Mental Discipline and Musical Meaning

Musical meaning, or what a musical experience communicates to a listener, is predicated on a shared habitus of listening between the musical creator (i.e., composer, performer, or improviser) and the listener. The meaning a listener takes away from a musical experience is partly dependent on the vessel transmitting it (i.e., who is performing, the quality of performance, or the visual aspects of performance), and a musical creator\u27s actions are the result of his or her training, past experiences, enculturation, attentional focus, and bodily control in the heightened mental state in which creativity occurs. Even in traditions that consider the musician to be a conduit for inspiration from an otherworldly source, the musician must still undergo training in order to allow for a free, uninhibited flow of music. Music practitioners\u27 evaluative statements, in which they describe the ways in which a musical experience was meaningful for them, often implicitly include an expectation of this mental discipline on the part of the musical creator. A practitioner-listener uses the appearance of both the music and the musician, the expectation of a musical logic governing the musical sounds, and the emotions or feelings of transport that he or she experiences to infer a musical creator\u27s mental state and mental discipline, relying on his or her own musical experiences as a guideline. Most broadly, this dissertation is an ethnomusicological study of the cultural and social contexts, cognitive dimensions, and aesthetic judgments found in 18th-century German flute pedagogical treatises and published writings from shakuhachi players. More specifically, it is an axiological examination of the role habitus plays in the forming of aesthetic judgments among practitioners whose writings include an implicit expectation of mental discipline in a good musical experience, drawing upon the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Kendall Walton, in particular. This dissertation offers a description of the kinds of mental states in which creativity occurs, includes a theory of musicking as the bringing forth of one\u27s inner self or core consciousness, and demonstrates ways in which practitioners suggest that another musician\u27s inner self (i.e., mental discipline and mental state) can be discerned in a musical experience. Flute treatises by Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773) and Johann Georg Tromlitz (1725-1805) raise broad issues of aesthetics in terms of the ways in which serious music of the 18th century aspired to capture ideals of nobility, the ways in which musical judgment was used a means of assessing a listener\u27s social status, the ways in which mental control in musical execution and composition were defined, and the ways in which a musician\u27s mental discipline can produce a transcendent musical experience. The issues raised in these treatises resonate with concerns equally touched upon by contemporary music philosophers (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Gottfried Körner, Johann Mattheson, and Johann Georg Sulzer) and also perpetuate aesthetic concerns from the Renaissance. The writings of shakuhachi players Hisamatsu Fūyō (1791-1871), Watazumi (1910-92), Andreas Fuyu Gutzwiller (b. 1940), Christopher Yohmei Blasdel (b. 1951), John Singer (b. 1956), Ralph Samuelson, and Gunnar Jinmei Linder present a range of concerns that define the modern shakuhachi habitus. Their statements which allude to discernible aspects of mental discipline in their own playing and in the playing of others are driven by four major concerns: the primacy of the performance as the meaningful act of musicking, a player\u27s membership in social groups (ryūha), the shakuhachi\u27s traditional role as a tool for spiritual meditation, and practitioners\u27 multiple senses of history. In this dissertation, the issue of mental discipline is examined in shakuhachi playing with regard to a player\u27s inner mental experience, the execution of gestures that result in musical sound, and the experience of achieving enlightenment (suizen)

A conjecture of singing chinese in italian

This research intends to show how Chinese contemporary vocal works can be sung with the western lyrical singing technique, focusing on the pronunciation of the Italian language: The way of dealing with Chinese vowels and consonants in the pronunciation of articulation refers to the rules/principles of that presented in Italian language. The subject was inspired by Dr. A. Hirt’s lecture about singing English like Italians in 2011. In terms of rationality, to convey a sense yet also to approach the maximization of the rules of phonation (vowels) and articulation (consonants), researchers hypothesize that Chinese language (Mandarin) can be pronounced like the Italian language but in the setting of singing. This study will take into consideration from pieces of literature about singing technique to teaching, from viewpoints about articulation (in singing) of performers, to recordings and videos. We Believe it’s necessary to import(impart) knowledge about the singing of Chinese phonetics and linguistics, compared to Italian, the most traditional language for singing and the original language of a considerable number of masterpieces on what regards vocal repertoire,since they have been evolving from two completely families of languages

Investigating the build-up of precedence effect using reflection masking

The auditory processing level involved in the build‐up of precedence [Freyman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 874–884 (1991)] has been investigated here by employing reflection masked threshold (RMT) techniques. Given that RMT techniques are generally assumed to address lower levels of the auditory signal processing, such an approach represents a bottom‐up approach to the buildup of precedence. Three conditioner configurations measuring a possible buildup of reflection suppression were compared to the baseline RMT for four reflection delays ranging from 2.5–15 ms. No buildup of reflection suppression was observed for any of the conditioner configurations. Buildup of template (decrease in RMT for two of the conditioners), on the other hand, was found to be delay dependent. For five of six listeners, with reflection delay=2.5 and 15 ms, RMT decreased relative to the baseline. For 5‐ and 10‐ms delay, no change in threshold was observed. It is concluded that the low‐level auditory processing involved in RMT is not sufficient to realize a buildup of reflection suppression. This confirms suggestions that higher level processing is involved in PE buildup. The observed enhancement of reflection detection (RMT) may contribute to active suppression at higher processing levels

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-BASED APPROACH TO MODELLING OF PIPE ORGANS

The aim of the project was to develop a new Artificial Intelligence-based method to aid modeling of musical instruments and sound design. Despite significant advances in music technology, sound design and synthesis of complex musical instruments is still time consuming, error prone and requires expert understanding of the instrument attributes and significant expertise to produce high quality synthesised sounds to meet the needs of musicians and musical instrument builders. Artificial Intelligence (Al) offers an effective means of capturing this expertise and for handling the imprecision and uncertainty inherent in audio knowledge and data. This thesis presents new techniques to capture and exploit audio expertise, following extended knowledge elicitation with two renowned music technologist/audio experts, developed and embodied into an intelligent audio system. The Al combined with perceptual auditory modeling ba.sed techniques (ITU-R BS 1387) make a generic modeling framework providing a robust methodology for sound synthesis parameters optimisation with objective prediction of sound synthesis quality. The evaluation, carried out using typical pipe organ sounds, has shown that the intelligent audio system can automatically design sounds judged by the experts to be of very good quality, while significantly reducing the expert's work-load by up to a factor of three and need for extensive subjective tests. This research work, the first initiative to capture explicitly knowledge from audio experts for sound design, represents an important contribution for future design of electronic musical instruments based on perceptual sound quality will help to develop a new sound quality index for benchmarking sound synthesis techniques and serve as a research framework for modeling of a wide range of musical instruments.Musicom Lt

A portfolio of compositions with commentary

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London

Music and the general classroom: Literacy in a new key

After a personal description of the traditional role of music education and its relationship to the overall curriculum of an American elementary school, this dissertation asks: What do grade 4/5 students do when their classroom and music teachers integrate music more deliberately into classroom life? Set in a classroom in a small New England town, the dissertation describes how a collaboration between a classroom teacher and a music teacher brought the music curriculum into the daily lives of students in a school where scheduled music class occurred only once per week. Viewing music as a valid means to represent thought and express it, the teachers explored ways to weave aspects of the music curriculum into the general classroom\u27s language arts, science, and social studies units. Their desire was to blur the boundaries between classroom and music room experiences and make music more available to their students for learning and showing what they know. Descriptions of three thematic units show that the children first needed to play with the tools of the new literacy, namely musical instruments and sounds, to gain familiarity with them. As they learned the potentials and limitations of the instruments in a way described as aural scribbling, they came to make informed choices of musical instruments to illustrate events and set moods in stories they had written. A science unit on the physical properties of sound showed that some students chose music as a way to demonstrate what they knew about the topic. A social studies unit on cultural ways of celebrating holidays showed the students choosing music to symbolize certain elements of their celebration. Throughout the semester of the study, students also selected music spontaneously to satisfy various personal and interpersonal purposes such as recreation, problem solving, memory assistance, motivation for writing, and as a means of personal expression. The study shows the importance of music specialists for adding breadth and depth to an integrated curriculum. It also suggests further research into music\u27s relation to print literacy, into alternative evaluation methods, and into methods of including arts in collaborative approaches to instruction

Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism

Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts