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Latest research in music perception & cognition

jonathan — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:25:53 +0000

If there’s one area of music research that really grabs me, it’s music perception & cognition. With astonishing speed, considering it only took place at the end of August, the abstracts from the 11th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition are available online, all 95 pages of them. This is like a massive variety performance of all the top stars of the MP&C world. One of my favourite papers is ‘The Social Side of Avian Movement to Music’ by Aniruddh Patel, John Iversen & Irena Schulz. To cut a long story short, the question is whether parrots dance differently if there’s another human in the room that’s dancing to a different beat through headphones – and the answer seems to be, yes they do – they adapt their dancing to co-ordinate somewhat with the human.

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Musicality: not such a big question after all?

jonathan — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:22:58 +0000

It’s very common in the dance education world to denigrate the word ‘musicality’, because it’s a woolly term. Or people look at you in a knowing way and say ‘What is musicality, anyway? That’s the big question!’

But I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘what is musicality?’ is not a big question. It’s a word which does have several available meanings out there in the world of scholarship, philosophy, music psychology and education research. You can also get a good idea of what people mean by it just by reading what they say (unless they say ‘Now that’s a big question!’, of course). For example, ‘human musicality’ is a word used by neuroscientists and psychologists to describe the innate capacity of the human brain to deal with music. ‘Communicative musicality’ is a field that covers all kinds of musical aspects of communication, such as ‘motherese’, the musical language that mothers and babies develop between themselves before words and concepts.

Notions such as Musikalität and das Musikalische can traced back to the late 18^th century in German philosophy according to Lydia Goehr in Elective Affinities, and they’re related to the concept of Innerlichkeit or ‘inwardness’. Music psychologist Susan Hallam has written several articles on popular conceptions of what ‘musicality’ means, and is one of many music educationalists to point out that for many, ‘musicality’ is synonymous, however misguidedly, with musical ability.

On a more basic level, ‘musicality’ is sometimes used to describe aspects of something that have the qualities associated with music such as rhythm, timing, dynamics, accent, or tone quality. There are several studies which have looked at conventions of musical expression, and for some people, ‘musicality’ means just being able to play expressively. ‘Musical’ is also used to refer to people who are temperamentally suited to becoming musicians (otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen to do so), or for whom music is a big part of their lives. ‘Musicality’ in some cases, like 19^th century novels, is readable as an aspect of a middle class girl’s education, part of ‘finishing school’, whether she is much good at it or not.

The difficulty is not what ‘musicality’ means, but of spending the time and effort to do the necessary reading, thinking and reflection to negotiate its several meanings. There may be no consensus on what it means, but that doesn’t mean it has no meaning as a word, it implies on the contrary that there are too many meanings to give it a single definition, and that we need to understand all of them and our own position in order to make sense of it. To hide behind the lack of consensus as an excuse to get rid of the word is cheating. Ironically, those who claim that it’s a ‘big question’ are probably themselves secretly or unwittingly hanging on to a single notion of das Musikalische as ‘Innerlichkeit’, which is why they, hip postmodernists that they are, are so keen to deny that it means anything at all.

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‘Social loss’, dance notation and Josephine Baker

jonathan — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:48:21 +0000

What do Glaser & Strauss’s grounded theory study The Social Loss of Dying Patients, dance notation and Josephine Baker have in common? Well, I’m making a few conceptual leaps here, but I think it’s worth considering as a theory. I’ll walk you through it.

I was struck by a sentence in this article by Susan McClary & Robert Walser about Theorizing the body in the African American music. Their point, amongst others, is that it’s popular music and dance forms that have had the biggest and widest effect on dance generally, not avant-garde choreography which just borrows ‘vernacular’ movements to present in ‘legit’ works:

The fanaticism and hysteria that have greeted each new African-American dance in the last hundred years attest to the centrality of this music in contestations over the body. And the dances invariably triumphed over whatever opposition they faced, even in they were toned down somewhat in the transition. It is this music, these dances – not the hot-house experiments of the avant-garde – that have shaped us, body and soul, throughout this century.

When I read that, I thought of a dance teacher friend of mine who was saying how fabulous Josephine Baker was, and how she was sure she did more for dance in the 20th century than….and then named one of the greats, can’t remember – Isadora Duncan? Martha Graham? I tend to agree.

Now skip across a few years to yesterday, when I was reading Glaser & Strauss’s ‘social loss’ study. They looked at what happened when people were dying, and noticed that nurses had a notion of ‘social loss’ that might affect the way they dealt with the patients. Normally, young patients are perceived as high value because you shouldn’t die young, but an old person might gain a few points by being a wonderful character. You get the idea.

Now think about dance notation – why do some works get notated, whereas all kinds of popular dance forms don’t? Could it be that there’s a similar concept of ‘social loss’ here, too? The idea is kind of obvious, but only because we think it’s obvious that some works have ‘aesthetic value’ that’s worth preserving and some don’t. But what if it’s no more than a knee-jerk reaction to the perceived social value of the person doing the dance, disguised as an aesthetic judgement? The interesting thing for me would be to see if the category of ‘social loss’ provides a good explanation for what happens in dance. That’s got to be a gift of a dissertation or an article for someone, to do a comparative study using Glaser & Strauss’s original study to see how well the categories fit across the two scenarios. Any takers?

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Change deafness, multi-tasking and ballet teaching

jonathan — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:28:31 +0000

I was talking to a friend recently about scams and conmen. Our conclusion was that anyone who says ‘it would never happen to me’ is deluding themselves. The thing with conmen is that they know how to deflect your attention from what they’re up to, and so this idea that you’ll always be as alert as you think you are now to the trouble looming round the corner is wishful thinking. Our conversation was just idle banter and comparing experiences and half-remembered things about psychology.

But it turns out there’s a whole field here in psychology called ‘change blindness’ – the phenomenon whereby people are seemingly unable under certain conditions to detect even large changes in what they’re looking at. The experiment in the video shows just how extreme this effect can be – and that’s under relatively normal circumstances. What happens is so absurd, I burst out laughing – yet 75% of people didn’t notice, and I bet I’d be in that 75%.

What interests me is the related phenomenon of ‘change deafness’ – the likelihood that we won’t notice major changes in sound. An article in Current Biology in 2005 (Directed Attention Eliminates ‘Change Deafness’ in Complex Auditory Scene) suggests that in a complex auditory setting (i.e. where there are lots of sounds and sound sources) we only overcome ‘change deafness’ by directing attention to one source at a time. The concluding sentence goes like this: “Whatever the mechanisms, our results indicate that auditory perception is limited by attention and that our experience of a rich and detailed auditory world may be largely illusory.”

As I’m fond of saying, so much for multitasking. Next time someone says to you ‘I am listening’ while they’re doing something or trying to hold another conversation with someone on the phone, you can more even more justified in disbelieving them. But what really interests me about this is the implications it might have for dance teaching. There’s a certain kind of teacher that manages to speak with the music, so that their voice becomes part of the music, another line. In doing so, they draw attention to the music. Even if there’s residual noise in the room, or from an adjacent studio, they’re still pulling the dancers towards the music and vice versa: if they don’t do this, then teacher’s voice & the music become competing signals, and it will be hard for dancers to take much notice of either.

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Musicking – the rough guide

jonathan — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 08:03:14 +0000

What a fantastic resource this is: a truly whistle-stop guide from the Victoria Sings programme to everything that is current and trending in the world of interdisciplinary music studies (not that this even does justice to the range of things covered here). Thinking about musicking? The origins, purpose, function, results and value of music is one of the best guides I’ve seen to the array of disciplines and authors that are relevant to my subject area of music and dance in educational and training contexts. The longer I work in this field, the more remote I feel from many of my colleagues, because it’s not a field, it’s a federation of fields like Suffolk seen from above. But suddenly, looking at this page, I don’t feel weird any more, and it’s nice to know that others are trying to draw it all together too.

The main part of the page is a very accessible, concise glossary of terms used across the disciplines (like rhythm, music perception, amusia etc.). But each one is hyperlinked to relevant sources - currently contains 96 keywords, 185 cited individuals, 160 institutions where research is carried out, 79 periodicals, 55 conferences and 1,922 articles.

Congratulations. This is going straight on one of my reading lists.

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