198 research outputs found
Music in Action: Tinkering, Testing, and Tracing Over Time
ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.In this article we draw on a recent, six-year ethnographic study of community music therapy and mental health to highlight strategies and techniques for documenting musicâs role in processes of change. We place these strategies in dialogue with the ethnographic work on arts and crafts by Paul Atkinson. In tandem with Atkinson, we propose a âslowâ approach focused on micro-processes of musical/para-musical bricolage whereby things are made and transformed over time. A three-cornered strategy in support of this approach is described: (1) a focus on musical-practical tinkering, (2) a focus on the modification and contention or testing of idiocultural musical space and, (3) two specific techniques for tracing music-related change, the music therapy âindexâ and the âmusical eventâ schema
Taken by strum: ukuleles and participatory music-making in Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Ethnographic study of ukulele playing in Hamilton, N
Universal patterns in sound amplitudes of songs and music genres
We report a statistical analysis over more than eight thousand songs.
Specifically, we investigate the probability distribution of the normalized
sound amplitudes. Our findings seems to suggest a universal form of
distribution which presents a good agreement with a one-parameter stretched
Gaussian. We also argue that this parameter can give information on music
complexity, and consequently it goes towards classifying songs as well as music
genres. Additionally, we present statistical evidences that correlation aspects
of the songs are directly related with the non-Gaussian nature of their sound
amplitude distributions.Comment: Accepted for publication as a Brief Report in Physical Review
âNow he singsâ. The My Musical Memories Reminiscence Programme: Personalised Interactive Reminiscence Sessions for People Living With Dementia
This paper explores the impact of the My Musical Memories Reminiscence Programme (MMMRP), an innovative intervention that adopts a music-based reminiscence approach. MMMRP builds on the format of the popular Singing for the Brain sessions with the aim of increasing opportunities for interaction and reminiscence among people living with dementia. Data were collected pre- and post-intervention and three months later using structured observation, interviews and focus groups. Results suggest that that programme had a positive impact on participants by promoting engagement, reminiscence and social interaction. For some individuals the impacts continued beyond their participation in the programme. A range of key facilitators for successful implementation of this approach were identified including the Session Leader role, the involvement of informal carers and the input of volunteers
To soothe or remove? Affect, revanchism and the weaponized use of classical music
Over the past 30 years, in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, classical music has come to function as a sonic weapon. It is used a means of dispelling and deterring âloiterersâ by making particular public and privately owned public spaces â such as shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts and car parks â undesirable to occupy. In this article, I present weaponized classical music as a ârevanchistâ, audio-affective deterrent. Drawing upon Neil Smithâs description of the revanchist city, I examine how weaponized classical music works to affectively police neoliberal âpublicâ space. While credited with the capacity to âsoothe awayâ deviant behaviour through its calming influence, weaponized classical music ultimately aims to âremoveâ the figure of the threatening and menacing âloitererâ insofar as it is heard as repellent. Although affect has often been understood in contradistinction to social determinisms, weaponized classical music exemplifies the capacity of musical affects to function as a technology of social reproduction
Being well, being musical: Music composition as a resource and occupation for older people
Introduction: Participatory music making for older people has tended to focus on singing and performance. In a community music project undertaken by Manchester Camerata (a chamber orchestra), Blacon Community Trust and a small group of older adults, participants were given the opportunity to compose individual pieces of music interactively with professional musicians. This paper reports the findings of the research project. Method: An arts-based research method was adopted and incorporated action research and interpretive interactionism to articulate the experiences and perceptions of participants. Participants and Manchester Camerata musicians also worked together to represent the thematic findings of the research in a group composition. Findings: The findings demonstrate that individual and group music composition contributed to a sense of wellbeing through control over musical materials, opportunities for creativity and identity making, validation of life experience and social engagement with other participants and professional musicians. Conclusion; The results emphasised occupation as essential to health and wellbeing in the later stages of life. The findings also highlight the particularly innovative aspects of this research: (i) the use of music composition as a viable arts-in-health occupation for older people and (ii) the arts-based research method of group composition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved
Group Singing as a Resource for the Development of a Healthy Public
A growing body of evidence points to a wide range of benefits arising from participation in group singing. Group singing requires participants to engage with each other in a simultaneous musical dialogue in a pluralistic and emergent context, creating a coherent cultural expression through the reflexive negotiation of (musical) meaning manifest in the collective power of the human voice. As such, group singing might be taken â both literally and figuratively â as a potent form of âhealthy publicâ, creating an âidealâ community which participants can subsequently mobilise as a positive resource for everyday life. The experiences of a group of singers (n=78) who had participated in an outdoor singing project were collected and analysed using a three-layer research design consisting of: distributed data generation and interpretation, considered against comparative data from other singing groups (n=88); a focus group workshop (n=11); an unstructured interview (n=2). The study confirmed an expected perception of the social bonding effect of group singing, highlighting affordances for interpersonal attunement and attachment alongside a powerful individual sense of feeling âupliftedâ. This study presents a novel perspective on group singing, highlighting the importance of participant experience as a means of understanding music as a holistic and complex adaptive system. It validates findings about group singing from previous studies - in particular the stability of the social bonding effect as a less variant characteristic in the face of environmental and other situational influences, alongside its capacity for mental health recovery. It establishes a subjective sociocultural and musical understanding of group singing, by expanding on these findings to centralise the importance of individual experience, and the consciousness of that experience as descriptive self-awareness. The ways in which participants describe and discuss their experiences of group singing and its benefits points to a complex interdependence between a number of musical, neurobiological and psychosocial mechanisms which might be independently and objectively analysed. An emerging theory is that at least some of the potency of group singing is as a resource where people can rehearse and perform âhealthyâ relationships, further emphasising its potential as a resource for healthy publics
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