Perception and Movement Imagery as Tools in Performative Acts Combining Live Music and Dance

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-27
Author(s):  
Paula Salosaari
Keyword(s):  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Movement Imagery ◽  
Live Music ◽  
Music Interpretation ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Classical Ballet

Abstract In this article I discuss movement imagery and perceptual strategies as tools in enhancing performative acts of playing music and composing performance material combining music and dance. In my earlier research I have introduced the concept of multiple embodiment in classical ballet and developed co-authored choreography with dancers. The concept of multiple embodiment in ballet suggests treating the fixed vocabulary as qualitatively open and therefore a basis for interpretation, improvisation and composition of new dance material. Directing the dancer’s experience in an open-ended way with movement imagery and perceptual strategies gave the performer new, sometimes surprising information about performance possibilities and thereby enhanced interpretation of dance material. (Salosaari 2001) Movement imagery has helped creating open-ended tasks in dance and thus enabled co-authoring in dance making projects. (Salosaari 2007; Salosaari 2009). Not only dance, but other art forms as well, are embodied. In playing a musical instrument, the sound is made using body movements. In workshops with a musician and a dancer, reported in this article, I ask whether the tools created for dance creation would work also in music making. I ask whether movement imagery and perceptual strategies can initiate music interpretation and improvisation?

Life satisfaction and adolescent music making: A comparison of youth choirs and bands in Spain

2021 ◽  
pp. 102986492110214
Author(s):  
Salvador Oriola-Requena ◽  
Diego Calderón-Garrido ◽  
Josep Gustems
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Academic Motivation ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
Leadership Capacity ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Youth Music

Adolescents who are members of youth music groups learn music and develop other skills such as group work and conflict resolution. These skills and feelings may represent socioemotional factors underlying increased life satisfaction, leadership capacity, and academic motivation, together with the acquisition of emotional skills. The aim of the research was to determine the degree of life satisfaction reported by a sample of 660 Spanish adolescents who were members of a youth band or choir. It also aimed to examine correlations between life satisfaction, leadership capacity, academic motivation, and emotional development. Potential differences between these variables attributable to participants’ age, gender, type of youth music group, and musical instrument played were explored using a cross-sectional survey comprising four standardized questionnaires. The results show that the participants were highly satisfied with their lives. There were strong positive correlations between the variables studied but also some significant differences between the two groups (choirs and bands), and between players of different instrument families. These results are in line with those other studies, confirming the positive influence of group music making on adolescents’ social and emotional growth.

A Question of Technique

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-141
Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow
Keyword(s):  
Educational Program ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Indigenous Art ◽  
The Public ◽  
National School ◽  
European Heritage ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Financial Challenges ◽  
Classical Ballet

Mexico’s lack of dance infrastructure was evident to its political leadership. As a new administration shifted the focus of Vasconcelos’ educational program from Mexico’s classical European heritage to that of its working urban and rural peoples, the Secretaría de Educación Pública’s educators sought to employ a still ill-defined Mexican dance as one of its tools to educate the public. Despite a failed first attempt centered on the classical ballet and the financial challenges of the international financial depression, the SEP persisted in its efforts. Abstract painter Carlos Mérida, whose modernism sought to capture the spirit of pre-conquest indigenous art forms, turned the programming of what would become the National School of Dance toward the remnants of “pure” indigenous dance.

scholarly journals Scales of sustain and decay: making music in deep time

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
Philipp Kohl
Keyword(s):  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Radioactive Material ◽  
Industrial Processes ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Nuclear Decay ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between the human time of music making and the temporal layers that pervade the natural resources of musical instruments. It therefore offers case studies on two of popular music's most common instruments, the electric guitar and the synthesiser, and their symbolic and material temporalities: guitar players’ quest for ‘infinite sustain’ from Santana to today's effects manufacturers and the ‘psychogeophysical’ approach by artist and theorist Martin Howse, who developed a synthesiser module using radioactive material in order to determine musical events by nuclear decay. While language uses metaphors of sustain and decay as figurative ways to express both musical and planetary dimensions, practices of music offer alternative ecologies of relating the seemingly unrelatable scales of deep time and musical time. If in the Anthropocene humankind becomes aware of its role as a geophysical force, thinking about making music in the Anthropocene requires an awareness for the temporalities involved in the materials at hand. Besides an ecological perspective, the article looks at various media (magazines, ads, and manuals) and thus positions economical mechanisms of the musical instrument manufacturing market as a small-scale experimental setting for larger-scale industrial processes.

Developing “Big Ears”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Greenland
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Silent Majority ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Live Music ◽  
Private And Public

This chapter examines how jazz fans, especially the most active concertgoers (the regulars), respond to a musical performance. It first considers how fans become part of jazz communities and how they contribute to the New York City jazz scene. It then shows how nonperforming musicians fill the performance space, suggesting that these offstage participants, who are also “performing” jazz, constitute the unseen scene, the silent and not-so-silent majority that forms an integral part of communal music-making. It also explains what happens when fans are in the house: how their musical tastes develop, how they view performers and performances, and how their private and public listening practices inform their understandings of and appreciation for jazz and jazz performances. The chapter concludes that when jazz audiences with “big ears” attend to and interact with live music and musicians, it creates a sympathetic environment where jazz can come alive.

scholarly journals Digital Approaches to Music-Making for People With Dementia in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Current Practice and Recommendations

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Becky Dowson ◽  
Rebecca Atkinson ◽  
Julie Barnes ◽  
Clare Barone ◽  
Nick Cutts ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practice ◽  
Psychosocial Interventions ◽  
Cognitive Stimulation ◽  
Digital Inclusion ◽  
Music Making ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Digital Format ◽  
Live Music ◽  
Online Music ◽  
Music Activities

Before COVID-19, dementia singing groups and choirs flourished, providing activity, cognitive stimulation, and social support for thousands of people with dementia in the UK. Interactive music provides one of the most effective psychosocial interventions for people with dementia; it can allay agitation and promote wellbeing. Since COVID-19 has halted the delivery of in-person musical activities, it is important for the welfare of people with dementia and their carers to investigate what alternatives to live music making exist, how these alternatives are delivered and how their accessibility can be expanded. This community case study examines recent practice in online music-making in response to COVID-19 restrictions for people with dementia and their supporters, focusing on a UK context. It documents current opportunities for digital music making, and assesses the barriers and facilitators to their delivery and accessibility. Online searches of video streaming sites and social media documented what music activities were available. Expert practitioners and providers collaborated on this study and supplied input about the sessions they had been delivering, the technological challenges and solutions they had found, and the responses of the participants. Recommendations for best practice were developed and refined in consultation with these collaborators. Over 50 examples of online music activities were identified. In addition to the challenges of digital inclusion and accessibility for some older people, delivering live music online has unique challenges due to audio latency and sound quality. It is necessary to adapt the session to the technology's limitations rather than expect to overcome these challenges. The recommendations highlight the importance of accessibility, digital safety and wellbeing of participants. They also suggest ways to optimize the quality of their musical experience. The pandemic has prompted innovative approaches to deliver activities and interventions in a digital format, and people with dementia and their carers have adapted rapidly. While online music is meeting a clear current need for social connection and cognitive stimulation, it also offers some advantages which remain relevant after COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed. The recommendations of this study are intended to be useful to musicians, dementia care practitioners, and researchers during the pandemic and beyond.

Processes of Instrumental Learning: The Development of Musical Expertise

2012 ◽  
pp. 657-676
Author(s):  
Susan Hallam ◽  
Alfredo Bautista
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Instrumental Learning ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Widening Participation ◽  
Recreational Activity ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Require Time ◽  
Music Making ◽  
And Performance

This article explores the processes underlying learning to play an instrument. The processes underpinning the learning of a musical instrument require time, effort, and commitment, although the extent to which these are needed depends on the nature of the music itself and the particular cultural traditions that pertain in relation to its creation and performance. Widening participation in instrumental learning means that most learners will engage with music-making in the longer term as a recreational activity either through amateur music-making or as listeners. What they need to develop as a result of their learning is a love of music and the meta-cognitive skills that will support them throughout their lifetimes in whatever musical activities they choose to pursue. To reflect these changes, music educators need to consider what their curricular priorities should be. Learning is most enjoyable when what is to be learned is challenging (not too easy or too difficult) and there is a sense of achievement when it has been mastered.

From Machine to Musical Instrument

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-363
Author(s):  
Stephanie Probst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Reciprocal Relationships ◽  
Passive Listening ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Piano Playing

Media histories of music often frame technological innovation in the early twentieth century within a general zeal for automated musical reproduction. The engineering efforts of the Aeolian Company and its Pianola counter such narratives by fostering active music-making rather than passive listening. As a pneumatically powered attachment to a piano, the Pianola was initially limited to reproducing strictly mechanical renditions of music from perforated paper rolls. But the invention of the Metrostyle in 1903, a hand lever to achieve tempo-specific effects, significantly refined the musical capacities of the instrument. It allowed for inscribing onto the music rolls authoritative performance instructions that could be enacted by the player. Revisiting the various places that the Metrostyle Pianola inhabited, from the manufacturing site to the concert hall and the bourgeois living room, I illuminate the different sociocultural relationships and musical experiences that it mediates. By relegating certain tasks of conventional piano-playing to the mechanical workings inside the instrument, the Pianola was marketed as facilitating simplified music-making in ever wider parts of society. The Metrostyle annotations served as a pedagogical device for instructing novice players in principles of nuanced and tasteful interpretation. My analysis exposes the reciprocal relationships between the instrument and its human players, from attempts to adapt the physical interface to human physiologies, to the ways in which the instrument, in turn, imposes certain mechanistic affordances on its players.

scholarly journals The Hands: The Making of a Digital Musical Instrument

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Torre ◽  
Kristina Andersen ◽  
Frank Baldé
Keyword(s):  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Architecture Design ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Detailed History ◽  
Digital Devices ◽  
Live Music ◽  
Paper Documentation ◽  
First Time

Michel Waisvisz's The Hands is one of the most famous and long-lasting research projects in the literature of digital music instruments. Consisting of a pair of data gloves and exhibited for the first time in 1984, The Hands is a pioneering work in digital devices for performing live music. It is a work that engaged Waisvisz for almost a quarter of a century and, in turn, has inspired many generations of music technologists and performers of live music. Despite being often cited in the relevant literature, however, the documentation concerning the sensor architecture, design, mapping strategies, and development of these data gloves is sparse. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by offering a detailed history behind the development of The Hands. The information contained in this article was retrieved and collated by searching the STEIM archive, interviewing close collaborators of Waisvisz, and browsing through the paper documentation found in his personal folders and office.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document