Kindling the Spark

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Haroutounian
Keyword(s):  
Musical Training ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Home School ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Specialized Schools ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Teacher Researcher ◽  
Training And Research ◽  
Private Studio ◽  
Different Levels

Gathering perspectives of musical talent from the psychological, musical, and educational fields, Kindling the Spark is the only single sourcebook that defines musical talent and provides practical strategies for identifying and nurturing it. Joanne Haroutounian uses her experience as teacher, researcher, and parent to clarify central issues concerning talent recognition and development in a way that will easily appeal to a wide audience. The book describes the different stages of development in musical training, including guidelines for finding a suitable teacher at different levels, social and psychological aspects that impact musical training, and research on talent development by ages and stages from infancy and preschool years through the teen years. An important feature of the book are "sparkler exercises" designed to provoke observable talent behavior in home, school, and studio settings. The book also includes an Appendix of Resources which lists books, media, organizations, and specialized schools that offer additional information on musical talent, identification, and development. For music educators in both public school and private studio settings--as well as for parents and their musically inclined children--Kindling the Spark provides an invaluable summary of the research on talent and a wealth of resources for developing it.

The Flame: Teenage Years

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Haroutounian
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Talent Development ◽  
College Education ◽  
Music Students ◽  
Ivy League ◽  
Piano Students ◽  
Piano Lessons ◽  
Private Studio ◽  
Late Starters

Close to a dozen years have gone by and we find ourselves seated on folding chairs enjoying the final recital of a private studio of talented piano students. Each year there are a few new eager faces as the younger students deftly work through pieces that seem very complex for such little fingers to play so quickly. We notice the students who have been seasoned through training, now in those tenuous intermediate years. Their intense desire for precision shows maturing musical ideas, but often arrives at awkward adolescence when being on stage has an added gravity of meaning. We search for the advanced teenagers—those students we have seen truly blossom through the long process of talent development. Numbers have dwindled in this studio. One has decided to move out of state and is now studying at a conservatory. Another has decided to concentrate efforts on the oboe, begun in elementary school band, with time restraints easing piano lessons out of her schedule. Academic and parental pressures have caused last year’s shining star, a junior seeking an Ivy League college education, to quit as well. There remains one teenager who ends the program with a flourish, receiving many hugs from young admirers and awards galore following the program. This is our tiny, eager student from the front steps. A senior, having completed a full twelve years of instruction with many competitions and solo recitals under his belt, he bids farewell to this comfortable, nurturing studio. He enters college as a math major. Many private teachers, parents, and music students may recognize this scene as a very realistic portrayal of possibilities in musical talent development. The first years of training are “romance,” with parents aglow when hearing their talented youngster perform with such confidence and flair. The middle years consist of flux and flow, a phase when students search for the “whys” and “hows” beneath the notes that were so easily played in prior years. Musical training now presents persistent challenges. Late-starters may speed into these years with determination. Others may begin a second instrument or composition classes to broaden musical experiences.

Sensitive periods for music training from a cognitive neuroscience perspective: A review of the literature with implications for teaching practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eun Cho
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Early Onset ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Music Training ◽  
Early Childhood Music ◽  
Sensitive Periods ◽  
The Brain

This study addresses the issue of sensitive periods – a developmental window when experience or stimulation has unusually strong and long-lasting impacts on certain areas of brain development and thus behaviour (Bailey and Penhune 2012) – for music training from a neurological perspective. Are there really sensitive periods in which early musical training has greater effects on the brain and behaviour than training later in life? Many neuroscience studies support the idea that beginning music training before the age of 7 is advantageous in many developmental aspects, based on their findings that early onset of music training is closely associated with enhanced structural and functional plasticity in visual-, auditory-, somatosensory- and motor-related regions of the brain. Although these studies help early childhood music educators expand understanding of the potential benefits of early music training, they often mislead us to believe that early onset is simply better. Careful consideration on details of these research studies should be given when we apply these research findings into practice. In this regard, this study provides a review of neuroscience studies related to the issue of sensitive periods for childhood music training and discusses how early childhood music educators could properly apply these findings to their music teaching practice.

scholarly journals Algorithm Development for Distributed Memory Multicomputers Using CONLAB

1992 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Jacobson ◽  
Bo Kågström ◽  
Mikael Rännar
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Memory ◽  
Computer Architectures ◽  
Parallel Computer ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Development Methodology ◽  
Target Architecture ◽  
Real Performance ◽  
High Level ◽  
Different Levels

CONLAB (CONcurrent LABoratory) is an environment for developing algorithms for parallel computer architectures and for simulating different parallel architectures. A user can experimentally verify and obtain a picture of the real performance of a parallel algorithm executing on a simulated target architecture. CONLAB gives a high-level support for expressing computations and communications in a distributed memory multicomputer (DMM) environment. A development methodology for DMM algorithms that is based on different levels of abstraction of the problem, the target architecture, and the CONLAB language itself is presented and illustrated with two examples. Simulotion results for and real experiments on the Intel iPSC/2 hypercube are presented. Because CONLAB is developed to run on uniprocessor UNIX workstations, it is an educational tool that offers interactive (simulated) parallel computing to a wide audience.

scholarly journals Frustration Intensity Prediction in Customer Support Dialog Texts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janis Zuters ◽  
Viktorija Leonova
Keyword(s):  
Customer Support ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Learning Classifier ◽  
Intensity Prediction ◽  
Emotion Intensity ◽  
Frustration Level ◽  
Emotion Type ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Modelling Data ◽  
Classification Quality

This paper examines the evolution of emotion intensity in dialogs occurring on Twitter between customer support representatives and clients (“users”). We focus on a single emotion type— frustration, modelling the user's level of frustration (on scale of 0 to 4) for each dialog turn and attempting to predict change of intensity from turn to turn, based on the text of turns from both dialog participants. As the modelling data, we used a subset of the Kaggle Customer Support on Twitter dataset annotated with per-turn frustration intensity ratings. For the modelling, we used a machine learning classifier for which dialog turns were represented by specifically selected bags of words. Since in our experimental setup the prediction classes (i.e., ratings) are not independent, to assess the classification quality, we examined different levels of accuracy imprecision tolerance. We showed that for frustration intensity prediction of actual dialog turns we can achieve a level of accuracy significantly higher than a statistical baseline. However we found that, as the intensity of user’s frustration tends to be stable across turns of the dialog, customer support turns have only a very limited immediate effect on the customer's level of frustration, so using the additional information from customer support turns doesn't help to predict future frustration level.

scholarly journals Musicians at the Cocktail Party: Neural Substrates of Musical Training During Selective Listening in Multispeaker Situations

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (8) ◽  
pp. 3253-3265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Puschmann ◽  
Sylvain Baillet ◽  
Robert J Zatorre
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Auditory Processing ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Selective Listening ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Competing Speech

Abstract Musical training has been demonstrated to benefit speech-in-noise perception. It is however unknown whether this effect translates to selective listening in cocktail party situations, and if so what its neural basis might be. We investigated this question using magnetoencephalography-based speech envelope reconstruction and a sustained selective listening task, in which participants with varying amounts of musical training attended to 1 of 2 speech streams while detecting rare target words. Cortical frequency-following responses (FFR) and auditory working memory were additionally measured to dissociate musical training-related effects on low-level auditory processing versus higher cognitive function. Results show that the duration of musical training is associated with a reduced distracting effect of competing speech on target detection accuracy. Remarkably, more musical training was related to a robust neural tracking of both the to-be-attended and the to-be-ignored speech stream, up until late cortical processing stages. Musical training-related increases in FFR power were associated with a robust speech tracking in auditory sensory areas, whereas training-related differences in auditory working memory were linked to an increased representation of the to-be-ignored stream beyond auditory cortex. Our findings suggest that musically trained persons can use additional information about the distracting stream to limit interference by competing speech.

What's going on…

1977 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-32
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
Home School ◽  
Information Contact ◽  
Part C ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Title Iv ◽  
Oriented Activity

Home-School Math is the focus of a Title IV, Part C, grant in the St. Cloud school district. This project emphasizes materials for use by parents of children in grades K through 6 to help their children learn mathematics. Over 200 game-oriented activity kits for home or school use have been documented. The materials are available at cost. For additional information, contact Judith A. Maethner, Title IV Arithmetic Project, Seton Hall, 1204 Seventh Street South, St. Cloud, MN 56301.

Leveraging human agency to improve confidence and acceptability in human-machine interactions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerian Chambon
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Avoidance Task ◽  
Automated Systems ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Levels Of Automation ◽  
Machine Interaction ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
Different Levels

Repeated interactions with automated systems are known to affect how agents experience their own actions and choices. The present study explores the possibility of partially restoring sense of agency in operators interacting with automated systems by providing additional information about how and why these systems make decision. To do so, we implemented an obstacle avoidance task with different levels of automation and explicability. Levels of automation were varied by implementing conditions in which the participant was free or not free to choose which direction to take, whereas levels of explicability were varied by providing or not providing the participant with the system’s confidence in the direction to take. We first assessed how automation and explicability interacted with participants' sense of agency, and then tested whether increased self-agency was systematically associated with greater confidence in the decision and improved system acceptability. The results showed an overall positive effect of system assistance. Providing additional information about the system’s decision (explicability effect) and reducing the cognitive load associated with the decision itself (automation effect) was associated with stronger sense of agency, greater confidence in the decision, and better performance. In addition to the positive effects of system assistance, acceptability scores revealed that participants perceived “explicable” systems more favorably. These results highlight the potential value of studying self-agency in human-machine interaction as a guideline for making automation technologies more acceptable and, ultimately, improving the usefulness of these technologies.

scholarly journals Adaptive Vocabulary Construction for Frustration Intensity Modelling in Customer Support Dialog Texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Janis Zuters ◽  
Viktorija Leonova
Keyword(s):  
Customer Support ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Learning Classifier ◽  
Intensity Prediction ◽  
Frustration Level ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Emotion Type ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
A Current ◽  
Modelling Data

This paper examines emotion intensity prediction in dialogs between clients and customer support representatives occurring on Twitter. We focus on a single emotion type, namely, frustration, modelling the user's level of frustration while attempting to predict frustration intensity on the current and next turn, based on the text of turns coming from both dialog participants. A subset of the Kaggle Customer Support on Twitter dataset was used as the modelling data, annotated with per-turn frustration intensity ratings. We propose to represent dialog turns by binary encoded bags of automatically selected keywords to be subsequently used in a machine learning classifier. To assess the classification quality, we examined two different levels of accuracy imprecision tolerance. Our model achieved a level of accuracy significantly higher than a statistical baseline for prediction of frustration intensity for a current turn. However, we did not find the additional information from customer support turns to help predict frustration intensity of the next turn, and the reason for that is possibly the stability of user’s frustration level over the course of the conversation, in other words, the inability of support’s response to exert much influence to user’s initial frustration level.

scholarly journals Development of assessment criteria for profiling the personality of candidates for vacant positions based on an analysis of their activity in social networks

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 175-189
Author(s):  
V.A. Ilyin ◽  
E.A. Mikhailova
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Diagnostic Criteria ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Assessment Criteria ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Personnel Assessment ◽  
Top Managers ◽  
Different Levels

The article is devoted to quite relevant issues today, which are discussed at different levels of research in the field of management psychology, namely, the development of psychological profiling algorithms based on the analysis of activity in social networks, in order to solve organizational problems, in particular in order to solve problems HR sectors such as recruiting. The article, in a rather lapidary, but at the same time, sufficient form to represent a wide audience, shows that the relevance of this problem is due not only to objective prerequisites (development of digital technologies, insufficient, in modern conditions, the effectiveness of traditional methods of personnel assessment, etc. n.), but also by direct request of business representatives and top managers of large companies. The program of socio-psychological research is fully presented, which allows to identify and verify diagnostic criteria for creating a profile of labor motivation for candidates for vacant posts and employees of the organization, based on the analysis of accounts in social networks. Criteria and results of their preliminary verification are described.

scholarly journals Rhythm and Beat Perception in Motor Areas of the Brain

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 893-906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Grahn ◽  
Matthew Brett
Keyword(s):  
Basal Ganglia ◽  
Supplementary Motor Area ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Premotor Cortex ◽  
Imaging Study ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Motor Areas

When we listen to rhythm, we often move spontaneously to the beat. This movement may result from processing of the beat by motor areas. Previous studies have shown that several motor areas respond when attending to rhythms. Here we investigate whether specific motor regions respond to beat in rhythm. We predicted that the basal ganglia and supplementary motor area (SMA) would respond in the presence of a regular beat. To establish what rhythm properties induce a beat, we asked subjects to reproduce different types of rhythmic sequences. Improved reproduction was observed for one rhythm type, which had integer ratio relationships between its intervals and regular perceptual accents. A subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging study found that these rhythms also elicited higher activity in the basal ganglia and SMA. This finding was consistent across different levels of musical training, although musicians showed activation increases unrelated to rhythm type in the premotor cortex, cerebellum, and SMAs (pre-SMA and SMA). We conclude that, in addition to their role in movement production, the basal ganglia and SMAs may mediate beat perception.

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