Music,empathy and cultural understanding

In the age of the Internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and embeddedness in people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and solitary, and public and collective, kinds – from an individual with their smartphone and headphones, to large-scale live events and global simulcasts; and it increasingly brings together a huge range of cultures and histories, through developments in world music, sampling, the re-issue of historical recordings, and the explosion of informal and home music-making that circulates via YouTube. For many people, involvement with music can be among the most powerful and potentially transforming experiences in their lives. At the same time, there has been increasing interest in music's communicative and affective capacities, and its potential to act as an agent of social bonding and affiliation. This review critically discusses a considerable body of research and scholarship, across disciplines ranging from the neuroscience and psychology of music to cultural musicology and the sociology and anthropology of music, that provides evidence for music's capacity to promote empathy and social/cultural understanding through powerful affective, cognitive and social factors; and explores ways in which to connect and make sense of this disparate evidence (and counter-evidence). It reports the outcome of an empirical study that tests one aspect of those claims, demonstrating that ‘passive’ listening to the music of an unfamiliar culture can significantly change the cultural attitudes of listeners with high dispositional empathy; presents a model that brings together the primary components of the music and empathy research into a single framework; and considers both some of the applications, and some of the shortcomings and problems, of understanding music from the perspective of empathy.     

Music stage design

Until comparatively recently the specific acoustic needs of performers, and the means of satisfying these, has played second fiddle to the achievement of satisfactory audience listening conditions in auditoria. This paper presents a personal view of music stage design based on the author's experience in architecture and acoustics and on the results of recent research. Local reflections and the possible influence of stage and auditorium rake are discussed and guidelines for the salient features of orchestral stages are suggested.     

Music practice rooms

A study of users, requirements and preferences for music practice rooms is described. Analysis of the subjective and objective information obtained provides guide lines for the design of such rooms. The study has shown that, ideally, the requirements for different users and different instruments vary, but there are broad areas of agreement so that satisfactory designs are often possible.     

科学家与音乐

物理学家卢瑟福曾经明确表示:科学也是艺术,伟大的科学理沦本身就是伟大的艺术品.他说:"我坚决主张,不妨把科学发现的过程看作艺术活动的一种形式.这一点最好地表现在物理科学的理论方面.物理学家依据某些假定并根据某些得到透彻理解的逻辑规则,一步一步地建立起了一座宏伟的大厦,并清楚地揭示出大厦内部各部分之间隐藏的关系.从某些方面看,一个得到良好塑造的理论毫无疑问是一件艺术品."     

电声音乐中的物理学问题--物理与音乐专题之六

一般而言，在电声乐器中，电声乐器与电子乐器不是一个概念．用传统的乐器发声，然后用电声放大的称为电声乐器，如电吉他、电扬琴、电子手风琴等．由电子振荡器产生声的称为电子乐器，如电子琴、电子钢琴等．数字式电子音响合成器也是电子乐     

Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) Survey: Who''s Teaching What in Nonclassical Music

Currently, there is an increasing interest in and demand for training in a wide variety of nonclassical music--contemporary commercial music (CCM)--and most particularly for music theater. A survey of singing teachers was completed to elucidate their training, education, and experience with and methods of teaching CCM. Teachers were at colleges, universities, and conservatories as well as in private studios, both nationally and in several foreign countries. A substantial percentage of those teaching CCM had neither formal education in teaching it nor professional experience. Many of the respondents indicated conflict between classical and CCM styles. Respondents were generally familiar with voice science and voice medicine as well as certain CCM terminology. Teachers expressed an interest in obtaining more information, with an emphasis on healthy vocal production. These results are discussed, as well as implications for the singing teacher who desires specific training to teach CCM.     

Statistical and Visual Analysis of Audio,Text, and Image Features for Multi-Modal Music Genre Recognition

We present a multi-modal genre recognition framework that considers the modalities audio, text, and image by features extracted from audio signals, album cover images, and lyrics of music tracks. In contrast to pure learning of features by a neural network as done in the related work, handcrafted features designed for a respective modality are also integrated, allowing for higher interpretability of created models and further theoretical analysis of the impact of individual features on genre prediction. Genre recognition is performed by binary classification of a music track with respect to each genre based on combinations of elementary features. For feature combination a two-level technique is used, which combines aggregation into fixed-length feature vectors with confidence-based fusion of classification results. Extensive experiments have been conducted for three classifier models (Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest) and numerous feature combinations. The results are presented visually, with data reduction for improved perceptibility achieved by multi-objective analysis and restriction to non-dominated data. Feature- and classifier-related hypotheses are formulated based on the data, and their statistical significance is formally analyzed. The statistical analysis shows that the combination of two modalities almost always leads to a significant increase of performance and the combination of three modalities in several cases.