The role of engagement and visual imagery in music listening

This thesis investigates music' responses to a selection of complete nineteenth and twentieth century piano works, with respect to their levels of musical engagement (heightened attention and interest towards the music; Olsen, Dean & Stevens, 2014) and their experience of music-induced visual imagery. Although engagement and visual imagery have been increasingly explored over the past two decades, little work has investigated the relationship between the two. Potential links, however, exist: for instance, the way visual imagery is described as one of the key mechanisms underlying listeners' emotional responses to music (Juslin et al., 2013). This thesis draws upon three different methodological approaches: two exploratory studies empirically investigate listeners' responses quantitatively, as well as qualitatively; the third study, a self-reflective account, draws upon the researcher's personal visual imagery experience as a performer.In the two empirical studies, listeners provided continuous self-report measures of their engagement with the music, as well as the occurrence of any visual imagery during listening. Time series analyses revealed that engagement with the music was significantly associated with the experience of visual imagery; this was the case in both Studies 1 and 2. Granger causality tests were carried out to investigate the details of this relationship: overall, engagement mostly predicted visual imagery in Study 1; whilst a bidirectional relation of the series emerged more frequently in Study 2. In both studies, however, differences according to the piece and to the musical experience of the listener were apparent. A selection of listeners' individual differences (such as musical experience) are also reported, with respect to engagement and visual imagery responses. A thematic analysis of the qualitative data, collected through free written annotations and face-to-face interviews, led to the emergence of nine broad ‘visual imagery types’: (1) Arbitrary, (2) Shared Musical Topics, (3) Idiosyncratic Sound Associations, (4) Emotions, (5) Material Abstraction, (6) Narratives, (7) Performance, (8) Personal Recollections, and (9) Pictorial Associations. Examples of each category, alongside insights into the diverse range of imagery experiences, are provided. Finally, the self- reflective account explores visual imagery from a different perspective: the performer as listener. A pianist's visual imagery experiences are investigated across two contexts: the practice of a piano- duet work, comparing imagery data with that of a second pianist; and practising from memory, exploring the way imagery experiences may change with the absence of the score. Links to the qualitative ‘visual imagery types’ model are drawn throughout this exploration

Speaking on the record

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-273).Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression. The words 'literate' and 'literacy' themselves are a simple case: their connotations sometimes focus on the process of reading text and sometimes on the kinds of knowledge that happen to be associated in our culture with people who read many books. This thesis has a conceptual and an empirical component. On the conceptual side a central task is to disengage certain concepts that have become conflated by defining new terms. Our vocabulary is insufficient to describe alternatives that serve some or all of the functions of writing and reading in a different modality. As a first step, I introduce a new word to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking 'on the record' that yields a technologically-supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself. This thesis considers a particular (still primitive compared with might come in the future) version of spriting in the form of two technology-supported representations of speech: (1) the speech ·in audible form, and (2) the speech in visible form.(cont.) The product of spriting is a kind of 'spoken' document, or talkument. As one reads a text, one may likewise aude a talkument. In contrast, I use the word writing for the manual activity of making marks, while text refers to the marks made. Making these distinctions is a small step towards envisioning a deep change in the world that might go beyond graphocentrism and come to appreciate spriting as the first step--but just the first--towards developing ways of manipulating spoken language, exemplified by turning it into a permanent record, permitting editing, indexing, searching and more. The empirical side of the thesis is confined to exploring implications of spriting in educational settings. I study one group of urban adults who are at elementary levels of reading and writing, and two groups of urban elementary school children who are of different ages, cultures and socioeconomic status, and who have appropriated writing as a tool for thought and expression to greater or lesser extents. One effect of graphocentrism in our culture is the very limited and constrained developmental path of literacy and learning. This has not always been the case. And it does not need to be so in the future. This thesis discusses some small ways in which we might re-value modes of expression in education closer to oral language than to writing. This thesis recognizes three ways in which spriting is relevant to education: (1) spriting can serve as a stepping stone to writing skills, (2) it can in some circumstances serve as a substitute for writing, and (3) it provides a window onto cognitive processes that are present but less apparent in the context of producing text.Tara Michelle Rosenberger Shankar.Ph.D

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music