Practice Makes Perfect: Beat Perception is Enhanced by Musical Training Not Active Music Playing

The ability to perceive the beat in music is crucial for both music listeners and players with expert musicians being notably skilled at noticing fine deviations in the beat. However, it is unclear whether this beat perception ability remains stable once trained or whether it diminishes with disuse. Thus, we investigated this by comparing active musicians’, inactive musicians’, and nonmusicians’ beat perception ability scores on the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT). 97 adults with diverse musical experience participated in the study, reporting their years of musical training, number of instruments played, hours of weekly music playing, and hours of weekly music listening, in addition to their demographic information. The analysis showed that there was no significant difference between active musicians’, inactive musicians’, and nonmusicians’ CA-BAT scores once differences in musical training had been accounted for. Regression analysis confirmed that years of musical training was the only significant predictor of beat perception ability. These results suggest that expertly perceiving fine differences in the beat is not a use-dependent ability that degrades without regular maintenance through practice or musical engagement. Instead, beat perception appears to be a stable ability once sufficiently trained

Umweltvertraeglichkeitsstudie fuer das Raumtransportsystem SAeNGER. T. 1 Unterstufe

The central issue of this study was: Will flights of the airbreathing, hydrogen combusting lower stage of the planned S/''ANGER space transport system cause any significant disturbances of the composition of the stratosphere and what consequences would this imply to the ozone contents and radiation balance? The present study on the environmental compatibility of a planned space transport system restricts itself to the lower stage of the SAeNGER space transport system conceived in Germany. This preference of the lower stage had the following reasons: relatively substantiated emission data were available at an early stage; the cruising altitude around 25 km in the ozone layer of the stratosphere indicated an accumulation of the climate relevant emissions water vapor and nitrogen oxides in one layer and thus a potential hazard to the ozone layer; the airbreathing engines of the lower stage, in contrast to the upper stage, lead to nitrogen oxide emissions which together with water vapor increase the concentration of two catalysts that are essentially contributing to ozone depletion in the stratosphere. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Nationalism in Norway in the Middle Ages

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