13 research outputs found

    The effectiveness of Sufi music for mental health outcomes. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 21 randomised trials.

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    BACKGROUND: There is some evidence that Sufi music therapy might improve physical and mental well-being; however, no systematic review or meta-analysis has pooled and critiqued the evidence. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the effects of Sufi music therapy on mental health outcomes. METHODS: We searched Medline, PsycINFO, the Web of Science, Science Direct, PsycARTICLES, Cochrane Library, SCOPUS, CINAHL Plus, AMED, and ULAKBIM databases, and the reference lists of the studies found. Papers published in academic peer-reviewed journals were included, as well as from other sources such as chapters in edited books, the grey literature, or conference presentations. Articles published up to March 2020 in Turkish and English were included. Our primary outcome of interest was anxiety and secondary outcomes of interest were other mental health outcomes such as depression. To assess the methodological quality of the articles, the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool was used. The quality of evidence was assessed using the GRADEpro GDT system. RESULTS: This search yielded 21 clinical trials that were eligible for inclusion. A meta-analysis, using a random effects model, of 18 randomised controlled trials involving 1454 participants showed that Sufi music therapy with makams, compared with treatment as usual (TAU) or a no-music control group, reduced symptoms of anxiety in the short term in patients undergoing an operation or treatments such as chemotherapy or haemodialysis (standardised mean difference SMD= -1.15, 95% CI, -1.64 to -0.65; very low-quality evidence). The evidence of Sufi music with makam's effect on anxiety is rated as very low. Qualitative synthesis of secondary outcomes revealed significant effects for depression, positive symptoms in schizophrenia, stress, which however were based on fewer studies. Trials were of moderate methodological quality, and there was significant heterogeneity across the studies. CONCLUSION: Sufi music may reduce anxiety of patients undergoing medical procedures like haemodialysis, coronary artery surgery, angiography, colonoscopy, bone marrow aspiration and biopsy procedures. Evidence from single studies suggests effects on depression and stress as well. However, due to methodological limitations of the studies, further, higher quality studies are required in other cultures

    Sufi music therapy with makams as a potential intervention for common mental health disorders

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    Sufi music has long been regarded as both spiritual and beneficial. This thesis aims to develop and evaluate Sufi music with makams as an intervention for people with mild to moderate levels of depression and anxiety. To reach this aim, the MRC framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions was used. As a first step, reviews of the historical and theoretical framework for Sufi music, its structure and applications were undertaken. Then an umbrella review of systematic reviews on receptive music therapy and its impact on mental health was conducted, followed by a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of listening to Sufi music with makams in patients with mental health symptoms. As a fourth step, a qualitative face-to-face interview study on how such music would best be delivered was conducted in adults attending two Turkish community centres in England. Participants listened to short clips of Sufi music and fed back on the emotions it evoked and how it might help them. A brief manual for the face-to-face delivery of Sufi music as an intervention for anxiety and depression was then designed from the results of these studies, as well as from consultation with three international experts on its application in clinical and community settings. Finally, a feasibility randomised trial was undertaken to explore the acceptability of the intervention, patients’ adherence to the intervention and the research, and to provide preliminary data on its effectiveness. The overall objective of the trial was to estimate whether a major trial would be possible. While the historical and theoretical framework provided a theoretical baseline for the intervention, the umbrella review and systematic review provided an evidence base. The qualitative study revealed that Sufi music with makams was perceived by listeners as spiritual and beneficial. Finally, the feasibility randomised controlled trial demonstrated that this music listening intervention was feasible and acceptable for Turkish people in the UK, and preliminary results of the clinical exploratory analysis revealed that it might be helpful for reducing anxiety and improving mental and spiritual well-being. Thus, the overall finding of this PhD project is that a manualised Sufi music intervention can be delivered to community dwelling people with mild to moderate distress, and that it is a feasible and acceptable intervention for the Turkish community living in the UK. It suggests that a larger randomised trial could be undertaken

    Statistical Machine Translation from Arab Vocal Improvisation to Instrumental Melodic Accompaniment

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    International audienceVocal improvisation is an essential practice in Arab music. The interactivity between the singer and the instru-mentalist(s) is a main feature of this deep-rooted musical form. As part of the interactivity, the instrumentalist re-capitulates, or translates, each vocal sentence upon its completion. In this paper, we present our own parallel corpus of instrumentally accompanied Arab vocal improvisation. The initial size of the corpus is 2779 parallel sentences. We discuss the process of building this corpus as well as the choice of data representation. We also present some statistics about the corpus. Then we present initial experiments on applying statistical machine translation to propose an automatic instrumental accompaniment to Arab vocal improvisation. The results with this small corpus, in comparison to classical machine translation of natural languages, are very promising: a BLEU of 24.62 from Vocal to instrumental and 24.07 from instrumental to vocal

    Characterizing and classifying music genres and subgenres via association analysis

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    In this thesis, we investigate the problem of automatic music genre classification in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). MIR seeks to apply convenient automated solutions to many music-related tasks that are too tedious to perform by hand. These tasks often deal with vast quantities of music data. An effective automatic music genre classification approach may be useful for other tasks in MIR as well. Association analysis is a technique used to explore the inherent relationships among data objects in a problem domain. We present two novel approaches which capture genre characteristics through the use of association analysis on large music datasets. The first approach extracts the characteristic features of genres and uses these features to perform classification. The second approach attempts to improve on the first one by utilizing a pairwise dichotomy-like strategy. We then consider applying the second approach to the problem of automatic subgenre classification

    Extending our senses: music, nostalgia, space, artefact and the Mediterranean imaginary among the Greek- and Turkish-speaking Cypriot diaspora in Birmingham (UK)

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    My PhD research focuses on Greek- and Turkish-speaking Cypriots, their musical performances and Mediterranean transbordering tropes, and their diaspora to Birmingham (UK). It introduces a new spatial construction in diaspora which I term "The Mediterranean Imaginary"—an informed, playful, and re-structured space in the triangle of Cyprus, Turkey and Greece, defined by the history of the Cypriot di-ethnos, assessed in modern life through ethnographically-informed lived realities, yet geographically determined in the not-so- Mediterranean UK. After describing the ethnos in question (Preface) and orienting the reader to the methodological and theoretical approaches employed (Chapter 1), focus turns to the notion of nostalgic musical ends in Chapter 2, which via performance avenues foregrounds emotionality and a gender-play with feminine undertones alongside the diasporic masculine imperative. Part II, ‘Extending Our Senses’, analyses four YouTube videos. Chapter 3, ‘Zorba’, takes us to the Bullring Shopping Centre and a dance flash-mob; and in Chapter 4, a father-son duo (Stavros Flatley) reprises the famous neo-Celtic performances of Michael Flatley for Britain’s Got Talent. Chapter 5 examines Lil Maaz’s music-video Eat Kebabs and its effect on Turkishspeaking Cypriot migrants, while Chapter 6 looks into a parody of 50Cent’s Candy Shop named Kebab Shop, dubbed with lyrics from the Cypriot YouTube user hasandinho95. Part III compares native and diasporic practices against the background of Cyprus’ Mediterranean appeal. Following the construction of the Mediterranean imaginary, Mediterranean ethnomusicologies are advanced with the analysis of a set of versions of the Cypriot traditional tune Tillirka. Tillirka’s timeline traces a distant ecumenical past and a translocal native modern with fragmented censorial claims, peaking in diaspora where it recapitulates to the ecumenical and Mediterranean, turning into a contemporary paradigm of pan-Mediterranean culture and performance in diaspora

    Sounding Together

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    Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The book’s essays—written by a diverse and cross-generational group of scholars, performers, and practitioners—demonstrate how collaboration can harness complementary skills and nourish comparative boundary-crossing through interdisciplinary research. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music

    A VOICE OF THEIR OWN: MUSIC AND SOCIAL COHESION IN TURKISH ALEVI LIFE

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    This dissertation examines the role that music has played in the expression of identity and revitalization of culture of the Alevis in Turkey, since the start of their sociocultural revival movement in the late 1980s. Music is central to Alevi claims of ethnic and religious difference—singing and playing the bağlama (Turkish folk lute) constitutes an expressive practice in worship and everyday life. Based on research conducted from 2012 to 2014, I investigate and present Alevi music through the lens of discourses on the construction of identity as a social and musical process. Alevi musicians perform a revived repertoire of the ritual music and folk songs of Anatolian bards and dervish-lodge poets that developed over several centuries. Contemporary media and performance contexts have blurred former distinctions between sacred and secular, yet have provided new avenues to build community in an urban setting. I compare music performances in the worship services of urban and small-town areas, and other community events such as devotional meetings, concerts, clubs, and broadcast and social media to illustrate the ways that participation—both performing and listening—reinforces identity and solidarity. I also examine the influence of these different contexts on performers’ musical choices, and the power of music to evoke a range of responses and emotional feelings in the participants. Through my investigation I argue that the Alevi music repertoire is not only a cultural practice but also a symbol of power and collective action in their struggle for human rights and self-determination. As Alevis have faced a redefined Turkish nationalism that incorporates Sunni Muslim piety, this music has gained even greater potency in their resistance to misrecognition as a folkloric, rather than a living, tradition

    Nostalgia, emotionality, and ethno-regionalsim in Pontic parakathi singing

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    This dissertation explores the multilayered connections between music, emotionality, social and cultural belonging, collective memory, and identity discourse. The ethnographic case study for the examination of all these relations and aspects is the Pontic muhabeti or parakathi. Parakathi refers to a practice of socialization and music making that is designated insider Pontic Greek. It concerns primarily Pontic Greeks or Pontians, the descendants of the 1922 refugees from Black Sea Turkey (Gr. Pontos), and their identity discourse of ethno-regionalism. Parakathi references nightlong sessions of friendly socialization, social drinking, and dialogical participatory singing that take place informally in coffee houses, taverns, and households. Parakathi performances are reputed for their strong Pontic aesthetics, traditional character, rich and aesthetically refined repertoire, and intense emotionality. Singing in parakathi performances emerges spontaneously from verbal socialization and emotional saturation. Singing is described as a confessional expression of deeply personal feelings and memories that ideally entails the sharing of pain. Sharing and expression of memories, personal feelings, and pain take place through the dialogical performance of short poetic forms, distichs, sung to riff-like tunes played by the Pontic fiddle, the lyra. This dissertation documents the poetics, aesthetics, rhetorics, and pragmatics of the intimate emotional socialization, nostalgic remembering, and participatory dialogical singing that characterize parakathi and illustrates how these processes negotiate the broader discourses of ethnicity, nationalism, and regionalism that contextualize Pontic Greek senses of belonging. This analysis demonstrates the musical limits of discursivity, the special connection between music and emotion, the significance of music for imagined communities of sentiment, and the importance of musical performance in the cultural negotiations of collective memory, subjectivity, and emotionality. It also provides important information about the aesthetics, styles, structures, and genres of Pontic music, which remain rather understudied, contributing to the expansion of the ethnomusicological field

    The Aesthetics of Motion in Musics for the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Rumi

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    This dissertation investigates the concept of motion as a fundamental aesthetic element in the devotional music, dance, and rituals performed in honor of the celebrated thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet and saint, the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi. The main focus of the study is threefold. First, it investigates the prevalence of the notion of movement in Islamic music and culture, specifically within the Sufi communities of Turkey, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the relationship between music, aesthetics, and worldview. Secondly, it explores how musical performance functions as a form of devotion or religious worship by focusing on the musical repertories performed in honor of a single holy figure, the Mevlana Rumi. Finally, it provides an ethnographic account of contemporary developments in Sufi musical culture in Turkey and across the world by describing the recent activities of the Mevlana's devotees, which includes members of the Mevlevi Order of Islamic mystics as well as adherents of other Sufi brotherhoods and followers of so-called New Religions or New Age. The primary research for this study involved two short one-month field trips to Turkey and India in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and a longer one year expedition to Turkey in 2004 and 2005, which also included shorter stays in Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. Additionally, the dissertation draws directly from critical theories advanced in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and ethnochoreology and focuses on the kinesthetic parameters of music, dance, trance, and ritual as well as on broader forms of socio-cultural movement including pilgrimage, cultural tourism, and globalization. These forms of movement are analyzed in four broad categories of music used in worship, including classical Mevlevi music, music of the zikr ceremony, popular musics, and non-Turkish musics

    2019 Oklahoma Research Day Full Program

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    Oklahoma Research Day 2019 - SWOSU Celebrating 20 years of Undergraduate Research Successes
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