Auditory Streaming Complexity and Renaissance Mass Cycles

How did Renaissance listeners experience the polyphonic mass ordinary cycle in the soundscape of the church? We hypothesize that the textural differences in complexity between mass movements allowed listeners to track the progress of the service, regardless of intelligibility of the text or sophisticated musical knowledge.  Building on the principles of auditory scene analysis, this article introduces the Auditory Streaming Complexity Estimate, a measure to evaluate the blending or separation of each part in polyphony, resulting in a moment-by-moment tally of how many independent streams or sound objects might be heard. When applied to symbolic scores for a corpus of 216 polyphonic mass ordinary cycles composed between c. 1450 and 1600, we show that the Streaming Complexity Estimate captures information distinct from the number of parts in the score or the distribution of voices active through the piece. While composers did not all follow the same relative complexity strategy for mass ordinary movements, there is a robust hierarchy emergent from the corpus as a whole: a shallow V shape with the Credo as the least complex and the Agnus Dei as the most. The streaming complexity of masses also significantly increased over the years represented in this corpus

Measuring listeners' emotionally expressive responses to music

Surface Electromyographic recordings (sEMG) of facial muscles such as the zygomaticus and the corrugator supercilii have been used in several studies on emotional response to music. Though recorded continuously as music is presented to a listener, the relationship between felt emotions and contractions of these facial muscles have principally been considered in aggregate, over minutes of music and across participants, but results have been hard to interpret as these signals of affective response appear to be less consistent than subjective reports of felt emotion. Rather than treat facial sEMG measurements as directly reporting the feelings of subjects (as often promised by the idea of tracking microexpressions), I propose interpreting smiles and frowns as expressive behaviours, thus inviting factors such as social context of listening, social associations with the genre of stimulus, individual differences in emotional expressiveness and listener mood to modulate the relationship between facial muscle contraction and emotional response to the music. Examples demonstrating different conditions for expressive behaviour are taken from a case study of emotional responses collected during repeated presentations of wide variety of musical stimuli from one subject (the solo response project), and responses collected from groups of subjects presented with live and recorded concert music. Interpreting facial sEMG as a measure of expressed emotion has implications for interpreting published studies on physiological responses to music and future work exploring the listening experience. Traditional experimental paradigms may have limited the expressivity of participants by presenting music they are unfamiliar with, implicitly encouraging some acceptable range of expressive response, or presenting music to which people rarely practice expressive behaviour. By making explicit factors effecting expressive behaviour, we can make better use of these tools to investigate the experience of listening to music.Keywords: Emotion, Psychophysiology, Social elements of music, Expression, Listener

Streaming complexity in the Renaissance Mass Ordinary cycle

Complexity of a piece should also be related to its intended use and context. The Mass Ordinary cycles of 15th- and 16th-c. Europe were works of exceptional formal consistency, and if complexity is relevant to the role of a Kyrie, Gloria, or Agnus Dei, this should be measurable from the scores of surviving examples. We evaluate an aspect of complexity generalizable to past church goers from the consequences of low-level auditory streaming principles. The streaming complexity estimate presumes that this music tends to be heard as an integrated stream within the rich scene of the church service unless the voices diverge through separation cues such as independent onsets and contrary motion. In a corpus of more than 200 mass cycles composed over 150 years, we find significant differences in average streaming complexity over time and between movements. The Agnus Dei tends to be more complex, the Credo, with a long text, is usually low, depending on the composer. Results suggest streaming complexity may indeed be tuned for the intended use of a work. By bringing musicological evidence into corpus analysis, we can consider this feature in relation to the role of music beyond present day patterns of consumption

A complex multimodal activity intervention to reduce the risk of dementia in mild cognitive impairment - ThinkingFit: : pilot and feasibility study for a randomized controlled trial

© 2014 Dannhauser et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The version of record, Thomas M. Dannhauser, Martin Cleverly, Tim J. Whitfield, Ben (C) Fletcher, and Tim Stevens, 'A complex multimodal activity intervention to reduce the risk of dementia in mild cognitive impairment - ThinkingFit: pilot and feasibility study for a randomized controlled trial', BMC Psychiatry, 2014, 14: 129, is available online via doi: 10.1186/1471-244X-14-129Dementia affects 35 million people worldwide and is currently incurable. Many cases may be preventable because regular participation in physical, mental and social leisure activities during middle age is associated with up to 47% dementia risk reduction. However, the majority of middle-aged adults are not active enough. MCI is therefore a clear target for activity interventions aimed at reducing dementia risk. An active lifestyle during middle age reduces dementia risk but it remains to be determined if increased activity reduces dementia risk when MCI is already evident. Before this can be investigated conclusively, complex multimodal activity programmes are required that (1) combine multiple health promoting activities, (2) engage people with MCI, and (3) result in sufficient adherence ratesPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Detecting the Adaptation of Listeners' Respiration to Heard Music

This dissertation explores the surprising phenomenon of listeners' unconsciously breathing in time to music, inspiring and expiring at select moments of specific works. When and how the experience of hearing music might produce stimulus-synchronous respiratory events is studied through Repeated Response Case Studies, gathering participants' respiratory sequences during repeated listenings to recorded music, and through Audience Response Experiments, responses for participants experiencing live music together in a concert hall. Activity Analysis, a new statistical technique, supported the development and definition of discrete phase components of the breath cycle that come into coordination: the onsets of inspiration and expiration, the intervals of high flow during these two main phases, and the post-expiration pause. Alignment in these components across listenings illuminate when the naturalistic complex stimuli can attract or cue listener respiration events. Four patterns of respiratory phase alignment are identified through detailed analysis of stimuli and responses. Participants inspired with the inspirations of vocalists and wind performers, suggesting embodied perception and imagined action may exert influence on their quiet breathing. Participants suppressed and delayed inspirations when the music was highly unpredictable, suggesting adaptation in aid of auditory attention. Similar behaviour occurred with sustained sounds of exceptional aesthetic value. Participants inspired with recurring motivic material and similar high salience events, as if marking them in recognition or amplifying their affective impact. And finally, participants occasionally breathed following structural endings, suggesting a sigh-like function of releasing the respiratory system from cortical control. These instances of music-aligned respiratory phase alignment seemed to be stronger in participants who were typically active with heard music, but the impacts of training and expertise was not a simple condition for this behaviour. Contrasts between case study participants showed highly idiosyncratic patterns of respiratory alignment and differences in susceptibility along side moments of shared effect. In the audience experiments, alignment within phase components was measurable and significant, but rarely involved more than a quarter of participants in any given instance. These levels of concurrent activity in respiration underline the subtlety of this bodily response to music

Quantifying the temporal dynamics of music listening: a critical investigation of analysis techniques for collections of continuous responses to music

Continuous response measurement offers a data-rich trace of a listener's experiences of music in time. Listeners' responses are most often studied in collections---each a set of time series of the same response measure to the same stimulus from multiple listenings. Inter-response variability and the challenges of time series analysis complicate the interpretation of these collections. This thesis describes traditional and novel methods of analyzing collections of continuous responses to music with the goal of identifying what information can be found in these collections before trying to establish possible relationships to the features of the stimulating music. Besides mathematical investigations of these analysis methods, their potential outcomes are assessed by applying each to forty experimental collections of continuous rating responses and four artificial collections of unrelated continuous rating responses. The traditional analyses studied include the average response time series and Pearson correlations between continuous responses as a measure of response reliability. The chapter on novel techniques introduces activity analysis and coordination tests, evaluates measures of the relative significance of time points in these collection, and applies cluster analysis in search of distinct patterns of response to the same stimuli. The results of these analyses suggest that though music does not provoke the same continuous response from all listeners, musical works can induce distinct and repeatable listening experiences which are measurable in collections of continuous responses.L'évaluation des réactions continues permet d'obtenir un tracé riche en données de l'expérience des auditeurs par rapport à la musique au fil du temps. En règle générale, les réactions des auditeurs sont analysées par ensembles, c'est-à-dire par groupes de séries chronologiques portant sur de mêmes relevés de réactions au même stimulus provenant d'écoutes multiples. La variabilité entre les réactions et les défis inhérents à l'analyse des séries chronologiques rendent l'interprétation de ces ensembles encore plus complexe. La présente thèse décrit des méthodes traditionnelles et nouvelles d'analyse d'ensembles de réactions continues à la musique afin d'identifier quelles informations peuvent être recueillies dans ces ensembles avant de tenter d'établir des liens possibles avec les caractéristiques de la musique stimulante. En plus de l'étude mathématique de ces méthodes d'analyse, leurs résultats potentiels ont été évalués en appliquant chacune d'entre elles à quarante de ces ensembles d'évaluation de réactions continues ainsi qu'à quatre ensembles artificiels d'évaluations de réactions continues non apparentés. Les analyses traditionnelles étudiées comprennent les séries chronologiques moyennes et des corrélations de Pearson entre les réactions continues comme évaluation de la fiabilité de la réaction. Le chapitre portant sur les nouvelles techniques commence par une présentation de l'analyse de l'activité et des tests de coordination. Par la suite, il évalue les mesures de pertinence des repères temporels de ces ensembles, puis il rend compte de l'analyse par regroupements visant à identifier des modèles précis de réactions aux mêmes stimuli. Les résultats de ces analyses sous-tendent que bien que la musique ne provoque pas la même réaction chez tous les auditeurs, l'oeuvre musicale peut créer des expériences d'écoute distinctes et reproductibles pouvant être évaluées dans des ensembles de réactions continues

Concert Twitter, Audience Reconstructed Supplimentary Materials

Supplementary materials for analysis of twitter activity during BTS livestream concerts in 2021Compressed set of csv files for analysis of twitter activity during live streamed BTS concerts in 2021. Depersonalized tweet datasets, subset of tweets with content codes, and setlist timing for the four concerts. Descriptions of data preparation and analysis on github: https://github.com/finn42/Concert_Twt_OpenDescriptive pdf of supplimentary materials.Figures of secondary analysis of Corona Concert Survey data (https://osf.io/skg7h/)</p

Responses to Stimulus 13

<p>Matlab data file gathering continuous measures of emotion, subjective and physiological, to repeated listenings of stimulus 13,Stampede,The Quantic Soul Orchestra, in the solo response project.<br>Please refere to Readme.txt for more details, and http://soloresponseproject.com/ for related research.</p> <p> </p

Responses to Stimulus 6

<p>Matlab data file gathering continuous measures of emotion, subjective and physiological, to repeated listenings of stimulus 6,Basket,Dan Mangan, in the solo response project.<br>Please refere to Readme.txt for more details, and http://soloresponseproject.com/ for related research.</p> <p> </p