Deafness And Music: Can Vibration Be Used When Playing Music Together?

Performing music or singing together provides people with great pleasure. But if you are deaf (or hard of hearing) it is not always possible to listen to other musicians while trying to sing or play an instrument. It can be particularly difficult to perceive different musical pitches with a hearing aid or other hearing-assistance device. However, the human body can transmit musical sounds to the brain when vibrations are applied to the skin. In other words, we can feel music. Our research has identified a safe way for deaf people to hear musical notes through the skin of their hands and feet. We have shown that vibration allows people to safely feel music on the skin. This approach allows people to identify a musical note as being higher or lower in pitch than other notes, and it helps musicians to play music together.

Dramaturgia muzyczna

In her paper, Ewa Wąchocka examines the phenomenon of recent dramatic works becoming increasingly more ‘musical’ and the terminological shift it brought about, i.e. the inclusion of the term ‘musical dramaturgy’ in writing for the stage. The author argues that far from being limited to the sounds of speech and language in general, musicality also encompasses a variety of non-musical sounds, the unravelling of the play’s narrative and the psychological makeup of its characters; it also penetrates deeply into the structure of the text. In the analysis of plays by W. Murek, A. Grzegorzewska, and S. Bogacz, the author demonstrates how essential the inspirations sourced from musical culture are for recent dramatic works: the 20th-century experiments with music, the discovery of how potent sound expression can be, or the most technologically advanced methods of sound reproduction. By presenting the many and varied dramatic strategies, the author shows that contemporary playwrights not only use musicality to represent the sound landscape of the world but, first and foremost, to create the ontology of an internally conflicted world.

Harmony and Disharmony: Acoustic Opposition in the Early Lyrics of Alexander Blok

The article studies the role of the observer - the subject of acoustic perception of poetic narrative, in particular, in the construction of a dual reality in the early work by Alexander Blok Poems about the Beautiful Lady. Acoustic perceptual data is the basis for the creation of complex mystical and philosophical symbols and poetic images. The divine, ideal world of the Beautiful Lady and the real world of the lyric hero are in opposition to each other in acoustic terms, which give rise to the opposition HARMONY - DISHARMONY. The opposition is realized in musical sounds, songs, and bell ringing typical of the upper world. The real world is characterized by other sounds, non-musical: groans, creaks, complaints, and crying. Accordingly, emotions also differ in value depending on belonging to one or another world: in the world of the Beautiful Lady they quietly laugh, rejoice; in the world of the lyrical hero they cry, moan, complain. SILENCE is a significant symbol of the divine world. The world of the Beautiful Lady is thus harmonious, musical and quiet. Its important element is the voices of birds: swans, cranes, eagles. Smell, touch and taste play a minor role in the creation of the Bloks dual reality. Temperature sensations participate in the formation of the COLD symbol as a phenomenon hostile to the divine world. Thus, the concept of dual reality in Bloks early lyrics is embodied in a number of acoustic oppositions and acoustic symbols of silence, song, and bell ringing.

Magnetotransport in the quantum wires comprised of vertically stacked quantum dots

We investigate a periodic system of vertically stacked InAs/GaAs quantum dots (VSQD) subjected to a two-dimensional confining harmonic potential and a magnetic field in the symmetric gauge. Given the tiny length scales, adequate lateral confinement, and strong vertical coupling involved in the experiments, the VSQD system has become known for mimicking the standard semiconducting quantum wires. An exact analytical diagnosis of the problem allows us to show the system’s direct relevance to the physics of musical sounds, magnetization, magnetotransport, and the designing of the optical amplifiers. The results suggest making the most of the system for applications in single-electron devices and quantum state transfer in the quantum computation.

Hybrid Feature Based Classifier Performance Evaluation of Monophonic and Polyphonic Indian Classical Instruments Recognition

Instrument recognition in computer music is an important research area that deals with sound modelling. Musical sounds comprises of five prominent constituents which are Pitch, timber, loudness, duration, and spatialization. The tonal sound is function of all these components playing critical role in deciding quality. The first four parameters can be modified, but timbre remains a challenge [6]. Then, inevitably, timbre became the focus of this piece. It is a sound quality that distinguishes one musical instrument from another, regardless of pitch or volume, and it is critical. Monophonic and polyphonic recordings of musical instruments can be identified using this method. To evaluate the proposed approach, three Indian instruments were experimented to generate training data set. Flutes, harmoniums, and sitars are among the instruments used. Indian musical instruments classify sounds using statistical and spectral parameters. The hybrid features from different domains extracting important characteristics from musical sounds are extracted. An Indian Musical Instrument SVM and GMM classifier demonstrate their ability to classify accurately. Using monophonic sounds, SVM and Polyphonic produce an average accuracy of 89.88% and 91.10%, respectively. According to the results of the experiments, GMM outperforms SVM in monophonic recordings by a factor of 96.33 and polyphonic recordings by a factor of 93.33.

Fundamentals of Music Theory

This open e-book is the result of a project funded by a University of Edinburgh Student Experience Grant, Open e-Textbooks for access to music education. The project was a collaboration between Open Educational Resources Service, and staff and student interns from the Reid School of Music. As a proof-of-concept endeavour, the project aimed to explore how effectively we could convert existing course content into convenient and reusable open formats suitable for use by staff and students both within and beyond the University. The resulting e-book presents open licensed educational materials that deal with the building blocks of musical stave (sometimes known as staff) notation, a language designed to communicate about musical ideas which is in use around the world. The resources in this e-book include video lectures and their transcripts, as well as supporting text explanations, examples and illustrations. The materials introduce topics such as the organisation of discrete pitches into scales and intervals, and temporal organisation of musical sounds as duration, in rhythm and metre. These rudiments are presented through an introduction to the elements of five-line stave notation, and through critical discussion of the advantages and limitations served by notational systems in the representation and analysis of musical sounds. This serves as the basis of further explanations, to illustrate musical concepts including key, time signature, harmonisation, cadence and modulation. We anticipate that subsequent versions of this e-book will update and develop the contents and presentation of the materials, following the success of this student-led collaboration.

Harmonic Differences Method for Robust Fundamental Frequency Detection in Wideband and Narrowband Speech Signals

In this article, a novel pitch determination algorithm based on harmonic differences method (HDM) is proposed. Most of the algorithms today rely on autocorrelation, cepstrum, and lastly convolutional neural networks, and they have some limitations (small datasets, wideband or narrowband, musical sounds, temporal smoothing, etc.), accuracy, and speed problems. There are very rare works exploiting the spacing between the harmonics. HDM is designed for both wideband and exclusively narrowband (telephone) speech and tries to find the most repeating difference between the harmonics of speech signal. We use three vowel databases in our experiments, namely, Hillenbrand Vowel Database, Texas Vowel Database, and Vowels from the TIMIT corpus. We compare HDM with autocorrelation, cepstrum, YIN, YAAPT, CREPE, and FCN algorithms. Results show that harmonic differences are reliable and fast choice for robust pitch detection. Also, it is superior to others in most cases.

Bodies moving with sound: Effects of pitch and musical sounds on body-representations

The effects of music on bodily movement and feelings, such as when people are dancing or engaged in physical activity, are well-documented - people may move in response to the sound cues, feel powerful, less tired. How sounds and bodily movements relate to create such effects? Here we deconstruct the problem and investigate how different auditory features affect people’s body-representation and feelings even when paired with the same movement. In three experiments, participants executed a simple arm raise synchronised with changing pitch in simple tones (Experiment 1), rich musical sounds (Experiment 2) and different absolute frequency ranges (Experiment 3), while we recorded indirect and direct measures on their movement, body-representations and feelings. Changes in pitch influenced people’s general emotional state as well as the various bodily dimensions investigated – movement, proprioceptive awareness and feelings about one’s body and movement. Adding harmonic content amplified the differences between ascending and descending sounds, while shifting the absolute frequency range had a general effect on movement amplitude, bodily feelings and emotional state. These results provide new insights in the role of auditory and musical features in dance and exercise, and have implications for the design of sound-based applications supporting movement expression, physical activity, or rehabilitation.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF MUSICAL SOUNDS

English - Human beings have been interested in the environment around them since the beginning of history. Man learned to use fire and other instruments to change the environment. The things around an organism which affect its life activities, form the environment. In reality, the organism and the environment are dependent on each other. It is impossible to imagine the existence of one separate from the other. The existence of all living beings depends on the surrounding environment. Hindi - मानव इतिहास के प्रारम्भ से ही अपने चारों ओर के पर्यावरण में रूचि रखता आया है। मनुष्य ने अग्नि तथा अन्य यन्त्रों का प्रयोग पर्यावरण को परिवर्तित करने के लिए सीखा। जीवों के चारों ओर की वस्तुऐं जो उसकी जीवन-क्रियाओं को प्रभावित करती हैं, वातावरण का निर्माण करती हैं। यथार्थ में जीव और पर्यावरण एक दूसरे पर आश्रित हैं। एक की दूसरे से पृथक सत्ता की कल्पना करना असम्भव है। सभी जीवों का अस्तित्व चारों ओर के पर्यारण पर निर्भर करता है।

Musica di paesaggi sonori. Enunciazione, risignificazione, comunicazione

The paper – rapidly retracing some fundamental stages in the history of sound studies – questions the relationship between soundscape and music language and proposes a reflection on the resulting ontologies of sound. In the traditional conception of soundscape studies, musical language should contribute to a re-orchestration of environmental sound and should promote awareness and active listening of extra-musical sounds. However, every music composition or performance that draws on this kind of acoustic material, inevitably transforms its fruition. Immediacy is in fact impossible and each perception produces a new meaning. The article highlights the value of subjective perception and creative processes in the multidisciplinary discussion about soundscape.