"It's like being the hero of your own story": perceptions of musical skill development for the beginner cellist

Background: When children commence learning a musical instrument, they are introduced to a diverse range of skills from the cognitive, expressive and psychomotor domains. Children’s capacity to adopt and integrate these musical skills can directly affect their progress and influence ongoing interest. However, as many of these skills are unfamiliar to the beginner musician, their development requires specialised support, deliberate attention and focussed practice. The outcomes of these learning processes can also be a critical to children’s future musical engagement. Children’s lived experience of musical instrument skill acquisition is rarely examined in music education research; therefore, the current paper adopts a novel case study approach to investigate how children perceive and manage musical skill development. Intrapersonal factors and interpersonal relationships including those with the teacher, who is the principal researcher, are also examined. Aims: 1. To investigate seven-year-old children’s lived experience of cello skill development within the first 18-months of tuition. 2. To investigate how children’s musical skill development is affected by intrapersonal factors and interpersonal relationships. 3. To investigate how the experience and perceptions of skill development in early learning influences children’s longer-term musical engagement. Method: Through a longitudinal Action Research methodology, 14 seven-year-old children’s lived experiences of learning the cello were tracked across the first 18-months of tuition. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of interviews with the children and their parents were integrated with the teacher-researcher’s recorded observations from work with the children. Results: During the early stages of learning, children prioritised the development of skills in one of the three learning domains and this was attributed to initial competencies and affinities at the beginner level. As tuition progressed, teaching and learning challenges included ensuring that all skill sets developed according to the children’s individual, differentiated needs. Central to this developmental process was how the children’s intrapersonal factors interacted with their interpersonal relationships to shape their learning behaviour at home and in the instrumental music studio. Regardless of skill level or ability, all of the children measured their process in musical skill development through critical evaluation of their sound production. The children’s sophisticated perception of sound included discerning nuanced difference in quality of tone, intonation, volume, fluency and timbre. Production of an ideal sound that integrated these qualities was described as an aspirational goal in practice and performance. Sound was perceived also by the children as a powerful conduit for self-expression and musical communication. In this context, musical skill development fulfilled children’s creative needs and satisfied their desire to be seen and hear by others as capable musicians. This result generated growth in the children’s sense of agency and autonomy. When the complex process of skill attainment, sound production and musical expression was achieved successfully, students experienced transformed representations of their internal selves that positively impacted their emotional states. These transformative experiences were linked to a close affinity with their cello and this was evidenced by the children’s use of language devices such as metaphor, simile, analogy and imaginative narrative to describe how skill development strengthened their bond with the instrument. Further, some children ascribed anthropomorphic traits to their instruments, defining them as a person or ally and assigning names and gender pronouns. Investigation of students’ learning over time indicated that children who experienced beneficial interpersonal growth and productive interpersonal relationships through musical skill development maintained active longer-term musical engagement. These children described imagining themselves in positive performance and learning environments in their projected musical futures. Taken together, the findings from this investigation of children’s perceptions of musical skill development highlight how instrumental music learning can profoundly affect children’s inner worlds. The breadth and depth of the experience contributed to the children’s enjoyment in engagement and affected motivation to continue with their musical development. Conclusions: This research, conducted by the teacher as researcher, makes a unique contribution to the literature by identifying the importance of children’s perception of sound in the process of cognitive, physical and emotional engagement with musical skill development. It identifies how this can have a transformative effect on a child’s sense of self and influence their future musical engagement. Implications: Monitoring children’s perception of sound production and its impact on musical expression in the development of skills in the three learning domains is integral to instrumental music teaching and fosters meaningful, ongoing engagement outcomes

Automated, high-accuracy classification of textured microstructures using a convolutional neural network

Crystallographic texture is an important descriptor of material properties but requires time-intensive electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) for identifying grain orientations. While some metrics such as grain size or grain aspect ratio can distinguish textured microstructures from untextured microstructures after significant grain growth, such morphological differences are not always visually observable. This paper explores the use of deep learning to classify experimentally measured textured microstructures without knowledge of crystallographic orientation. A deep convolutional neural network is used to extract high-order morphological features from binary images to distinguish textured microstructures from untextured microstructures. The convolutional neural network results are compared with a statistical Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests with traditional morphological metrics for describing microstructures. Results show that the convolutional neural network achieves a significantly improved classification accuracy, particularly at early stages of grain growth, highlighting the capability of deep learning to identify the subtle morphological patterns resulting from texture. The results demonstrate the potential of a convolutional neural network as a tool for reliable and automated microstructure classification with minimal preprocessing

Music listening in everyday life: Devices, selection methods, and digital technology

Two studies considered whether psychological variables could predict everyday music listening practices more than those demographic and technology-related variables studied predominantly hitherto. Study 1 focused on music-listening devices, while Study 2 focused on music selection strategies (e.g. playlists). Study 1 indicated the existence of a one-dimensional identity based on music technology. Further, psychological variables (such as innovativeness and self-efficacy) predicted whether individuals possess such an identity. Moreover, while psychological variables predicted whether individuals preferred ‘familiarized’ advantages inherent to listening devices, a preference for ‘progressive’ advantages was predicted by technological behaviors. Study 2 supported the first study in terms of identity, and demonstrated that a different pattern of variables predicted playlist listening from listening to music via shuffle. More generally, the findings suggest the utility of applying constructs from consumer psychology to everyday music-listening behaviors

Embedding the Ni-SOD mimetic Ni-NCC within a polypeptide sequence alters specificity of the reaction pathway

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in the Inorganic Chemistry, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see http://doi.org/10.1021/ic301175f.The unique metal abstracting peptide (MAP) asparagine-cysteine-cysteine (NCC) binds nickel in a square planar 2N:2S geometry and acts as a mimic of the enzyme nickel superoxide dismutase (Ni-SOD). The Ni-NCC tripeptide complex undergoes rapid, site-specific chiral inversion to DLD-NCC in the presence of oxygen. Superoxide scavenging activity increases proportionally with the degree of chiral inversion. Characterization of the NCC sequence within longer peptides with absorption, circular dichroism (CD), and magnetic CD (MCD) spectroscopies and mass spectrometry (MS) shows that the geometry of metal coordination is maintained, though the electronic properties of the complex are varied to a small extent due to bis-amide, rather than amine/amide, coordination. In addition, both the Ni-tripeptides and Ni-pentapeptides have a −2 charge. The study here demonstrates that the chiral inversion chemistry does not occur when NCC is embedded in a longer polypeptide sequence. Nonetheless, the superoxide scavenging reactivity of the embedded Ni-NCC module is similar to that of the chirally inverted tripeptide complex, which is consistent with a minor change in reduction potential for the Ni-pentapeptide. Together, this suggests that the charge of the complex could affect the SOD activity as much as a change in primary coordination sphere. In Ni-NCC and other Ni-SOD mimics, changes in chirality, superoxide scavenging activity, and oxidation of the peptide itself all depend on the presence of dioxygen or its reduced derivatives (e.g., superoxide), and the extent to which each of these distinct reactions occurs is ruled by electronic and steric effects that emenate from the organization of ligands around the metal center

Counting on the mental number line to make a move: sensorimotor ('pen') control and numerical processing

Mathematics is often conducted with a writing implement. But is there a relationship between numerical processing and sensorimotor ‘pen’ control? We asked participants to move a stylus so it crossed an unmarked line at a location specified by a symbolic number (1–9), where number colour indicated whether the line ran left–right (‘normal’) or vice versa (‘reversed’). The task could be simplified through the use of a ‘mental number line’ (MNL). Many modern societies use number lines in mathematical education and the brain’s representation of number appears to follow a culturally determined spatial organisation (so better task performance is associated with this culturally normal orientation—the MNL effect). Participants (counter-balanced) completed two consistent blocks of trials, ‘normal’ and ‘reversed’, followed by a mixed block where line direction varied randomly. Experiment 1 established that the MNL effect was robust, and showed that the cognitive load associated with reversing the MNL not only affected response selection but also the actual movement execution (indexed by duration) within the mixed trials. Experiment 2 showed that an individual’s motor abilities predicted performance in the difficult (mixed) condition but not the easier blocks. These results suggest that numerical processing is not isolated from motor capabilities—a finding with applied consequences

To what extent can behaviour change techniques be identified within an adaptable implementation package for primary care? A prospective directed content analysis

Interpreting evaluations of complex interventions can be difficult without sufficient description of key intervention content. We aimed to develop an implementation package for primary care which could be delivered using typically available resources and could be adapted to target determinants of behaviour for each of four quality indicators: diabetes control, blood pressure control, anticoagulation for atrial fibrillation and risky prescribing. We describe the development and prospective verification of behaviour change techniques (BCTs) embedded within the adaptable implementation packages