The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music

Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed

Ostensive signals support learning from novel attention cues during infancy

Social attention cues (e.g., head turning, gaze direction) highlight which events young infants should attend to in a busy environment and, recently, have been shown to shape infants' likelihood of learning about objects and events. Although studies have documented which social cues guide attention and learning during early infancy, few have investigated how infants learn to learn from attention cues. Ostensive signals, such as a face addressing the infant, often precede social attention cues. Therefore, it is possible that infants can use ostensive signals to learn from other novel attention cues. In this training study, 8-month-olds were cued to the location of an event by a novel non-social attention cue (i.e., flashing square) that was preceded by an ostensive signal (i.e., a face addressing the infant). At test, infants predicted the appearance of specific multimodal events cued by the flashing squares, which were previously shown to guide attention to but not inform specific predictions about the multimodal events (Wu and Kirkham, 2010). Importantly, during the generalization phase, the attention cue continued to guide learning of these events in the absence of the ostensive signal. Subsequent experiments showed that learning was less successful when the ostensive signal was absent even if an interesting but non-ostensive social stimulus preceded the same cued events

Direction of visual apparent motion driven solely by timing of a static sound

In temporal ventriloquism, auditory events can illusorily attract perceived timing of a visual onset [1,2,3]. We investigated whether timing of a static sound can also influence spatio-temporal processing of visual apparent motion, induced here by visual bars alternating between opposite hemifields. Perceived direction typically depends on the relative interval in timing between visual left-right and right-left flashes (e.g., rightwards motion dominating when left-to-right interflash intervals are shortest [4]). In our new multisensory condition, interflash intervals were equal, but auditory beeps could slightly lag the right flash, yet slightly lead the left flash, or vice versa. This auditory timing strongly influenced perceived visual motion direction, despite providing no spatial auditory motion signal whatsoever. Moreover, prolonged adaptation to such auditorily driven apparent motion produced a robust visual motion aftereffect in the opposite direction, when measured in subsequent silence. Control experiments argued against accounts in terms of possible auditory grouping, or possible attention capture. We suggest that the motion arises because the sounds change perceived visual timing, as we separately confirmed. Our results provide a new demonstration of multisensory influences on sensory-specific perception [5], with timing of a static sound influencing spatio-temporal processing of visual motion direction

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St Dominic’s Sixth Form College: report from the Inspectorate (FEFC inspection report; 44/97 and 14/01)

The Further Education Funding Council has a legal duty to make sure further education in England is properly assessed. The FEFC’s inspectorate inspects and reports on each college of further education according to a four-year cycle. This record comprises the reports for periods 1996-97 and 2000-01