A Survey into Piano Teachers’ Perceptions of Music Memorization in One-to-one Piano Lessons: A Preliminary Study

Despite more than a century of research on music memorization and practicing strategies, there is a lack of comprehensive evidence on how instrumental music teachers teach memorization to children and adolescents in one-to-one lessons. The present qualitative study investigated the diversity of ways in which music memorization is taught in one-to-one piano lessons. Piano teachers (N = 37) completed an online survey collecting qualitative responses regarding music memorization. Participants were asked to give a brief description of music memorization, how they memorize as performers and how they teach music memorization to their students, amongst other questions. Results indicate that music memorization is perceived by most teachers as a skill that develops through practice rather than a natural talent. Reported strategies for teaching memorization fell into four categories: aural, visual, kinesthetic, and analytical, which align with previous theoretical conceptualizations of musical memorization. Recurring mentions of muscle memory practice and music theory knowledge suggest that kinesthetic and analytical methods are qualitatively dominant in the way teachers 1) define music memorization, 2) memorize as performers, and 3) teach music memorization. This suggests that aural and visual memorization methods might be less explored by piano teachers of children and adolescents and future research could be conducted in this area

Music-evoked autobiographical memories in everyday life

Music can be a particularly effective cue for bringing one back to the sights and sounds of events from across the lifespan. These music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) have typically been studied within laboratory experiments and clinical settings, often using experimenter-selected music to cue autobiographical memories. The present work took a more naturalistic approach, by studying the situational aspects, contents, and features of MEAMs within the course of participants’ everyday lives. Participants (N = 31) recorded details of their MEAMs and music listening habits in a diary for 7 days. MEAMs were experienced, on average, once per day and were cued by a wide variety of music, often during routine tasks such as traveling and housework. Everyday MEAMs were typically rated as highly vivid and involuntary and were often accompanied by positive or mixed emotions (e.g., happiness, nostalgia) and social themes. Some evidence of individual differences was found, with older participants rating their MEAMs as more vivid and accompanied by more positive emotions. The features reported within everyday MEAMs replicated several previous findings on MEAMs and autobiographical memory more generally, indicating that this naturalistic method was able to capture genuine MEAM experiences. Implications for future research on naturally occurring MEAMs are discussed

Music, Memory, and Imagination

This article argues that the capacity of music to reliably cue both autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings can be leveraged to better understand the relationship and interdependence between memory and imagination more generally. The multiple levels involved in musical engagement provide a rich forum for investigating how emotional, semantic, and contextual associations with musical cues influence both memories and imaginings. Moreover, musical excerpts are extended in time and can influence the trajectory of a memory or imagining dynamically as it develops, allowing for a more precise manipulation of the implied semantic space. Because music’s uses and contextual associations are culturally constrained, and culture can be shared, autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings cued by music can show surprising similarities among individuals from the same culture. This article surveys the research on music-evoked autobiographical memories and music-evoked fictional imaginings, proposing a framework for bringing these separate strands of work together to shed light on larger questions about shared underlying mechanisms

Investigating Temporal and Melodic Aspects of Musical Imagery

Musical imagery, the mental replay of music in the absence of a perceived stimulus, is a common experience in the everyday lives of both musicians and non-musicians. The present research investigated aspects of the temporal and melodic content of musical imagery in an attempt to better understand factors underlying the genesis, stability, and potential functions of imagined music. Specifically, this research explored how factors such as one’s current state of mood and arousal, level of musical experience, self-reported imagery abilities, and the musical properties of a song itself can influence the generation and stability of a musical image. The first three studies of the thesis were conducted in a laboratory context, in which participants deliberately imagined familiar tunes. The second two studies extended existing quantitative methods to examine the experience of involuntary musical imagery—music that is recalled spontaneously and repetitively within the mind—in more naturalistic contexts. The findings of the research have revealed that factors known to affect time perception, such as physiological arousal, can affect tempo representations within both voluntarily and involuntary musical imagery. The recall of tempo for imagined songs that exist in definitive versions was found to be fairly veridical in both voluntary and involuntary imagery, although temporal veridicality was also influenced by motor engagement with the imagery, a participant’s musical background, and the original tempo of a song stimulus itself. Additionally, the occurrence of an involuntarily generated musical image was predicted by both extra-musical factors, such as song popularity, as well as intra-musical features related to a song’s melodic contour and tempo. The results of this research suggest several parallels between voluntarily and involuntarily generated musical imagery and contribute a variety of novel findings regarding features underlying the genesis and possible functions of musical imagery

Aesthetics of musical timing : Culture and expertise affect preferences for isochrony but not synchrony

Este es un artículo de acceso abierto bajo la licencia CC BY.Expressive communication in the arts often involves deviations from stylistic norms, which can increase the aesthetic evaluation of an artwork or performance. The detection and appreciation of such expressive deviations may be amplified by cultural familiarity and expertise of the observer. One form of expressive communication in music is playing “out of time,” including asynchrony (deviations from synchrony between different instruments) and non-isochrony (deviations from equal spacing between subsequent note onsets or metric units). As previous research has provided somewhat conflicting perspectives on the degree to which deviations from synchrony and isochrony are aesthetically relevant, we aimed to shed new light on this topic by accounting for the effects of listeners' cultural familiarity and expertise. We manipulated (a)synchrony and (non-)isochrony separately in excerpts from three groove-based musical styles (jazz, candombe, and jembe), using timings from real performances. We recruited musician and non-musician participants (N = 176) from three countries (UK, Uruguay, and Mali), selected to vary in their prior experience of hearing and performing these three styles. Participants completed both an aesthetic preference rating task and a perceptual discrimination task for the stimuli. Our results indicate an overall preference toward synchrony in these styles, but culturally contingent, expertise-dependent preferences for deviations from isochrony. This suggests that temporal processing relies on mechanisms that vary in their dependence on low-level and high-level perception, and emphasizes the role of cultural familiarity and expertise in shaping aesthetic preferences

A Cross-Sectional Study of Reminiscence Bumps for Music-Related Memories in Adulthood

Music is often intimately linked to identity, as evidenced by the high value many people place on musical activities and the way in which music can become seemingly effortlessly coupled to important memories from throughout one’s lifespan. Previous research has revealed a consistent reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory—the disproportionate recall of memories from between ages 10 to 30 years in comparison with other lifetime periods—which also appears to extend to music-related memories. The present study represents one of the largest explorations of the musical reminiscence bump across adulthood to date. Participants (N = 470; ages 18 to 82 years) were shown the titles and artists of 111 popular songs that had featured in the charts between 1950 and 2015 and rated the degree to which they had autobiographical memories associated with each song, as well as the degree to which they were familiar with and liked the song. We found a reminiscence bump in adolescence (peaking around age 14) for both ratings of the autobiographical salience of songs featured in the charts during that period and the familiarity of these songs. Liking ratings showed more divergent results depending on a participant’s current age, including evidence for a cascading reminiscence bump, in which liking ratings from young adults increased for music from their parents’ adolescent years. We also revealed new evidence that music-related autobiographical memories appear to invoke similar retrieval processes to the common methodology of eliciting autobiographical memories via word cues. We contextualize these results in relation to general theoretical accounts of the reminiscence bump, and age-related differences in the bump are discussed in relation to various sociocultural and technological changes in music listening habits

Capturing the speed of music in our heads: Developing methods for measuring the tempo of musical imagery

The experience of imagining music is a common phenomenon. Musicians use mental rehearsal to help them memorize and prepare for performances, and even non-musicians regularly experience “earworms”, i.e., having a tune stuck in one’s head on repeat. Voluntarily imagined music is highly accurate in terms of pitch, rhythm, and timbre and recruits brain regions that are remarkably similar to those recruited in perceiving music.In terms of tempo, it has been found that even non-musicians can sing familiar pop songs very close to the original recorded tempo. This implies that the tempo of imagery is quite accurate, as participants must generate an image of a song before singing it aloud. However, this has not been previously tested in such a way that the imagery remains purely imagined, without becoming a sound production task. As such, the first aim of the present study is to test the accuracy of tempo judgments for purely imagined songs. The second aim is to explore the influence of individual differences on these tempo judgments, including previous musical training, musical engagement, general auditory imagery abilities, and familiarity with the stimuli.We utilized three methods of measuring each participant’s memory for the tempo of 12 familiar pop songs: 1) tapping to the beat of each song whilst imagining the song (hereafter Imagery (motor) task), 2) adjusting the speed of a click track to the beat of each song, again whilst imagining (hereafter Imagery (non-motor) task), and 3) adjusting the speed of each song whilst hearing the actual songs aloud (hereafter Perceived Music task). It was hypothesized that participants would perform most accurately in the Perceived Music condition””where all musical cues were present, but that motor engagement with musical imagery (in the Imagery (motor) task) would also improve performance, in line with previous literature.Significant differences were found in performance between all three tasks, such that performance on the Perceived Music task was significantly more accurate than in the Imagery tasks, and performance in the Imagery (motor) task was significantly more accurate than in the Imagery (non-motor) task. Performance in the Imagery tasks was also influenced by individual differences in musical training and/or engagement, whilst performance on the Perceived Music task was only influenced by previous familiarity with the musical stimuli.The results of the study help to inform us as to precisely how accurately tempo is preserved within musical imagery, and how this is modulated by other factors such as musical training and familiarity. The findings also have implications within the domain of mental music rehearsal.Keywords: musical imagery, tempo, musical memor

Alice Dalí augmented reality: Evaluating a cultural outdoors game for intergenerational play

Serious Games have been shown to have many uses, such as for learning and cultural engagement. Furthermore, research has shown that some types of game experiences can have significant social benefits, such as a study by Wang, Taylor and Sun, which showed that playing cooperative video games can improve family satisfaction and closeness. In this article, we present the design and evaluation of Alice Dalí AR (2022), a locative augmented-reality smartphone game designed as a cultural experience for families to engage with art, music and storytelling. Alice Dalí AR features 12 illustrations produced by Dalí in 1969 for the iconic story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol. We applied a multisensory design methodology based on synesthesia, where art shapes and color palettes from Dalí’s paintings were “transposed” to music genre and music language. The play experience involves using a radar to find AR music art encounters through which a story of Wonderland emerges. The design offers a cultural and social play experience that can help strengthen family connections and knowledge exchange across generations, and at the same time encourage players to spend time outside in healthy walking activities. We present the results of a user study, which shows evidence of cultural engagement and increased intergenerational emotional bonding. The Alice Dalí AR app is available from the Google and Apple app stores