the clinical neuroscience of music processing, the cognitive organization of music as a domain of non-verbal knowledge has been little studied. Here we addressed this issue systematically in two expert musicians with clinical diagnoses of semantic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, in comparison with a control group of healthy expert musicians. In a series of neuropsychological experiments, we investigated associative knowledge of musical compositions (musical objects), musical emotions, musical instruments (musical sources) and music notation (musical symbols). These aspects of music knowledge were assessed in relation to musical perceptual abilities and extra-musical neuropsychological functions. The patient with semantic dementia showed relatively preserved recognition of musical compositions and musical symbols despite severely impaired recognition of musical emotions and musical instruments from sound. In contrast, the patient with Alzheimer’s disease showed impaired recognition of compositions, with somewhat better recognition of composer and musical era, and impaired comprehension of musical symbols, but normal recognition of musical emotions and musical instruments from sound. The findings suggest that music knowledge is fractionated, and superordinate musical knowledge is relatively more robust than knowledge of particular music. We propose that music constitutes a distinct domain of non-verbal knowledge but shares certain cognitive organizational features with other brain knowledge systems. Within the domain of music knowledge, dissociable cognitive mechanisms process knowledge derived from physical sources and the knowledge of abstract musical entities

Understanding the Cultural Value of 'In Harmony-Sistema England'

This research project on which this paper reports was designed to explore questions of cultural value in relation to the schools music project In Harmony-Sistema England. Our core research focus has been upon the ways in which children, their teachers and tutors, and their families understand the value of their participation in IHSE initiatives. The project engaged with three case studies of IHSE initiatives (based in Norwich, Telford and Newcastle) and qualitative data was gathered with primary school children, school staff, parents and IHSE musicians in all three cases

Associating characters with events in films

The work presented here combines the analysis of a film's audiovisual features with the analysis of an accompanying audio description. Specifically, we describe a technique for semantic-based indexing of feature films that associates character names with meaningful events. The technique fuses the results of event detection based on audiovisual features with the inferred on-screen presence of characters, based on an analysis of an audio description script. In an evaluation with 215 events from 11 films, the technique performed the character detection task with Precision = 93% and Recall = 71%. We then go on to show how novel access modes to film content are enabled by our analysis. The specific examples illustrated include video retrieval via a combination of event-type and character name and our first steps towards visualization of narrative and character interplay based on characters occurrence and co-occurrence in events

The Semantic Web MIDI Tape: An Interface for Interlinking MIDI and Context Metadata

The Linked Data paradigm has been used to publish a large number of musical datasets and ontologies on the Semantic Web, such as MusicBrainz, AcousticBrainz, and the Music Ontology. Recently, the MIDI Linked Data Cloud has been added to these datasets, representing more than 300,000 pieces in MIDI format as Linked Data, opening up the possibility for linking fine-grained symbolic music representations to existing music metadata databases. Despite the dataset making MIDI resources available in Web data standard formats such as RDF and SPARQL, the important issue of finding meaningful links between these MIDI resources and relevant contextual metadata in other datasets remains. A fundamental barrier for the provision and generation of such links is the difficulty that users have at adding new MIDI performance data and metadata to the platform. In this paper, we propose the Semantic Web MIDI Tape, a set of tools and associated interface for interacting with the MIDI Linked Data Cloud by enabling users to record, enrich, and retrieve MIDI performance data and related metadata in native Web data standards. The goal of such interactions is to find meaningful links between published MIDI resources and their relevant contextual metadata. We evaluate the Semantic Web MIDI Tape in various use cases involving user-contributed content, MIDI similarity querying, and entity recognition methods, and discuss their potential for finding links between MIDI resources and metadata

An exploration of the impact of formal and non-formal teaching and learning approaches on piano students’ musical knowledge, skills, engagement and motivation: a longitudinal action research study

Traditional approaches to piano pedagogy tend to be dominated by Western Classical Music practices where musical literacy and technical skills take precedence over aural skills. This can lead to fragmented musical understanding and a lack of motivation and independence on the part of the learner. This research sought to investigate alternative pedagogical approaches in the one-to-one piano lesson, vis-à-vis the inclusion of formal and non-formal teaching and learning practices, and examine the potential impact on students' musical knowledge, skills, engagement, and motivation. A qualitative approach underpinned this study, employing action research methodology and semi-structured interviews with six piano students aged between 8 and 18 years old, over a three-year period, in addition to semi-structured interviews with parents. Guided by numerous significant theories, primarily within the fields of education and motivation psychology, namely Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory and Bruner’s Scaffolding of Learning Theory and Discovery Learning, Green's (2014) Hear, Listen, Play! Strategy and Harris' (2015) Simultaneous Learning approach were adapted by the researcher for this study. Each strategy was analysed individually and comparatively with the traditional, formal approaches predominantly employed to teach piano. Three cycles of action research were conducted with the six participants over three years, using a combination of non-formal and formal pedagogical approaches, which evolved throughout the study. The implementation and analysis of these approaches was an iterative process whereby the approaches and any changes in students' musical development and learning experience were documented through audio and video files, interviews, a teacher reflective journal; thus, the findings from each cycle informed the next. The development and creation of multimedia resources by the researcher complemented the pedagogical approaches that were implemented over the three-year period. Key findings from the three cycles of action research and student and parent interviews are summarised thus: (1) formal and non-formal approaches can complement one another and enhance student’s musical development, skill attainment, and independence; (2) formal and non-formal approaches can develop student motivation, engagement and autonomy; and (3) when implemented in a structured, scaffolded way, these innovative approaches can create an optimal learning environment for both piano students and teachers. The thesis offers an original contribution to the field by providing a sound evidence-base for the following recommendations for practice: the inclusion of non-formal pedagogical approaches in the one-to-one piano lesson, and structured, autonomy- and competence-supportive teaching practices that can foster independence and well-internalised motivation to learn. Moreover, the thesis demonstrates that a combination of pedagogical approaches can enable lifelong, independent learning and engagement in music-making.N

Ongoing Tracking of Engagement in Motor Learning

Teaching motor skills such as playing music, handwriting, and driving, can greatly benefit from recently developed technologies such as wearable gloves for haptic feedback or robotic sensorimotor exoskeletons for the mediation of effective human-human and robot-human physical interactions. At the heart of such teacher-learner interactions still stands the critical role of the ongoing feedback a teacher can get about the student's engagement state during the learning and practice sessions. Particularly for motor learning, such feedback is an essential functionality in a system that is developed to guide a teacher on how to control the intensity of the physical interaction, and to best adapt it to the gradually evolving performance of the learner. In this paper, our focus is on the development of a near real-time machine-learning model that can acquire its input from a set of readily available, noninvasive, privacy-preserving, body-worn sensors, for the benefit of tracking the engagement of the learner in the motor task. We used the specific case of violin playing as a target domain in which data were empirically acquired, the latent construct of engagement in motor learning was carefully developed for data labeling, and a machine-learning model was rigorously trained and validated

Effects of musically-induced emotions on choice reaction time performance

The main objective of the current study was to examine the impact of musically-induced emotions on athletes’ subsequent choice reaction time (CRT) performance. A random sample of 54 tennis players listened to researcher-selected music whose tempo and intensity were modified to yield six different music excerpts (three tempi x two intensities) before completing a CRT task. Affective responses, heart rate (HR), and RTs for each condition were contrasted with white noise and silence conditions. As predicted, faster music tempi elicited more pleasant and aroused emotional states; and higher music intensity yielded both higher arousal (p < .001) and faster subsequent CRT performance (p < .001). White noise was judged significantly less pleasant than all experimental conditions (p < .001); and silence was significantly less arousing than all but one experimental condition (p < .001). The implications for athletes’ use of music as part of a preevent routine when preparing for reactive tasks are discussed