Historical sources of ethnomusicology in contemporary debate

This anthology concerns traditional music and archives, and discusses their relationship as seen from historical and epistemological perspectives. Music recordings on wax cylinders, 78 records or magnetic tape, made in the first half of the 20th century, are regarded today as valuable sources for understanding musical processes in their social dimension and as unique cultural heritage. Most of these historical sound recordings are preserved in sound archives, now increasingly accessible in digital formats. Written by renowned experts, the articles here focus on archives, individual and collective memory, and heritage as today’s recreation of the past. Contributors discuss the role of historical sources of traditional music in contemporary research based on examples from music cultures in West Africa, Scandinavia, Turkey, and Portugal, among others. The book will appeal to musicologists and cultural anthropologists, as well as historians and sociologists, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with sound archives, libraries, universities and cultural institutions dedicated to traditional music

The Mozart effect on the episodic memory of healthy adults is null, but low-functioning older adults may be an exception

Literature on the effects of passive music listening on cognitive performance is mixed, showing negative, null or positive results depending on cognitive domain, age group, temporal relation between music and task (background music vs. music before task, the latter known as Mozart effect), or listener-dependent variables such as musical preference. Positive effects of background music on the two components of episodic memory – item and source memory - for verbal materials seem robust and age-independent, and thus deserve further attention. In the current study, we investigated two potential enhancers of music effects on episodic memory: stopping music before task performance (Mozart effect) to eliminate music-related distraction and using preferred music to maximize reward. We ran a main study on a sample of 51 healthy younger adults, along with a pilot study with 12 older adults, divided into low- vs. high functioning according to cognitive performance in a screening test. Against our expectations, Bayesian analyses showed strong evidence that music had no advantage over silence or environmental sounds in younger adults. Preferred music had no advantage either, consistent with the possibility that music-related reward had no impact on episodic memory. Among older adults, low- but not high-functioning participants’ item memory was improved by music – especially by non-preferred music - compared to silence. Our findings suggest that, in healthy adults, prior-to-task music may be less effective than background music in episodic memory enhancement despite decreased distraction, possibly because reward becomes irrelevant when music is stopped before the task begins. Our pilot findings on older adults raise the hypothesis that low-functioning older participants relate to prior-to-task auditory stimulation in deviant ways when it comes to episodic memory enhancement

a framework to explore correlations between space-based and place-based user-generated content

Tang, V., & Painho, M. (2023). Content-location relationships: a framework to explore correlations between space-based and place-based user-generated content. International Journal Of Geographical Information Science, 37(8), 1840–1871. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2023.2213869 ---The authors acknowledge the funding from the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT) through the CityMe project (EXPL/GES-URB/1429/2021; https://cityme.novaims.unl.pt/) and the project UIDB/04152/2020 - Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC)/NOVA IMS.The use of social media and location-based networks through GPS-enabled devices provides geospatial data for a plethora of applications in urban studies. However, the extent to which information found in geo-tagged social media activity corresponds to the spatial context is still a topic of debate. In this article, we developed a framework aimed at retrieving the thematic and spatial relationships between content originated from space-based (Twitter) and place-based (Google Places and OSM) sources of geographic user-generated content based on topics identified by the embedding-based BERTopic model. The contribution of the framework lies on the combination of methods that were selected to improve previous works focused on content-location relationships. Using the city of Lisbon (Portugal) to test our methodology, we first applied the embedding-based topic model to aggregated textual data coming from each source. Results of the analysis evidenced the complexity of content-location relationships, which are mostly based on thematic profiles. Nonetheless, the framework can be employed in other cities and extended with other metrics to enrich the research aimed at exploring the correlation between online discourse and geography.publishersversionpublishe

Une bibliographie commentée en temps réel : l'art de la performance au Québec et au Canada = An Annotated Bibliography in Real Time : Performance Art in Quebec and Canada

An Annotated Bibliography in Real Time: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada offers a bibliographic survey of writings, publications and printed matter on Quebec and Canadian performance art from the early 20th century to today. This university based research project, not only gathers and annotates but also questions how categories can be cross-read, revisited, and thought of in new ways. A key objective of the bibliography is to enable its future users to consider the various roles and complex networks that continue to shape the medium and practice of performance. This publication is a continuously growing resource that presents both the work of the artists and the history of the works’ reception in the past as well as the present, investigating the correlative relationship between the performer, the spectator and their given time(s). An Annotated Bibliography in Real Time offers a hybrid and discursive perspective on the historization of performance art and sheds light on performance’s many circumstances and modes of production, experience, and reception over time. -- p.