The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik

Gesprochene Musik, by Ernst Toch (1887–1964), is a forgotten milestone in the history of electronic music.1 A three–movement suite consisting of spoken music for choir, it is one of the few paradigmatic representatives of the genre of Gramophonmusik, which made use of prerecorded gramophone discs in a concert setting. The work was premiered in 1930 at a Berlin festival devoted to new music, in a concert featuring original works for gramophone playback by two rising stars of the German contemporary music scene, Toch and Paul Hindemith. The pieces were performed only once, yet through the intervention of a young John Cage, the score of the third movement of Gesprochene Musik, the “Geographical Fugue,” appeared in Henry Cowell’s journal, New Music, five years later. Although Cage published the piece in the context of a collection of music written expressly for gramophone, his version led the “Geographical Fugue” to receive a new lease of life as a purely acoustic choral showpiece performed live, which would, ironically, become Toch’s most famous work

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, and differences in the expression of preferences can be difficult to interpret. In this large-scale study, we test predictions from the Hunter and Ames model of infants' visual preferences. We investigate the effects of three factors predicted by this model to determine infants’ preference for novel versus familiar stimuli: age, stimulus familiarity, and stimulus complexity. Drawing from a large and diverse sample of infant participants (minimum expected sample size N = 1,280), this study aims to provide empirical evidence for a robust and generalizable model of infant visual preferences, leading to a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants’ responses in common behavioral paradigms. Moreover, we hope that our findings will guide future studies that rely on infants' visual preferences to measure cognitive and social processes

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time Pre-data collection manuscript for peer-review The ManyBabies 5 Team

International audienceMuch of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants' visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants' visual preferences are poorly understood, and differences in the expression of preferences can be difficult to interpret. In this large-scale study, we test predictions from the Hunter and Ames model of infants' visual preferences. 1 We investigate the effects of three factors predicted by this model to determine infants' preference for novel versus familiar stimuli: age, stimulus familiarity, and stimulus complexity. Drawing from a large and diverse sample of infant participants (N = XX), this study will provide crucial empirical evidence for a robust and generalizable model of infant visual preferences, leading to a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants' responses in common behavioral paradigms. Moreover, our findings will guide future studies that rely on infants' visual preferences to measure cognitive and social processes