Sin eso no hay música: La inducción del beat como un rasgo musical fundamental

La Inducción del Beat (IB) es la habilidad cognitiva que nos permite escuchar un pulso regular en la música con el que podremos sincronizar. Percibir esta regularidad en la música nos permite bailar y hacer música juntos. Como tal, puede ser considerada como un rasgo musical fundamental que, sin duda, jugó un papel decisivo en los orígenes de la música. Además, la IB puede ser considerada como una forma espontáneamente en desarrollo, de dominio específico y de habilidad específica de cada especie. Aunque tanto el aprendizaje como el acoplamiento percepción/acción demostraron ser relevantes en su desarrollo, al menos un estudio mostró que el sistema auditivo de un recién nacido es capaz de detectar las periodicidades inducidas por un ritmo variable. Un estudio relacionado con adultos sugirió que las representaciones jerárquicas de los ritmos (inducción del metro) se forman automáticamente en el sistema auditivo humano. Vamos a reconsiderar estos hallazgos empíricos a la luz de la cuestión de si la inducción del beat y la inducción del metro son mecanismos cognitivos fundamentales.Título original del paper: “Without it no music: beat induction as a fundamental musical trait”. Publicado en: The Neurosciences and Music IV Learning and Memory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1252 (2012), 85-91. New York Academy of Sciences, ISSN 0077-8923. Publicado con permiso del autor en el Boletín de SACCoM.Facultad de Bellas Arte

Lure(d) into listening: The potential of cognition-based music information retrieval

ABSTRACT: This paper argues for the potential of cognition-based music retrieval by introducing the notion of a musical 'hook' as a key memorization, recall, and search mechanism. A hook is considered the most salient, memorable, and easy to recall moment of a musical phrase or song. Next to its role in searching large data-bases of music, it is proposed as a way to understand and identify which cognitively relevant musical features affect the appreciation, memorization and recall of music. To illustrate the potential of this idea for the computational humanitie

Sin eso no hay música: La inducción del beat como un rasgo musical fundamental

La Inducción del Beat (IB) es la habilidad cognitiva que nos permite escuchar un pulso regular en la música con el que podremos sincronizar. Percibir esta regularidad en la música nos permite bailar y hacer música juntos. Como tal, puede ser considerada como un rasgo musical fundamental que, sin duda, jugó un papel decisivo en los orígenes de la música. Además, la IB puede ser considerada como una forma espontáneamente en desarrollo, de dominio específico y de habilidad específica de cada especie. Aunque tanto el aprendizaje como el acoplamiento percepción/acción demostraron ser relevantes en su desarrollo, al menos un estudio mostró que el sistema auditivo de un recién nacido es capaz de detectar las periodicidades inducidas por un ritmo variable. Un estudio relacionado con adultos sugirió que las representaciones jerárquicas de los ritmos (inducción del metro) se forman automáticamente en el sistema auditivo humano. Vamos a reconsiderar estos hallazgos empíricos a la luz de la cuestión de si la inducción del beat y la inducción del metro son mecanismos cognitivos fundamentales.Título original del paper: “Without it no music: beat induction as a fundamental musical trait”. Publicado en: The Neurosciences and Music IV Learning and Memory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1252 (2012), 85-91. New York Academy of Sciences, ISSN 0077-8923. Publicado con permiso del autor en el Boletín de SACCoM.Facultad de Bellas Arte

Predicting Variation of Folk Songs: A Corpus Analysis Study on the Memorability of Melodies

We present a hypothesis-driven study on the variation of melody phrases in a collection of Dutch folk songs. We investigate the variation of phrases within the folk songs through a pattern matching method which detects occurrences of these phrases within folk song variants, and ask the question: do the phrases which show less variation have different properties than those which do? We hypothesize that theories on melody recall may predict variation, and as such, investigate phrase length, the position and number of repetitions of a given phrase in the melody in which it occurs, as well as expectancy and motif repetivity. We show that all of these predictors account for the observed variation to a moderate degree, and that, as hypothesized, those phrases vary less which are rather short, contain highly expected melodic material, occur relatively early in the melody, and contain small pitch intervals. A large portion of the variance is left unexplained by the current model, however, which leads us to a discussion of future approaches to study memorability of melodies

Detecting the temporal structure of sound sequences in newborn infants

Most high-level auditory functions require one to detect the onset and offset of sound sequences as well as registering the rate at which sounds are presented within the sound trains. By recording event-related brain potentials to onsets and offsets of tone trains as well as to changes in the presentation rate, we tested whether these fundamental auditory capabilities are functional at birth. Each of these events elicited significant event-related potential components in sleeping healthy neonates. The data thus demonstrate that the newborn brain is sensitive to these acoustic features suggesting that infants are geared towards the temporal aspects of segregating sound sources, speech and music perception already at birth

Haptics for the development of fundamental rhythm skills, including multi-limb coordination

This chapter considers the use of haptics for learning fundamental rhythm skills, including skills that depend on multi-limb coordination. Different sensory modalities have different strengths and weaknesses for the development of skills related to rhythm. For example, vision has low temporal resolution and performs poorly for tracking rhythms in real-time, whereas hearing is highly accurate. However, in the case of multi-limbed rhythms, neither hearing nor sight are particularly well suited to communicating exactly which limb does what and when, or how the limbs coordinate. By contrast, haptics can work especially well in this area, by applying haptic signals independently to each limb. We review relevant theories, including embodied interaction and biological entrainment. We present a range of applications of the Haptic Bracelets, which are computer-controlled wireless vibrotactile devices, one attached to each wrist and ankle. Haptic pulses are used to guide users in playing rhythmic patterns that require multi-limb coordination. One immediate aim of the system is to support the development of practical rhythm skills and multi-limb coordination. A longer-term goal is to aid the development of a wider range of fundamental rhythm skills including recognising, identifying, memorising, retaining, analysing, reproducing, coordinating, modifying and creating rhythms – particularly multi-stream (i.e. polyphonic) rhythmic sequences. Empirical results are presented. We reflect on related work, and discuss design issues for using haptics to support rhythm skills. Skills of this kind are essential not just to drummers and percussionists but also to keyboards players, and more generally to all musicians who need a firm grasp of rhythm