Prosody, focus, and focal structure : some remarks on methodology

Prosody falls between several established fields as e.g. phonetics, phonology, syntax, and dialogue structure. It is therefore prone to misconceptions: often, its relevancy is overestimated, and often, it is underestimated. The traditional method in linguistics in general and in phonology in particular is the construction and evaluation of sometimes rather complex examples based on the intuition of the linguist. This intuition is replaced by more or less naive and thus non-expert subjects and inferential statistics in experimental phonetics but the examples, i.e. the experimental material, are often rather complex as well. It is a truism that in both cases, conclusions are made on an "as if\u27; basis: as if a final proof had been found that the phenomenon A really exists regularily in the language B. In fact, it only can be proven that the phenomenon A sometimes can be detected in the production of some speakers of a variety of language B. This dilemma matters if prosody has to be put into practice, e.g. in automatic speech and language processing. In this field, large speech databases are already available for English and will be available for other languages as e.g. German in the near future. At least in the beginning, the problems that can - hopefully - be solved with the help of such databases might look trivial and thus not interesting - a step backwards and not forwards. "As if\u27; statements (concerning, e.g., narrow vs. broad focus) and problems that are trivial at face value (concerning, e.g., the relationship between phrasing units and accentuation and the ontology of sentence accent) will be illustrated with own material. I will argue that such trivial problems have to be dealt with in the beginning, and that they can constitute the very basis for the proper treatment of more far reaching and complex problems

Creating a Tudor Musical Miscellany: The McGhie/Tenbury 389 Partbooks

The best-known Tudor manuscript partbooks tend to be complete or near-complete sets, associated with known individuals, elegantly copied, and with a clear repertorial focus. Yet such manuscripts are not the norm among extant partbooks. Rather most are obscure in origin, the product of workaday copying, and survive as orphans or partial sets. They are miscellanies with wide-ranging contents, complex and seemingly chaotic in their compilation, and their challenges have tended to deter scholarly attention. This article focuses on one particular miscellany from which two partbooks survive—the privately owned McGhie partbook and Bodleian Library Tenbury MS 389—to explore what such collections can reveal about the methods and habits of compilers and the circulation of music. These partbooks were assembled in a series of stages that demonstrate several different strategies for the collection and selection of pieces, methods for organizing scribal labour, and the influence of musical print culture on manuscript production

An exploratory study on the acoustic musical properties to decrease self-perceived anxiety

Musical listening is broadly used as an inexpensive and safe method to reduce self-perceived anxiety. This strategy is based on the emotivist assumption claiming that emotions are not only recognised in music but induced by it. Yet, the acoustic properties of musical work capable of reducing anxiety are still under-researched. To fill this gap, we explore whether the acoustic parameters relevant in music emotion recognition are also suitable to identify music with relaxing properties. As an anxiety indicator, the positive statements from the six-item Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, a self-reported score from 3 to 12, are taken. A user-study with 50 participants assessing the relaxing potential of four musical pieces was conducted; subsequently, the acoustic parameters were evaluated. Our study shows that when using classical Western music to reduce self-perceived anxiety, tonal music should be considered. In addition, it also indicates that harmonicity is a suitable indicator of relaxing music, while the role of scoring and dynamics in reducing non-pathological listener distress should be further investigated