Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Music listening and personality'

Individual differences in the strength of music preference are among the most intricate psychological phenomena. While one person gets by very well without music, another person needs to listen to music every day and spends a lot of temporal and financial resources on listening to music, attending concerts, or buying concert tickets. Where do these differences come from? The hypothesis presented in this article is that the strength of music preference is mainly informed by the functions that music fulfills in people’s lives (e.g., to regulate emotions, moods, or physiological arousal; to promote self-awareness; to foster social relatedness). Data were collected with a diary study, in which 121 respondents documented the goals they tried to attain and the effects that actually occurred for up to 5 music-listening episodes per day for 10 successive days. As expected, listeners reporting more intense experience of the functional use of music in the past (1) had a stronger intention to listen to music to attain specific goals in specific situations and (2) showed a larger overall strength of music preference. It is concluded that the functional effectiveness of music listening should be incorporated in existing models and frameworks of music preference to produce better predictions of interindividual differences in the strength of music preference. The predictability of musical style/genre preferences is also discussed with regard to the present results.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-248).
When human listeners are confronted with musical sounds, they rapidly and automatically orient themselves in the music. Even musically untrained listeners have an exceptional ability to make rapid judgments about music from very short examples, such as determining the music's style, performer, beat, complexity, and emotional impact. However, there are presently no theories of music perception that can explain this behavior, and it has proven very difficult to build computer music-analysis tools with similar capabilities. This dissertation examines the psychoacoustic origins of the early stages of music listening in humans, using both experimental and computer-modeling approaches. The results of this research enable the construction of automatic machine-listening systems that can make human-like judgments about short musical stimuli. New models are presented that explain the perception of musical tempo, the perceived segmentation of sound scenes into multiple auditory images, and the extraction of musical features from complex musical sounds. These models are implemented as signal-processing and pattern-recognition computer programs, using the principle of understanding without separation. Two experiments with human listeners study the rapid assignment of high-level judgments to musical stimuli, and it is demonstrated that many of the experimental results can be explained with a multiple-regression model on the extracted musical features. From a theoretical standpoint, the thesis shows how theories of music perception can be grounded in a principled way upon psychoacoustic models in a computational-auditory-scene-analysis framework. Further, the perceptual theory presented is more relevant to everyday listeners and situations than are previous cognitive-structuralist approaches to music perception and cognition. From a practical standpoint, the various models form a set of computer signal-processing and pattern-recognition tools that can mimic human perceptual abilities on a variety of musical tasks such as tapping along with the beat, parsing music into sections, making semantic judgments about musical examples, and estimating the similarity of two pieces of music.
Eric D. Scheirer.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-139).
Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models the life cycle of listening, composing, and performing, turning the machine into an active musician, instead of simply an instrument. We accomplish this through an analysis-synthesis technique by combined perceptual and structural modeling of the musical surface, which leads to a minimal data representation. We introduce a music cognition framework that results from the interaction of psychoacoustically grounded causal listening, a time-lag embedded feature representation, and perceptual similarity clustering. Our bottom-up analysis intends to be generic and uniform by recursively revealing metrical hierarchies and structures of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Training is suggested for top-down un-biased supervision, and is demonstrated with the prediction of downbeat. This musical intelligence enables a range of original manipulations including song alignment, music restoration, cross-synthesis or song morphing, and ultimately the synthesis of original pieces.
by Tristan Jehan.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 2004.
Computer printout. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-03, Section: A, page: 0878. Adviser: Mary Goetze. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-223), abstract, and vita.

While emerging technologies such as interactive multimedia are increasingly being employed in computerised music instruction, understanding of participant music listening behaviours in interactive multimedia music instruction is currently very limited. With the aim of elucidating music listening behaviour, the central concern of this work is to identify and explain participant interactions with the audio components of interactive multimedia music instruction. The investigation employs a novel documentation procedure, which extends the application of digital audio recording technology, to provide a finely calibrated analysis of the audio activity of a sample of 20 undergraduate music education majors during individual sessions with two commercially-available interactive multimedia music instruction programs. Graphically-based Sound Activity Profiles, which the researcher developed specifically for the current investigation, characterise and summarise participant interactions with audio components, while an analysis of questionnaire responses and follow-up interview transcripts provides supplementary information that further explains participants' music listening behaviours. The results of the investigation show that music listening behaviours during the study sessions were highly variable. While extensive participant interaction with music examples occasionally reflected attentive music listening behaviours, many study sessions were characterised by brief, fragmentary music excerpts and lengthy periods of silence. Participants spent as little as five percent of their session time listening to music and as much as 88 percent of the session time in silence. A substantial number of the study cohort frequently interrupted the music examples they had activated. Participants' perceptions of the extent of their interaction with music examples were frequently inaccurate, as subjects often substantially overestimated the amount of session time they had spent listening to music. The study findings suggest that many interactive multimedia music instruction participants would benefit from interventions that elicit more extensive and prolonged interaction with music examples. Accordingly, recommendations include a call for research to develop and test software designs that incorporate automated monitoring of session audio activity so that dynamic on-screen information about music listening behaviour can be provided to interactive multimedia music instruction participants. Such information may encourage participants to modify inappropriate music listening behaviours.

Generative music, manifesting a perpetually new music which transcends the temporal limitations of both live and recorded music, presents us with continuously new possibilities and perspectives which in turn enable new modes of being. As specific compositional choices are automated, the sonic possibility space thus becomes the operative creative field. The new concern with structural possibilities as they come to presence yields a new listening ontology. Brian Eno’s specific manifestation of generative music has evolved along a distinctly technological trajectory of creativity. Through his own liminal position between popular and avant garde musical cultures, his ambient aesthetic has found a new mode of expression and materialization. The music is environmentally utilized as an absent presence rather than as an object of focus, and this position is preserved and mirrored textually in this inquiry; the music is not directly treated as an object of scrutiny but rather informs the text as a background, ambient presence. The experience of listening to generative music carries with it the possibility of transcending the duality of the subject–object relationship and its impedance of the transformative power of the aesthetic experience in its traditional aesthetic conception. Generative music thus inherently evades both traditional methods of analysis and traditional modes of aesthetic commentary. As the music foregrounds the moment in which reception occurs, while simultaneously existing as a background presence, it elicits a transformation in the way in which we perceive and conceptually order the sound, the environment, and our subsequent relation between the two. Generative music itself becomes a structure through which one can engage with a new way of being through listening, one in which we apprehend our creative capacity through being receptive to alterity. In this way, listening itself has an ontology, one which can only be revealed through new forms of textual engagement. Ontologically, Heidegger provides the language to explore a music that reorients us at the level of being. Phenomenologically, he examines and reveals the structures of being which manifest our earth and world, our very possibilities of and for being, and these structures are precisely those which are technologically represented in generative music. Aesthetically, Heidegger views the artwork as almost a generative system in itself—one which sets truth to work as it manifests a dynamic between revealing and concealing. Art and technology, and thus poiesis and techne respectively, are examined as orientations of being which have an ideal configuration for Heidegger that manifests at the level of thought. Thus, Heidegger’s specific philosophic configuration which is pre-eminently concerned with ontological structures and coming to presence provides a structure through which generative music can emerge and find resonance. Heidegger’s philosophy evolves and unfolds in new generative iterations through his student Hans Georg Gadamer, who extends the hermeneutic nature of being to include the process of mediation. This enables an exploration of the temporality of the moment of the aesthetic encounter—a point of convergence at which the perceiver or listener undergoes self-transcendence through entering the unifying and structuring force of play. Play manifests sonically in generative music, during which the preexisting temporal and subjective structures are reconfigured and transformed through technological mediation. Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas reveals new variations on Heidegger’s ontology as he explores notions of alterity and the ways in which these are formative of our subjectivity. As he delineates the moment of encounter with the Other, we recognize its constitutive elements as they play out technologically within the generative music listening encounter. As the notion of infinity is played out sonically through each passing generative iteration, it manifests a constant overflowing of itself in both thought and presence. This process arises through a dynamic movement between interiority and exteriority, in which an internal desire for the Other is ignited and perpetuated by the external, radical Other. This simultaneously internal and external encounter with alterity situates a fundamentally radical passivity, one which reflects our ontological situation which comes to be mirrored in the technological, generative manifestation of the same structural relations. The philosophical approach of the present inquiry is not a commentary on generative music; it is a demonstration of its genesis—embodying the generative motion between being and becoming which comprises generative music, rather than engaging with traditional textual commentary about music. Between the textual presence and musical absence, a space arises in which music can emerge not as an object but as a way of being into which we enter. In this way, the subject–object structure of traditional aesthetics is transcended in a move toward a new aesthetic which encompasses the larger truth at issue—that the process of configuration, combination, juxtaposition and subsequent emergence is the very point of the genesis of meaning, or the origin of truth. Thus, generative music embodies not only a technological but also a textual path to this moment in which we engage with the origins of our own ontological possibilities.

Klavierbearbeitungen waren für die Aufführungs- sowie Hörgewohnheiten des nichtprofessionellen Musikers des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts entscheidend. Nicht nur deckten sie den dringenden Bedarf an einer kosteneffektiven musikalischen Verbreitungstechnologie sondern ihre immense Popularität verursachte eine mit großen Umfang kommerzielle musikalische Verlagsindustrie. Diese Dissertation stellt zum ersten Mal die viele Seiten des Klavierarrangements wieder her, indem es als musikalisches Schaffen, als Konsumware und als Objekt vieler kritischen Diskurse analysiert wird. Es wird gezeigt, dass Arrangement---als musikalisches Schaffen---eine Methodensammlung statt einer in sich geschlossenen Technik ist. Walter Benjamins Übersetzungstheorie wird mit einer Analyse der ersten, in dem Robertsbridge Codex aus 1360 sich befindenden, Klavierbearbeitung verbunden, um vorzuschlagen, dass Arrangements als eine Auferstehung ihrer Originale gesehen werden sollen. Die wirtschaftliche Wichtigkeit der Klavierbearbeitung wird durch einer vom Computer errechneten statistischen Analyse dargestellt, indem es gezeigt wird, dass Arrangementmethoden in 30 Prozent der in deutschsprachigen Ländern zwischen 1829 und 1900 publizierten Klaviermusik vorkommt. Die kritischen Diskurse mit denen den Wert eines Arrangements geschätzt wurde werden auch rekonstruiert: Musikalische Lexika werden benutzt, um eine Begriffsgeschichte mehrerer Schlüsselbegriffe zu schreiben. Letztlich werden die Ähnlichkeiten des Hörgewohnheiten der Hörer des neunzehnten und des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts betont, damit neue Forschungsperspektiven eröffnet werden können.
Keyboard arrangement was central to both the performing and the listening habits of the nineteenth-century non-professional musician. Not only did it respond to the desperate need for a cheap technology of musical circulation, but its immense popularity helped create a commercial musical publishing industry of an unprecedented scale. This thesis reconstructs for the first time the many faces of the keyboard arrangement by analysing it simultaneously as a musical work, an economic commodity and the object of a number of critical discourses. As a musical work, arrangement is shown to be a collection of practices, rather than, and as has been previously assumed, a self-contained product. Walter Benjamin''s theory of translation is combined with an analysis of the first extant keyboard arrangement in the Robertsbridge Codex of 1360 to construct a model which suggests that arrangements should be understood as resurrections of the material of their originals. The economic significance of keyboard arrangement is demonstrated through a computer-aided statistical analysis which shows that on average practices of arrangement appeared in 30 percent of the keyboard music published in German-speaking countries from 1829 to 1900. Significant attention is given to an attempt to reconstruct the critical discourses by which arrangements were assessed: in particular, musical dictionaries are used to produce a Begriffsgeschichte of several key terms relating to the production of arrangements. Finally, throughout the thesis, emphasis is placed on the extent to which the kinds of listening experience that arrangement engendered show similarities with those offered by popular musical styles of today, thereby opening up new avenues for research.

The aim of this PhD is to better understand the place that music occupies in everyday, modern life. Specifically, the three sections of this thesis address the most notable aspects of music is experienced as a consequence of the digital revolution, namely [1] how music fits in with other contemporaneous activities; [2] how music is accessed and selected; and [3] a focus on music practices on social media.

The following dissertation combines reception history and technical analysis in a revisionist account of Russian orchestral music from 1850 to 1870. Through close readings of a wide range of reception materials, I recover little-known historical perspectives on this repertory, focusing particularly on ways in which Russian musicians engaged with transnational musical trends. These historical perspectives inform my analyses of compositions by Mikhail Glinka, Mily Balakirev, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, and Anton Rubinstein. In these analyses, I elucidate formal, harmonic, and orchestrational features that nineteenth-century Russian listeners found notable, such as Balakirev's disintegrating recapitulations, Dargomyzhsky's ubiquitous augmented triads, and Glinka's timbrai crescendos. This analytical approach allows me to reimagine this repertory as a variegated network of musical works, where each new composition is a reaction to existing ones, to domestic reception, and to pan-European aesthetic currents.

Chapter 1, entitled "Glinka's Three Models of Instrumental Music," traces the organicist discourse surrounding Glinka's orchestral fantasias, links the origins of this discourse to the writings of Adolf Bernhard Marx, and articulates the musical features that distinguish the three fantasias. Chapter 2, "Formal Disintegration in Balakirev's Overtures," portrays Balakirev's attempts to distinguish himself from Glinka as well as from established formal conventions of the time, primarily through creative reinterpretations of formal strategies employed by Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Franz Liszt. Chapter 3, "Satire,

We investigated the concurrent effects of arousal and encoding specificity as related to background music on associative memory accuracy. Extant literature suggested these factors affect memory, but their combined effect in musical stimuli was not clear and may affect memory differentially for young and older adults. Specifically, we sought to determine if music can be used as a mnemonic device to overcome the associative memory deficits typically experienced by healthy older adults. We used a paired-associates memory task in which young and older adults listened to either highly or lowly arousing music or to silence while simultaneously studying same gender face-name pairs. Participants' memory was then tested for these pairs while listening to either the same or different music selections. We found that young adults' memory performance was not affected by any of the music listening conditions. Music listening, however, was detrimental for older adults. Specifically, their memory performance was worse for all music conditions, particularly if the music was highly arousing. Young adults' pattern of results was not reflected in their subjective ratings of helpfulness; they felt that all music was helpful to their performance yet there was no indication of this in the results. Older adults were more aware of the detriment of music on their performance, rating some highly arousing music as less helpful than silence. We discuss possible reasons for this pattern and conclude that these results are most consistent with the theory that older adults' failure to inhibit processing of distracting task-irrelevant information, in this case background music, contributes to their elevated memory failures.

This thesis is about music, meaning and listening. It attempts to address the question of how music means to listeners by situating listeners at the centre of music analysis, examining the meanings that they construct when they experience musical situations. In its first chapter, the concept of meaning is interrogated and a model for understanding meaning, and how it is generated, is developed. My meaning-relations model proposes a conception of meaning as fundamentally subjective, relational and context-dependant, whilst arguing that shared human experiences can give rise to intersubjective meanings within communities. Using this model, I then analyse three musical situations, and the listening communities that experienced them, for the shared meanings that may have been generated therein. Each of these three analytical case studies focuses on a different community from different historical periods, but they are linked by the theme of the Passion of Christ, which is central to each of the musical situations in question. The first examines the Passions of J.S. Bach and the eighteenth-century Lutheran congregation that first experienced them as part of the Good Friday Vespers service, performed in the principal churches of Leipzig. The second explores the Anglo-Saxon monastic community in mid-eleventh- century Worcester, and the music and liturgy of the Veneration of the Cross ceremony practised there annually, also on Good Friday. The third focuses on the English National Opera's 2014 production of John Adams and Peter Sellars's The Gospel according to the Other Mary and its audience. The purpose of these case studies is to test whether the methodological exigencies of the meaning-relations model can be fruitfully applied to music analysis, in order to establish a style of analysis that focuses on listeners and the meanings they might construct from real-life experiences of music.

This thesis examines _The Desert Music_ by Steve Reich in the context of the composer's artistic perspective and advocates studying the subjective listening experience as a tool for musical analysis. Challenging conventional approaches in musicology and music theory, this work examines how a specific analytical approach in turn shapes the values assigned to that work. Systematic documentation of the author's listening experience is presented as an application of this premise and as a template to use in subsequent investigations of how other listeners respond to the work. The author concludes, mirroring the ideas implied in _The Desert Music_ itself, that instead of suppressing individual responses as opinions too myriad and divergent to be relevant, we should recognize that these reactions are products of shared cultural experience and that discussing them collectively may lead to powerful revelations about artistic meaning that may not emerge any other way.

This thesis locates historical discourses about music listening within the field of sound studies. Thus, the first three chapters illuminate the contiguities between sound studies and the so-called “sensory turn” introduced in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s. An important theoretical premise of the research is the historicity of folk and expert notions that are normally employed in describing the structuring of the human psyche, like “sensation” and “perception”, which are related to the distinction between “to hear” and “to listen”. Chapters 1 and 2 addresses the historical development of the notion of “cultural construction of the senses”, which has been predominant among sensory scholars; they trace the emergence of the anthropology of the senses and the anthropology of the emotions, discussing also some critical approaches influenced by phenomenology and the anthropology of the body. The narration stresses the importance of authors, notions and theoretical elaborations associated with audition. Chapter 3 reviews the historical emergence of an awareness of the historicity of the senses and emotions in Europe, starting from the contributions of the French Annales School. It also deals with theoretical and methodological problems related to the historiography of the senses and emotions, in particular with the difficulties in establishing a periodization. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 form the historical core of the thesis, which zooms in on modern times, from the 15th century to the second half of the 19th century, that is until the publication of Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863). These chapters try to build a bridge between the history of aesthetics and the history of science by combining different thematic threads: the history of anatomical and physiological research into the ear and audition, the history of acoustics and the archaeology of audio technologies, and historical discourses on music listening. Chapter 4 presents the main disciplines that have historically dealt with hearing: physics music, rhetoric, medicine and physiology, psychology, and the convergence of electroacoustics, electrophysiology and psychoacoustics in 20th-century hearing science. It provides a short introduction to their history and the specificity of their approaches to hearing, stressing their connections to music and pointing at problems in the historicization of audition. While the chapter initially considers ancient and medieval notions of hearing and the senses in relation to music, it focuses mainly on early modern discourses on music and audition, including advances in anatomical and physiological knowledge, the relationship between rhetoric and music in Renaissance humanism, and the key role of music and the study of the senses in the establishment of the experimental programme of the so-called “Scientific Revolution”. The chapter offers a glimpse of aesthetic and scientific discourses on the senses, passions, sound, hearing and music until the end of the 17th century, when Sauveur proposed the foundation of acoustics. Chapter 5 deals with the 18th-century emergence of the concept of sensibility, with had roots both in Locke’s empiricism and in physiological research on muscle and nerve irritability, but ultimately stressed the connection between the senses and aesthetic and moral sentiments. It reviews important works of the French philosophes (Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau) on the differentiation and education of the senses, the sense of hearing and music aesthetics, as well as Rameau’s theory of harmony within the context of the mathematical development of acoustics in the 18th century. It also reviews some influential works on music aesthetics, and traces the transformation of musical taste and listening attitudes that took place in France and Germany towards the end of the 18th century, when hearing was increasingly defined as an “inner sense” and the notion of musical connoisseurs (Kenner) was formed. Chapter 6 briefly tackles on the acoustic research of Chladni and reports on the 19th-century development of new scientific instruments, including new musical instruments, which contributed to the refinement of scientific practices related to the measuring and evaluation of audition. This happened in parallel with the institutionalization of otology as a medical speciality, in the second half of the century, which is also narrated. The chapter then turns to sensory physiology and the pioneering work of Helmholtz, who developed physiological acoustics. His concern with delimiting the fields of aesthetics and science is presented here side by side with Hanslick’s efforts to define The Beautiful in Music, which would shape the notion of “absolute music”. The thesis closes with a narration of the reshaping of sensation by the new experimental psychology, pointing thus towards the beginnings of the psychology of music.
Aquesta tesi situa els discursos sobre la història de l’escolta musical en el context del camp, relativament recent, dels estudis de so (sound studies). Els tres primers capítols es proposen il·luminar la contigüitat entre els estudis de so i l’anomenat “gir sensorial” (sensory turn), que es va introduir en les ciències humanes i socials a partir dels anys 80. La investigació parteix de la historicitat de les nocions que fem servir habitualment per descriure l’estructura de la psique humana; nocions utilitzades per estudiosos i no estudiosos, com ara “sensació” i “percepció”, que sovint s’invoquen per explicar la diferència entre “sentir” i “escoltar”. Els capítols 1 i 2 s’ocupen del desenvolupament històric de la noció de “construcció cultural dels sentits”, que ha estat tan important dins del “gir sensorial”, i en aquest context expliquen l’emergència de l’antropologia dels sentits i les emocions, fent referència també a les crítiques formulades des de l’antropologia del cos i la fenomenologia. La narrativa d’aquests capítols subratlla el paper dins d’aquest procés històric d’autors, nocions i elaboracions teòriques relacionades amb l’audició i formulades des d’una comprensió d’aquesta. El capítol 3 repassa l’aparició en la història europea d’una consciència de la historicitat dels sentits i les emocions, a partir sobretot de les aportacions de l’escola francesa dels Annales. Tracta també alguns problemes teòrics i metodològics que planteja la historiografia dels sentits i les emocions, en especial les dificultats per establir-ne una periodització, també en el cas de l’audició. Els capítols 4, 5 i 6 formen el nucli històric de la tesi, que se centra sobretot en la modernitat, des del segle XV fins a la segona meitat del XIX, és a dir, fins a la publicació de l’obra de Helmholtz Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863), un text clau en la història de l’acústica i la fisiologia, que va posar també en qüestió la relació entre l’aproximació científica i estètica a la música i l’audició. Aquests tres capítols volen connectar la història de l’estètica i la història de la ciència combinant diferents línies temàtiques: la història de la investigació anatòmica i fisiològica sobre l’oïda i l’audició, la història de l’acústica i l’arqueologia de les tecnologies auditives, i els discursos històrics, en clau estètica, sobre l’escolta musical.
Esta tesis sitúa los discursos sobre la historia de la escucha música en el contexto del campo, relativamente reciente, de los estudios de sonido (sound studies). Los tres primeros capítulos se proponen iluminar la contigüidad entre los estudios de sonido y el llamado “giro sensorial” (sensory turn), que se introdujo en las ciencias humanas y sociales a partir de los años 80. La investigación parte de la historicidad de las nociones que utilizamos habitualmente para describir la estructura de la psique humana; nociones utilizadas por estudiosos y no estudiosos, tales como “sensación” y “percepción”, que precisamente se invocan a menudo para explicar la diferencia entre “sentir” y “escuchar”. Los capítulos 1 y 2 se ocupan del desarrollo histórico de la noción de “construcción cultural de los sentidos”, que tan importante ha sido dentro del “giro sensorial”, y en este contexto explican la emergencia de la antropología de los sentidos y las emociones, haciendo referencia también a las críticas formuladas desde la antropología del cuerpo y la fenomenología. La narrativa de estos capítulos subraya el papel dentro de este proceso histórico de autores, nociones y elaboraciones teóricas relacionadas con la audición y formuladas desde una comprensión de la misma. El capítulo 3 repasa la aparición en la historia europea de una conciencia de la historicidad de los sentidos y las emociones, a partir sobre todo de las aportaciones de la escuela francesa de los Annales. Trata también algunos problemas teóricos y metodológicos que plantea la historiografía de los sentidos y las emociones, en especial las dificultades para establecer una periodización, también en el caso de la audición. Los capítulos 4, 5 y 6 forman el núcleo histórico de la tesis, que se centra sobre todo en la modernidad, desde el siglo XV hasta la segunda mitad del XIX, es decir, hasta la publicación de la obra de Helmholtz Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863), un texto clave en la historia de la acústica y la fisiología, que puso también en cuestión la relación entre la aproximación científica y estética a la música y la audición. Estos tres capítulos pretenden conectar la historia de la estética y la historia de la ciencia combinando diferentes líneas temáticas: la historia de la investigación anatómica y fisiológica sobre el oído y la audición, la historia de la acústica y la arqueología de las tecnologías auditivas, y los discursos históricos, en clave estética, sobre la escucha musical.

The personality of musicians, artists, and other creative persons is of considerable interest to researchers and educators who seek to identify traits associated with musical behaviors. Personality traits can influence music behaviors such as instrument choice, ensemble choice, practice habits, and musical experience, which may contribute to continued music participation. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships between personality type, music ensemble section, instrument choice (vocal or instrumental), and musical experience in college students and individuals who choose to continue participation after college. Few studies have concentrated on personality characteristics of ensemble members at the collegiate level and after formal education ceases. This is particularly relevant as personality characteristics may not be stable with age. This study examined the following questions: 1) To what extent do personality traits (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience) relate to ensemble choice (instrumental, vocal no musical ensemble participation) and gender?; and 2) To what extent do personality traits (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience) relate to ensemble section (e.g., brass, alto voice)? Participants were given a survey containing demographic questions and the Big Five Personality Inventory IPIP (Goldberg, 1992). Results showed that vocalists scored higher in Extroversion and Agreeableness compared to instrumentalists, and Instrumentalists scored higher in Neuroticism than vocalists. These results are consistent with previous research findings. This study has many implications for ensemble directors, such as rehearsal structure and repertoire choice. Music educators could also benefit from this knowledge when developing lesson plans and group assignments. Understanding different personality traits would also help ensemble members with communication within the ensemble.

To date, very few studies have been conducted focusing on ratings of music and music listening experience of hearing aid (HA) users. This study aimed to collect more detailed and descriptive information via a questionnaire, on the music listening experience and ratings of musical sounds from postlingually deafened adults. The following hypotheses were posed: (i) ratings for music from HA users who have been assessed for a cochlear implant (HA-CI group) will be worse than those who have not been assessed for a CI (HA-NCI group); and (ii) HA users with a moderate or worse hearing loss (Moderate+ subgroup) will provide lower ratings for music than those with a mild hearing loss (Mild subgroup). A questionnaire by She (2008), was modified for this study, and subsequently called the University of Canterbury Music Listening Questionnaire – HA version (UCMLQ_HA). The questionnaire was divided into the following seven sections: music listening and music background, sound quality ratings, music styles, music preferences, music recognition, factors affecting music listening enjoyment, and a music training programme. Thirteen HA-CI recipients and 98 HA-NCI recipients returned the questionnaire. The HA-NCI group was divided into two subgroups: mild hearing loss (n = 51), and moderate or worse hearing loss (Moderate+; n = 47). Essentially findings were consistent with hypothesis one, but only partially consistent with hypothesis two. The HA-CI group provided lower ratings for ‘pleasantness’ and ‘naturalness’ of instruments (p = 0.007), and found music styles to be less ‘pleasant’ (p < 0.001) than the HA-NCI group. For musical styles, the HA-CI group preferred solo performers whereas the HA-NCI group preferred groups of performers. In addition to ratings of music, the HA-CI group provided significantly lower ratings for music listening (p = 0.001), and overall music enjoyment (p = 0.021) than the HA-NCI group. For the comparisons between the Mild and Moderate+ subgroups, the Mild subgroup found Instruments to sound significantly ‘less noisy’ (p < 0.001) and ‘less sharp’ (p < 0.001) than the Moderate+ subgroup. The Moderate+ subgroup provided higher ratings for overall enjoyment of listening to music with HAs than the Mild subgroup (p = 0.044). Both subgroups rated the drum kit (the lowest rated Instrument) to be significantly less pleasant and less natural than all other Instruments. It was also found that all musical styles were significantly more pleasant than Pop/Rock. There were similarities between the groups for music preferences; the male singer was significantly preferred over female singers (p = 0.021), and low-pitched instruments were significantly preferred over high-pitched instruments (p = 0.04). Classical music was also selected as the style that sounded the best with their HAs and listened to the most often. Almost all of the respondents indicated that they would like music in general to sound it would to those with normal hearing (97.1%). Close to 30% indicated that they would be interested in an MTP and would like it to focus on a wide range of music and feature commonly known tunes. In addition, training sessions should consist of two 30 minute sessions per week. Overall this study indicates that ratings of music differ with level of hearing loss to some degree. The general consensus was that music did not sound as they would expect it to sound to a person with normal hearing, and that respondents would like to enjoy listening to music more.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of visual stimuli on music listening skills in pre-service elementary teachers. Visual Stimuli in this study refers to the presentation of arts elements in selected visually projected images of paintings. Music listening skills are defined as those skills needed to identify and interpret musical excerpts. A Pretest-Posttest Control-group Design was used in this study. Subjects were pre-service elementary general educators enrolled in a large southern university (N=93). Students from intact classes were randomly placed into either the experimental group or the control group. The treatment consisted of six music listening lessons over a two-week period with each group receiving the identical teaching protocol with the exception of the use of paintings with the experimental group. Listening instruction emphasized the identification of melodic contour, instrumentation, texture, rhythm and expressive elements of the compositions. The Teacher Music Listening Skills Test (TMLST) was constructed by the investigator and administered before and after the treatment. The TMLST was designed to assess music listening skills in adult non-musicians. Results indicate that the group receiving visual stimuli in the form of paintings scored significantly higher on listening skills (pandlt;.01) than the control group which received no visual stimuli in the form of visually projected images of paintings. There was an instruction effect on both preference and familiarity of the musical pieces for both the control group and the experimental group.

The research aims to propose a narrative of the experience of listening and to provide some first examples of its possible application. This is done in three parts. Part One, “Words”, aims to methodologically frame the narrative by discussing the limits and requirements of a theory of listening. After discussing the difficulties of building an objective characterization of the listening experience, the research proposes that any theorization on listening can only express a point of view that is implied by descriptions of listening both in linguistic terms and in the data they involve. The analysis of theories about listening is therefore conducted through a grammatical path that unfolds by following the syntactic roles of the words involved in theoretical claims about listening. Starting from the problem of synonymy, the analysis moves around the subject, the object, adjectives and adverbs to finally discuss the status of the references of the discourses on listening. The Part One ends by claiming the need to reintroduce the subject in theories about listening and proposes to attribute the epistemological status of the narrative to any discourse about the listening experience. This implies that any proposed narrative must substitute its truth-value with the instrumental value that is expressed by the idea of “viability”. The Part Two, “Patterns”, is devoted to introducing a narrative of listening. This is first informally introduced in terms of the experience of a distinction within the sonic flow. After an intermission dedicated to connecting the idea of distinction to Gaston Bachelard’s metaphysics of time, the narrative is finally presented as a dialectics among three ways of organizing perceptive distinctions. Three perceptive modes of distinctions are presented as a basic mechanism that is responsible for articulating the sonic continuum in a complex structure of expectations and reactions, in terms of patterns, that is constantly renewed under the direction of statistical learning. The final chapter of the Part Two aims to briefly apply the narrative of pattern structures to dealing with the experience of noise. Part Three aims to show the “viability” of the proposed narrative of listening. First, a method for analysing music by listening is discussed. Then, a second chapter puts the idea of pattern structures in contact with music composition, as a framework that can be applied to data sonification, installations, music production and to the didactics of composition. Finally, the last chapter is devoted to the discussion of the idea of “soundscape” and “identity formation”, in order to show the potential of applying the proposed narrative to the context of cultural and social studies.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of Mindful Listening Instruction on Music Listening Sensitivity and Music Listening Enjoyment. The type of mindfulness investigated in this study was of the social-psychological type, which shares both commonalities with and distinctions from meditative mindfulness. Enhanced context awareness, openness to new information, situation in the present, awareness of novel distinctions, and awareness of multiple possible perspectives (cognitive flexibility) are components of social-psychological mindfulness. A pretest-posttest control group design was used for this study. Two different age groups of students were studied: fourth-grade students (N = 42) and undergraduate non-music major college students (N = 48). The fourth-grade participants in this study were selected from an elementary school in a large city in the Northeastern United States. The college students were selected from a large university in the Southeastern United States. Participants were randomized into either the experimental or control group. Gordon’s Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation and Advanced Measures of Music Audiation were used as a pretest for fourth-grade students and college students, respectively. The results showed no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups. Student demographical information was also collected and reported. The treatment consisted of 10 lessons for fourth-grade students. Five of the 10 lessons were used with the college students. For each age level, participants in both groups, Mindful Listening and Control, received instruction using listening-map-based and non-listening-map-based lessons from the Share the Music textbook series. Students in the Mindful Listening groups also received listening instructions designed to promote mindful listening. Music Listening Sensitivity was measured using the phrasing test from the Sensitivity portion of Gordon’s Music Aptitude Profile (MAP-P), as well as the researcher-created Anderson Test of Music Listening Sensitivity (ATMLS). Music Listening Enjoyment was measured using students’ ratings of their Listening Enjoyment after each lesson on a seven-point Likert-type scale. Results indicated that Mindful Listening Instruction yielded higher scores, which were statistically significant (at α = .05), for Music Listening Sensitivity (as measured by both the ATMLS and the MAP-P) and Music Listening Enjoyment for fourth-grade and college-student participants.

Sounds are often experienced as being spatially higher or lower in congruence with their frequency ‘height’ (i.e. pitch register). The term ‘spectral spatiality’ refers to this impression of spatial height and vertical depth as evoked by the perceived occupancy of evolving sound-shapes (spectromorphologies) within the continuum of audible frequencies. Chapters One and Two draw upon a diverse body of literature to explore the cognitive and physiological processes involved in human spatial hearing in general, and spectral spatiality in particular. Thereafter the potential pertinence of a spectral space consciousness in the acousmatic listening experience is highlighted, particularly with regard to more abstract acousmatic contexts where sounds do not directly invoke familiar source identities. Chapters Three and Four further elaborate aspects of spectral space consciousness and propose a terminological framework for discussing musical contexts in terms of their spectral space design. Consequently, it is argued that in acousmatic music, spectral spatiality must be considered as an inseparable aspect of spatiality in general, although its pertinence only becomes directly highlighted in particular musical contexts. The recurring theme in this thesis is that, in acousmatic music, 'space' is not a parameter but a multifaceted quality that is inherent to all sounds. As well as providing an analytical framework for discussing spatiality in acousmatic music, this thesis highlights the compositional potentials offered by spectral spatiality, particularly in relation to the creation of perspectival image in multichannel works. For instance, the possibility of (re)distributing the spectral components of a sound around the listener (circumspectral image) is discussed in context, and a software tool is presented that enables an intuitive and experimental approach to the composition of circumspectral sounds for 6 and 8 channel loudspeaker configurations. This thesis is useful for both composers and analysts interested in aspects of spatiality in acousmatic music. It also offers some insight into spectral space consciousness in non-acousmatic music, and may therefore contribute towards a more general understanding of the nature of our spatial experience in music.

In a world where information, entertainment and e-commerce are growing rapidly in terms of volume and options, it can be challenging for individuals to find what they want. Search engines and recommendation systems have emerged as solutions, guiding the users. A typical example of this is Spotify, a music streaming company that utilises users listening data and other derived metrics to provide personalised music recommendation. Spotify has a hypothesis that external factors affect users listening preferences and that some of these external factors routinely affect the users, such as workout routines and commuting to work. This work aims to find time- based listening habits in users’ music listening history to decrease the entropy in the data, resulting in a better understanding of the users. While this work primarily targets listening habits, the method can, in theory, be applied on any time series-based dataset. Listening histories were split into hour vectors, vectors where each element represents the distribution of a label/genre played during an hour. The hour vectors allowed for a good representation of the data independent of the volume. In addition, it allowed for clustering, making it possible to find hours where similar music was played. Hour slots that routinely appeared in the same cluster became a profile, highlighting a habit. In the final implementation, a user is represented by a profile vector allowing different profiles each hour of a week. Several users were profiled with the proposed approach and evaluated in terms of decrease in Shannon entropy when profiled compared to when not profiled. On average, user entropy dropped by 9% with highs in the 50% and a small portion of users not experiencing any decrease. In addition, the profiling was evaluated by measuring cosine similarity across users listening history, resulting in a correlation between gain in cosine similarity and decrease in entropy. In conclusion, users become more predictable and interpretable when profiled. This knowledge can be used to understand users better or as a feature for recommender systems and other analysis.
I en värld där information, underhållning och e-handel har vuxit kraftig i form av volym och alternativ, har individer fått det svårare att hitta det som de vill ha. Sökmotorer och rekommendationssystem har vuxit fram som lösningar till detta problem och hjälpt individer att hitta rätt. Ett typexempel på detta är Spotify, en musikströmningstjänst som använder sig av användares lyssningsdata för att rekommendera musik och annan personalisering. Spotify har en hypotes att externa faktorer påverkar användares lyssningspreferenser, samt att vissa av dessa faktorer påverkar användaren rutinmässigt som till exempel träningsrutiner och pendlade till jobbet. Målet med detta arbete är att hitta tidsbaserade lyssningsvanor i användares musiklyssningshistorik för att sänka Shannon entropin i data, resulterande i en bättre förståelse av användarna. Arbetet är primärt gjort för att hitta lyssningsvanor, men metoden kan i teorin appliceras på valfri godtycklig tidsserie dataset. Lyssningshistoriken delades in i timvektorer, radvektorer med längden x där varje element representerar fördelningen av en etikett/ genre som spelas under en timme. Timvektorerna skapade möjligheten till att använda klusteranalys som användes för att hitta timmar där liknande musik spelats. Timvektorer som rutinmässigt hamnade i samma kluster blev profiler, som användes för att markera vanor. I den slutgiltiga produkten representeras en användare av en profilvektor som tillåter en användare att ha en profil för varje timme i veckan. Ett flertal användare blev profilerade med den föreslagna metoden och utvärderade i form av sänkning i entropi när de blev profilerade gentemot när de inte blev profilerade. I genomsnitt sänktes användarnas entropi med 9%, med några över användare 50%, samt ett fåtal som inte fick någon sänknings alls. Profilering blev även utvärderad genom att mäta cosinuslikhet över en användares lyssningshistorik. Detta resulterade i en korrelation mellan ökning i cosinuslikhet och sänkning i entropi vid användandet av profilering. Slutsatsen som kan dras är att användare blir mera förutsägbara och tolkbara när de har blivit profilerade. Denna kunskap kan användas till att förstå användare bättre eller användas som en del av ett rekommendationssystem eller annan analys.

This thesis discusses the possibility of combining music and images through the use of metadata. Test subjects from different usability tests say they are interested in seeing images of the band or artist they are listening too. Lyrics matching the actual song are also something they would like to see. As a result an application for cellphones is created with Flash Lite which shows that it is possible to listen to music and automatically get images from Flickr and lyrics from Lyrictracker which match the music and show them on a cellphone.

Within the field of audience studies it has been acknowledged that audience experience is altered by the presence of other listeners (Pitts 2005) and this can form audience communities (Pitts & Spencer 2008; Benzecry 2009, 2011). However, the notion of audience community is not fully accepted, with Phillip Auslander suggesting live audiences partake in no more than ‘common consumption’ (2008: 64). Previous authors have called for more understanding of classical music communities and how effectively a newcomer may integrate with them (Pitts & Spencer 2008: 237). Currently, there has been little research investigating the nature of listening communities formed around a concert series and particularly from its origins in a new venue. Through the findings of two case studies, this thesis explores the formation of a community within a concert audience at new venue in Doncaster and investigates the experiences of attenders under the age of 25, underrepresented in the regular makeup of classical music audiences in Sheffield. These two case studies build up an understanding of the different perspectives and needs of regular and new audiences for live chamber music. Also investigated through both case studies are the relationships between audience member and performance space. Moreover, the thesis considers how cultural buildings, in this case concert halls, may influence the way in which people feel about the place they live. Central to all the research questions in this thesis is an interrogation of the current methodological toolkit used to understand audience experience, and the research includes a trial of new visual methodologies that aim to increase understanding of both regular and new audiences’ experiences. The core audience for classical music concert series show their support by being loyal to the arts organisation that provides the series, to the resident musicians and by showing knowledge of the art form and of the concert culture at a particular venue (Pitts & Spencer 2008). In my first case study, I am interested in placing the ‘aficionados’ of such an audience community into a populist sphere by analysing their behaviours in line with popular culture and viewing them as ‘fans’. By understanding classical music audiences in this way, comparisons can be made with other musical communities in popular culture, which becomes particularly interesting when considering people that are choosing not to associate with this community. The critical lens of popular fan culture is used in this thesis to explore the inner workings of a classical music listening community and the fan-like behaviours the aficionados often perform. Conversely, by understanding a classical music audience as a working ‘listening community’, I question what impact their ‘fan’ behaviours may have for those demographic groups that are underrepresented in the regular audience. For my second case study, the particular group chosen is younger people under the age of 25 (referred to as U25s), who are typically far away from this culture in their musical tastes and experiences but who often have a strong musical identity themselves. Through arts-informed research methods, this case study investigates the views of U25s who have differing levels of musical and cultural knowledge but do not regularly attend classical concerts. I am interested in the perceptions these U25s have about classical music concert culture and the pre-existing community of listeners and when exposed to the culture of classical concert going, how well they can integrate. With increasing cuts to funding in the arts it is possible that arts organisations will become more reliant upon private donations and the financial security of its core ‘fan’ base, so a greater understanding of these people and their relationship with concert culture is important. In contrast, with a large demographic group currently absent from regular audiences, it is also necessary to consider how the relevance of classical music may be grown for younger people and the live presentation of this art form preserved. In order to most accurately answer both of these audience development questions, the best possible understanding of audience experience is necessary through the application of new methods to this enquiry.

This study explored teacher and student perspectives on music listening for student engagement through semi-structured interviews. Two major findings are reported: music may be used to focus and motivate students during individual and non-challenging tasks; and, individual music listening can reduce classroom distractions.

Thesis (M.A)--University of Rochester, 1992.
Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references: leaves 80-82. Digitized version available online via the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music http://hdl.handle.net/1802/1546

Training can enable performers to express music in a personal and emotional way while communicating aesthetic impressions to an audience. Little research has been done on the emotive experiences of performing musicians listening to their own performances. The main goal of this study was to develop a reliable way to investigate emotive content of such experiences through a combination of listening profiles and continuous measurement. This empirical, methodological study used a mixed-method design. Responses from formally and informally trained musicians were tested. The methodology consists of two parts: listening profiles (Part I), and the continuous measurement of self-reported emotional response to music (Part II), supported by interviews. Part I consists of a demographic questionnaire, a listening test and a personality test. Part II consists of a computerised questionnaire with four questions: 1) word sorting, 2) word, colours, and facial expressions checklists, which participants use to indicate their emotional responses while the music plays, 3) free description, and 4) rating scales. Data was obtained during three test periods. Part I results revealed that personality, illness, preferences, and psychological factors influence the emotive content of listening experiences. Participants’ response time and manner of word sorting was also supportive of their profiles. Part II results revealed that listeners pay attention to both structural and performance elements as well as emotive content in both prescribed and personal musical tracks. Only a few participants were able to identify the predetermined emotion of the prescribed musical tracks. Participants’ experiences seemed to be influenced by training and personal preferences. Listening to their own recorded performances, informally trained participants were able to focus progressively less on performance elements and more on emotive content, while formally trained participants seemed to focus progressively more on performance elements, and less on emotive content.
Thesis (MMus)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

This thesis will describe a set of interactive systems developed for a range of musical styles and instruments, all of which attempt to participate in a concert by means of audio signal analysis alone. Machine listening, being the simulation of human peripheral auditory abilities, and the hypothetical modelling of central auditory and cognitive processes, is utilised in these systems to track musical activity. Whereas much of this modelling is inspired by a bid to emulate human abilities, strategies diverging from plausible human physiological mechanisms are often employed, leading to matching capabilities which exceed or differ from the human counterparts. Technology is described which detects events from an audio stream, further analysing the discovered events (typically notes) for perceptual features of loudness, pitch, attack time and timbre. In order to exploit processes that underlie common musical practice, beat tracking is investigated, allowing the inference of metrical structure which can act as a co-ordinative framework for interaction.  Psychological experiments into human judgement of perceptual attack time and beat tracking to ecologically valid stimuli clarify the parameters and constructs that should most appropriately be instantiated in the computational systems. All the technology produced is intended for the demanding environment of realtime concert use. In particular, an algorithmic audio splicing and analysis library called BBCut2 is described, designed with appropriate processing and scheduling facilities for realtime operation. Proceeding to outlines of compositional applications, novel interactive music systems are introduced which have been tested in real concerts. These are evaluated by interviews with the musicians who performed with them, and an assessment of their claims to agency in the sense of ‘autonomous agents’. The thesis closes by considering all that has been built, and the possibilities for future advances allied to artificial intelligence and signal processing technology.

This thesis presents the development and implementation of a proof-of-concept study testing music listening’s capacity to reduce subjective and physiological symptoms of anxiety in a situation analogous to an anxiety disorder. This interdisciplinary thesis draws on both clinical psychology and music psychology literature to present a conceptualisation for music listening in the treatment of anxiety disorders. In preparation for the proof-of-concept study, criteria for optimal stimuli were synthesised from the music psychology literature, two optimal stimuli were selected, and an anxiety induction protocol was developed to model the worry-based nature of an anxiety disorder. The two stimuli selected were ‘The Swan’, from Carnival of the Animals, by Camille Saint-Saëns, and a combination of ‘Dawn’ and ‘The Secret’, by Dario Marianelli, from the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice. In the anxiety induction protocol, participants were told that they would be asked to give a presentation in front of other participants and experimenters (whom they had not yet seen), and that this presentation would be assessed. While they awaited the presentation, participants were asked to do a mental visualisation exercise, which involved thinking about any previous public speaking experience that had made them feel nervous. Participants were given headphones with either music or white noise while they completed this exercise. The proof-of-concept study was conducted with a general population, with participants (n = 58) randomised to listen to either music or white noise during the anxiety induction protocol. Subjective anxiety (as per the short form of the state scale of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory, or STAI-SF) and physiological arousal (as per pulse rate and skin resistance) were measured. Physiological arousal measures were taken for one minute at baseline (time 1), for one minute when the participant had been introduced to the task and were reading through the mental visualisation exercise (time 2), and while the participants completed the mental visualisation exercise, and music or white noise was playing (time 3). Subjective anxiety scores were obtained immediately after each physiological time point. Results showed that subjective anxiety and physiological arousal rose significantly in response to the anxiety induction protocol, and that subjective anxiety and pulse rate decreased significantly in response to the music but remained the same for those who listened to white noise.

Inharmonicity is a concept implicit in acoustic systems that explains the production of non-linear (non-integer) harmonics. While inharmonicity in and of itself is not always audible per se, its effects are no less than creating the basis for timbre and differential sound discrimination. In other words, inharmonic and non-linear signals are essential for human audition, yet they appear and disappear almost instantaneously. This paper attempts to elucidate the wide-reaching effects of inharmonicity and non-linear dynamic systems in a concrete sense by examining their relationships to the listening body and mind, as well as in an abstract sense in considering the theoretical implications of noise and non-linearity on the process of thought, potentiality, and subjective meaning-making.

The paper opens with several accounts related to foregrounding historical ideas about the relationship between sound and body, leading up to a contemporary understanding of sound in the sense of physics and acoustics. Therein, a modern account of inharmonicity and perception is given through current research in psychoacoustics, psychology, and dynamic systems. Finally, the tactic of ‘creative listening’ is introduced following from a discussion of the relationships between noise and thought in 20^th- and 21^st century aesthetics and philosophy.

Summary Personality psychology is one of the most popular ranges of psychology today. There’re many different theories about how personality influences your thinking and behavior. The general thought among psychologists today is that personality is something that arises from within and stays somewhat similar throughout life – although some dimensions of personality can also change and develop. Genetics, environment and personal experiences each have an influence on your personality and its development. For musicians, personality affects for example what kind of colleague you are and how you like to work. It even has an impact on your stage charisma. Even so, perhaps one of the biggest things that tells about a musician’s personality is the reason why they’ve chosen music as a career. This reflection is about the different aspects of your personality and what kind of role they play in your practicing process, and in what way is your performance influenced by your personality, based on psychological research and my experiences with Sibelius Violin Concerto. Since personality also has a big impact on many other aspects in life, it’s definitely one aspect that shapes your performances and your career. Learning about your personality can help you to better understand yourself and your preferred working habits, and you can even learn to use this information for improving yourself as a colleague and a musician. Keywords: Personality, Psychology, Jean Sibelius, Violin Concerto Op. 47

A common task facing college freshman and sophomore music majors is the acquisition of recognition ability for a core repertoire of music literature. It seems plausible that interactive computer technology holds great promise for the development of this particular skill. To test this premise, students from an undergraduate music literature class of approximately 80 members were chosen to participate in a study. Students in the experimental group (n = 17) utilized a computerized listening station (employing researcher-designed instructional programming) to determine if such use would augment the ability of those Ss to identify selected works in a subsequent recognition task, while students in a control group utilized a typical repeated hearing strategy. A Likert-scale questionnaire administered prior to the study served as a pretest and assessed the students' knowledge of composers and works included in the study. No significant difference between the groups was found. At the conclusion of the study, a recognition test was administered which required students to identify composers, works, movements of works, and theme groups of the works included in the study. Ss in the experimental group had a significantly higher score (p < .001) on the posttest than the control group. The results of the study suggest that use of such a listening station improves the ability of undergraduate music majors to develop a recognition ability for basic music repertoire, and possibly decreases the amount of time needed for the process. Recommendations include: (1) expanding study sample sizes in subsequent studies, (2) widening the music example pool, (3) expanding the study to include more dependent variables in the analysis, and (4) including more detailed time analysis in subsequent studies.

This study investigated the use of music listening maps to help learning and the preferences of second graders for orchestral music. Subjects were a population of four 2nd grade classes, and were randomly divided into two groups. The investigation was a counterbalanced, post-test only design, lasting for three consecutive classes. Two treatments/lessons were presented and a third lesson was a review. In Treatment 1 Group I used listening maps first, while Group II received instruction without listening maps. In Treatment 2, the order was reversed. Two post-tests and a comprehensive test were administered. An affective survey was administered after the treatments, measuring student preference and attitude. When listening maps were presented, scores were significantly higher. It did not matter whether the listening maps were presented first or not. Results of the survey show student preference will increase with music listening maps.

This thesis discusses my new sound drawing practice and its development throughout the course of my practice-based PhD research at Brunel School of Arts. “Sound drawing” is a general term that I have chosen to use to describe a body of visual artworks that instigated the composition of soundscapes as well as the design of an audiovisual performance instrument. I will start by giving a clear picture of the musical and visual arts background that led up to my current sound drawing practice. Then I will go through the individual works created between 2008 and 2012 that have contributed the most to the development of sound drawing. I will discuss how performance sketches ... (2009) instigated the shift from composing graphic scores to sound drawing when I was confronted with drawing my graphic scores in real time. In 31 (sound) studies on paper (2010-2011), the sound drawing process began to mature through a closer examination of the visual imagery, drawing materials, physical gestures and the overall sound production. As I started to develop solo performance projects based on my sound drawing practice, I looked back to the compositions projection-reaction (2008-2009) and de (re)construction (2009) which suggested how I might return to using the medium of video. My most recent work, drawalineandlistentoit and R=15 (2012), seems to constitute a point where all the different strands in my works of the preceding four years come together to produce an intricate collaboration between sound, image and performer. Working with the sound drawings within a performance context, a registration of the sonic event occurs, a form of score is created – and at the same time sound is mixing and moving into the space through the audio software Plogue Bidule, while a visual projection is constructed in realtimev through the VPT software.

My composition, Maitreya, combines vocal synthesis techniques with the theoretical concept of Deep Listening. This essay discusses developments in vocal synthesis and digital signal processing (DSP) software that can be performed in real-time and contributed to my composition. Deep Listening involves meditative practices to make one more aware of sounds that are both audible and inaudible. The composition utilizes recordings of male and female voices that recite poetry, chant, and are phase-vocoded. The composition also features various DSP techniques, and a custom-built modular synthesizer. The composition has three sections that were compiled and edited in Ableton Live 8.2.2.

Music Therapy
Ph.D.
This study examined a music therapy technique designed according to a resource-oriented approach and involved the use of music listening with adults, called "Intentional Music Listening". This protocol consisted of four music listening techniques. An exploratory sequential design was used, with a quantitative data phase followed by a qualitative data phase. The quantitative phase employed a modified crossover design, with an experimental group and waitlist control group. Participants attended groups at which they were coached in the music listening techniques for at-home practice. Quantitative data was gathered using the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988), and through completion of diary cards after each at-home listening protocol. The qualitative data phase consisted of semi-structured interviews following participation in the music listening protocol. Both the statistical data and the qualitative data give support for the Intentional Music Listening protocol as having a positive impact on the participants' perceived state of well-being, and as a viable set of techniques for use in wellness-based music therapy practice.
Temple University--Theses

Originally presented as author's thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2006.
Also available online. Thesis title: "Being touched by music: a phenomenological-hermeneutical approach to understanding transformational musical experience." Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-112) and index.

This is a study of the way in which digital audio and a number of key associated technologies that rely on it as a framework have changed the creation, production and dissemination of music, as witnessed by my own creative practice. The study is built on my own work as an electronic musician and composer and draws from numerous collaborations with not only other musicians but also researchers and artists, as documented through commissions, performances, academic papers and commercial releases over an 9 year period from 2007 to 2016. I begin by contextualising my own musical practice and outlining some prominent themes associated with the democratisation of computing that the work of this thesis interrogates as a critical framework for the production of musical works. I go on to assess how works using various techniques afforded by digital audio may be interpreted as progressively instantiating a digital ontology of music. In the context of this digital ontology of music I propose a method of analysis and criticism of works explicitly concerned with audio analysis and algorithmic processes based on my interpretation of the concept of `hypertext', wherein the ability for computers to analyse, index and create multi-dimensional, non-linear links between segments of digital audio is best described as hypertextual. In light of this, I contextualise the merits of this reading of music created using these affordances of digital audio through a reading of several key works of 20th century music from a hypertextual perspective, emphasising the role information theory and semiotics have to play in analyses of these works. I proffer this as the beginnings of a useful model for musical composition in the domain of digital audio which I seek to explore through my own practice. I then describe and analyse, both individually and in parallel numerous works I have undertaken that seek to interrogate the intricacies of what it means to work in the domain of digital audio with audio analysis, machine listening, algorithmic and generative computational processes and consider the ways in which aspects of this work might be seen as contributing useful and novel insights into music creation by harnessing properties intrinsic to digital audio as a medium. Finally, I emphasise, based on the music and research presented in the thesis, the extent to which digital audio and the harnessing of increasingly complex computational systems for the production and dissemination of music has changed the ontology of music production, a situation which I interpret as creating both substantial challenges, but also great possibilities for the future of music.

A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine.
Music is ubiquitous in all media, and, in the last decade, has become a potential tool for enhancing cognition. This study aimed to investigate the facilitating effect of music on working memory performance in a healthy older adult cohort. Sixty-three healthy, community-dwelling older adults who had previously undergone comprehensive neuropsychological testing were enrolled in the study. Participants were randomized into one of two groups, and were presented with a series of positive and negative musical clips. Following listening, working memory performance was tested using Wechsler Digit Span and a computerized Spatial Span task. For each task, a total score consisting of number of correct forward and backward sequences was calculated. A significant improvement in Digit Span scores was found after listening to music as compared to Digit Span scores collected ~5 years ago. Contrary to our hypothesis, this facilitative effect of music on working memory held for both positive and negative musical stimuli. It has been shown that negative music can illicit the same pleasurable feelings as positive music, and, given West’s frontal lobe hypothesis, can therefore produce the same effects on working memory as positive music.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.
Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 10, 2007). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Recreation Administration in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science." Discipline: Exercise and Sports Science; Department/School: Exercise and Sport Science.

This thesis investigates the role of music in office-based workplace settings. While many studies in the past have examined the effects of researcher-selected music on work performance, fewer studies have taken into account the effects of self-selected music and situational aspects. No studies to date have explored office workers' music listening patterns. Music at work is a multidisciplinary topic of research, yet the topic is rarely conceptualised as such and there is a lack of integrated literature that takes into account the various disciplines involved. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach and utilising mixed methods, three empirical studies were carried out, with a sample of over 300 employees. A survey investigated current listening practices, a field experiment examined the effects of a listening intervention on work appreciation, and semi-structured interviews were used to explore contextual aspects int1uencing the listening experience at work. ~lusic listening in offices is characterised by employees balancing internal needs (motivations for listening) and external requirements (situation-specific considerations). When employees consider these two aspects, they practice "responsible listening". Listening practices were coloured by desires to control the auditory environment and to intluence subjective well-being, inspiration and concentration. Music selections were \aried, often made at random and derived from home. No main effect of music on work peIi'ormance and well-being was found; music had positive as well as negative effects for different individuals in different situations. Employees avoided imposing music onto others or listening in an unsuitable way by modifying their listening behaviour (through listening technology, music styles and volume). No specific policies on music listening \\ere found, and music was often conceptualised as a "grey area". Music in offices can be considered as blurring the boundaries between private and public, and as a way to bring private habits into work for the purpose of regulating personal wellbeing in public spaces.