Sounds of Waitakere: Using practitioner research to explore how Year 6 recorder players compose responses to visual representations of a natural environment

How might primary students utilise the stimulus of a painting in a collaborative composition drawing on a non-conventional sound palette of their own making? This practitioner research features 17 recorder players from a Year 6 class (10–11-year-olds) who attend a West Auckland primary school in New Zealand. These children were invited to experiment with the instrument to produce collectively an expanded ‘repertoire’ or ‘palette’ of sounds. In small groups, they then discussed a painting by an established New Zealand painter set in the Waitakere Ranges and attempted to formulate an interpretation in musical terms. On the basis of their interpretation, drawing on sounds from the collective palette (complemented with other sounds), they worked collaboratively to develop, refine and perform a structured composition named for their chosen painting. This case study is primarily descriptive (providing narrative accounts and rich vignettes of practice) and, secondarily, exploratory (description and analysis leading to the development of hypotheses). It has implications for a range of current educational issues, including curriculum integration and the place of composition and notation in the primary-school music programme

Gestures as an interface of performers’ intentionality : a case study of Western Embodiment of Karnatic Music in piano performance

Background Music performance has a strong corporeal dimension, involving different types of gestures (technical gestures, expressive gestures, etc.) that performers employ to transform a written score into live music (Leman 2007). This transformation is based on the musical intentions that arise from the performers’ personal interpretation of the composition as an outcome of their artistic praxis, which leads to decisions on how to play the music in terms of its structure, articulation of the phrases, dynamics, timber and the necessary motor strategies to realize these decisions in the sounding music. Aims This research wants to investigate musical gestures as an interface of performers’ intentionality, i.e. an outcome of the artistic praxis and the process of embodiment, in the light of the recent theories on enactment and embodied music cognition (Leman 2016). For this reason, we considered a case study based on the interpretation of a piece that includes the acquisition and embodiment of musical knowledge quite knew to the performer in order to map the modifications in the corporeal engagement from an intuitive approach to a conscious approach. The composition chosen was a contemporary piano piece based on a non-western music tradition: the Karnatic modes from South India. Method To assist the performer in (re)framing the phases of her artistic process, a methodology, called performer based analysis method (Caruso et al 2016), was developed to establish also the procedures of a performative experiment where the performance of the 8th cycle from the 72 Etudes Karnatiques pour piano by Jacques Charpentier (b.1933) was taken as a case study. The performative experiment required a period of preparation, which concerns the performer/researcher’s artistic praxis (to embody the piece) and the self-observation of a video recording archive of her performances in order to map and describe the artistic praxis. The pianist conducted a musicological research on the influence of Indian music in the French contemporary piano repertoire to enrich specifically her current competences in Karnatic Music and had a collaborative three years practice with the composer and with two experts in Karnatic music, a singer and a dancer (see the Re-Orient project: http://re-orient.wixsite.com/indiandream). A retrospective thinking-aloud procedure (Van den Haak & De Jong, 2003) was used during the experiment to allow the performer in rendering explicit and systematic the artistic reflections. The experiment was recorded by a video camera, a microphone and the Motion Capture System. Results To catch the development between the initial intuitive performance and the final embodied performance, two recordings of one fragment from the piece played with these two different approaches (intuitive and conscious) were compared. The analysis of these fragments was based on an alignment between qualitative data acquired through subjective descriptions - based on a performance model and a score annotation - and quantitative data (objective measurements) produced by the audio-video and motion capture recordings. The qualitative and quantitative data (audio and video) were processed through the ELAN software. Gestural similarities and differences between the intuitive and conscious versions were detected by comparing the kinematic and audio measurements (quantitative data) with the performer’s subjective annotations (qualitative data) concerning the motor strategies and the interpretative cues. The results show a different corporeal engagement of the pianist related to the different intentions through a parallel configuration of these two different subjective and objective layers. Conclusions The actual investigation wants to present musical gestures as vehicles of idiosyncratic intentions and expressions by linking performers’ corporeal engagement to the embodiment of their interpretation in order to better understand the connection between musical intentions, goal actions and sound. The role of the technology-mediated approach (thirdperson’s perspective) gives the opportunity to study, as in a mirror-like tool, some aspects, which imply the performer’s subjective involvement (first-person’s perspective). This method provides specifically to musicians/researchers an easier access to music performance analysis. Furthermore, with the implementation of a transdisciplinary and collaborative practice (with the composer, the Indians singer and dancer) plus the aid of technology with the motion and audio analysis, the actual study adds an alternative perspective concerning the exploration and the design of new paths within the field of artistic research

Children’s musical perception and creativity as a compositional model

The intention of this study was to understand more fully the process of creating musical composition. As a means to to this I created a compositional model, "Maya's Words", a conscious experiment which utilised the techniques I discovered and codified from children's compositions. By utilising rhe model as a working tool and the information extracted from the children's works I was able to draw together my own theories and observations concerning the process of musical composition and how it works. Within this study I have also examined my own process of musical composition and drawn, in a limited way, upon my work on the methodology behind the compositional procedures of composer Elisabeth Lutyens. The way in which the children used their own musical ideas in a flexible and original manner illustrated a mental state that seemed to be able to grasp thoughts from anywhere, without reference, for example, to tradition or style. This dexterity brought to my attention the notion that the children were using fragments of ideas/music/sound and integrating them into their own compositions. In the compositional model for this study I chose to compose in a way that utilised information from this study in many manifestations but it also had to be an organic growth as a means to be real and for me to have a true input into it a sa composer. It also had to incorporate many of the study elements into it otherwise it would not be a conscious experiment. The two forces here, for me haave worked in tandem as the flexibility of approach used by the children has allowed me to work in a flexible way in this compositional model and yet the uncomplicated way in which the children evaluated their own progressions has had a profound influence on me too and provided me with a method of self-evaluation which does not create self-inflicted damage to my own feelings about my composition. I hope in the same way that this study will allow composers a freedon of perspective that will open for them a new understanding of musical composition

Performing composition : developing a computer assisted composition system through live coding performance

This thesis maps the author's journey from a music composition practice to a composition and performance practice. The work involves the development of a software library for the purpose of encapsulating compositional ideas in software, and realising these ideas in performance through a live coding computer music practice. The thesis examines what artistic practice emerges through live coding and software development, and does this permit a blurring between the activities of music composition and performance. The role that software design plays in affecting musical outcomes is considered to gain an insight into how software development contributes to artistic development. The relationship between music composition and performance is also examined to identify the means by which engaging in live coding and software development can bring these activities together. The thesis, situated within the discourse of practice led research, documents a journey which uses the experience of software development and performance as a means to guide the direction of the research. The journey serves as an experiment for the author in engaging an hitherto unfamiliar musical practice, and as a roadmap for others seeking to modify or broaden their artistic practice

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

The Effect of Repetition and Expertise on Liking and Complexity in Contemporary Music

Aesthetic perception of music has been extensively researched in the last decades. Numerous studies suggest that listeners find a piece of music more or less pleasant according to its complexity. Experimental results show that complexity and liking have different relationship according to the musical genre examined, and that these two variables are also affected by other factors such as familiarity to the music and expertise of the listener. Although previous experiments have examined several genres such as jazz, pop, rock and bluegrass, surprisingly, no study has focused on contemporary music. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying the relationships between complexity, liking, musical training and familiarity in the case of contemporary music. By analysing this genre – which is usually underrepresented in music cognition – it is possible to shed some light on the correlation between liking and complexity in the case of highly complex music. To obtain data, a multifactor experiment was designed in which both music experts and novices had to provide scores of subjective complexity and liking for four 30-second long excerpts of contemporary music with different degrees of complexity. Empirical results suggest that liking and complexity are negatively correlated in the case of contemporary music and that listeners’ expertise does not influence the perceived complexity of musical pieces, but it can significantly affect liking. This possibly indicates that experts have the musical knowledge needed to appreciate extremely complex music, while novices do not

Supporting creative composition: the FrameWorks approach

We present a new system for music composition using structured sequences. FrameWorks has been developed on the basis of Task Analysis research studying composition processes and other user-centred design techniques. While the program only uses MIDI information, it can be seen as a ‘proof of concept’ for ideas generally applicable to the specification and manipulation of other music control data, be it raw audio, music notation or synthesis parameters. While this first implementation illustrates the basic premise, it already provides composers with an interesting and simple to use environment for exploring and testing musical ideas. Future research will develop the concept, in particular to enhance the scalability of the system

Neural Translation of Musical Style

Music is an expressive form of communication often used to convey emotion in scenarios where "words are not enough". Part of this information lies in the musical composition where well-defined language exists. However, a significant amount of information is added during a performance as the musician interprets the composition. The performer injects expressiveness into the written score through variations of different musical properties such as dynamics and tempo. In this paper, we describe a model that can learn to perform sheet music. Our research concludes that the generated performances are indistinguishable from a human performance, thereby passing a test in the spirit of a "musical Turing test"