An Exploratory Study on the Acoustic Musical Properties to Decrease Self-Perceived Anxiety

Musical listening is broadly used as an inexpensive and safe method to reduce self-perceived anxiety. This strategy is based on the emotivist assumption claiming that emotions are not only recognised in music but induced by it. Yet, the acoustic properties of musical work capable of reducing anxiety are still under-researched. To fill this gap, we explore whether the acoustic parameters relevant in music emotion recognition are also suitable to identify music with relaxing properties. As an anxiety indicator, the positive statements from the six-item Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, a self-reported score from 3 to 12, are taken. A user-study with 50 participants assessing the relaxing potential of four musical pieces was conducted; subsequently, the acoustic parameters were evaluated. Our study shows that when using classical Western music to reduce self-perceived anxiety, tonal music should be considered. In addition, it also indicates that harmonicity is a suitable indicator of relaxing music, while the role of scoring and dynamics in reducing non-pathological listener distress should be further investigated.

The Symbolism of the Caravaca Cross in the Work “Crux Christi Salva Nos” by Szymon Godziemba-Trytek

Relevance of the study. The author’s commentary of Szymon Godziemba-Trytek concerns the role of sacred symbol in his work “Crux Christi Salva Nos” for mixed choir, soloists, horns, double basses and percussion (2017). This study for the first time acquaints the Ukrainian audience with the creativity of a modern Polish composer, who fruitfully works in the field of symphonic, chamber, and especially vocal and choral music. Main Objective of the article is to show the author’s way of interpreting sacred symbols in the composition and drama of his work; to reveal the role of a symbol as a tool for integrating a composition into an intercultural context that arises on the basis of musical and extra-musical listening experience. Methodology/How the study was done. The empirical and analytical methods used in the research reflect the two sides of the author’s activity — he is a composer and a scientist. From the Christian symbol of Caravaca Cross that inspired him — to the compositional idea and its implementation in sounds: these are the stages of the creative process described in the article. Results/Findings and Conclusions. The composition of the work «Crux Christi Salva Nos» was determined by two aspects of the European Christian symbol Caravaca Cross — its graphics and the history of its existence in culture. The external feature of the Caravaca Cross is the mnemonic signs applied to its surface, they fix the sequence of prayer lines. The sequence of the placement of these signs forms the architectonics of Godziemba-Trytek’s musical work. The symmetry in the arrangement of the signs corresponds to the symmetry of the music composition. In the history of the existence of Caravaca Cross in European culture, the composer is most attracted by the emergence of various religious cults associated with it. They origins often are in folklore. Reflections on the process of acceptance of theological ideas among the people led the composer to some decisions in the field of drama, performing resources, stylistics. Specially, composer use the text of the Polish traditional Lent Song as the epilogue of his work. This epilogue becomes the quiet climax of the composition. The choir’s location and the way haw it is used in the work are also symbolic: within each subsequent movement, the choir is situated closer to the listener. Stylistic means reflect the idea of giving the dogmas of faith a human dimension.

Sounding the “Spirit of My Silence”

Sufjan Stevens’s 2015 album Carrie and Lowell threw indie rock fans into collective mourning with its sonic depiction of feeling so much to the point of experiencing an overwhelming affective nothingness. Written as an elegy for Stevens’s mother, the album performs Stevens’s loss by creating a static soundscape punctuated by moments of stark sonic absence. Some moments evoke the emotionally ineffable (rhythmic stutters between phrases), some occupy a sonically liminal space with white noise negating silence, and others are calls to physical action (flipping over the LP) that literally give the listen pause. This paper places an autoethnographic encounter with a Carrie and Lowell pre-release “silent listening party” in conversation with Roland Barthes’s theory of affect and grief as originally developed in Camera Lucida: A Note on Photography. This paper explores the possibility that Barthes’s theory offers an infrastructure for approaching affect and musical listening by highlighting the ways in which the individual functions as an affective archive, navigating culturally-coded and pre-cognitive physiological responses to aesthetic objects. Drawing upon Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s work on structured silences, this paper argues that moments of foregrounded silence in Carrie and Lowell provide musical analogies for Barthes’s punctum of time and death.

Musical Training and Brain Volume in Older Adults

Musical practice, including musical training and musical performance, has been found to benefit cognitive function in older adults. Less is known about the role of musical experiences on brain structure in older adults. The present study examined the role of different types of musical behaviors on brain structure in older adults. We administered the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, a questionnaire that includes questions about a variety of musical behaviors, including performance on an instrument, musical practice, allocation of time to music, musical listening expertise, and emotional responses to music. We demonstrated that musical training, defined as the extent of musical training, musical practice, and musicianship, was positively and significantly associated with the volume of the inferior frontal cortex and parahippocampus. In addition, musical training was positively associated with volume of the posterior cingulate cortex, insula, and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Together, the present study suggests that musical behaviors relate to a circuit of brain regions involved in executive function, memory, language, and emotion. As gray matter often declines with age, our study has promising implications for the positive role of musical practice on aging brain health.

Song: Denise Riley’s Lyric and Rock Echoes

Denise Riley's poetry and prose is pivotal in framing voice as social, resonant and material, rather than as an emanation from the private depths of an individual interior being. Examination of a range of her work published over the last two decades shows how the inner speech of thought may be conceived as a replaying of language encountered in the externally sounded world, from fragments of lyric to verbal abuse. Her sustained engagement with lyric and song, whether in poems that quote song lyrics, or in her recent work that argues with and comments on its own use of traditional lyric forms, links the sounding of poetry with musical listening to articulate a position in which emotions are mobilized rather than ‘expressed’. Through the materialist imagination of her poems, continuities are created between the voicing of the poem, the voices of the dead, and the sounding of the non-human world.

Expectations

Almost every facet of the experience of musical listening—from pitch, to rhythm, to the experience of emotion—is thought to be shaped by the meeting and thwarting of expectations. On the assumption that these components of the phenomenal character of musical experience are indeed shaped by expectations rather than some other kind of mental state (an assumption we do not challenge in this chapter), it is unclear what kind of mental states these expectations are. In particular, it is unclear what their format is, and whether they are conscious or unconscious. The chapter distinguishes between different modes of musical listening, arguing that expectations play different roles in each, and pointing to the need for increased collaboration between music psychologists and philosophers in order to arrive at a more detailed characterization of conscious musical experience and the role of expectations therein than has previously been offered.

L’écoute musicale et ses enjeux dans Conversations avec le maître de Cécile Wajsbrot

Conversations avec le maître, the first volume of a series called ‘Haute mer’, is a novel about the experience of listening to music. Through conversations between a composer and an anonymous young woman, it conveys crucial aspects of musical listening and of its verbal expression. This article examines the functioning of dialogue between the two characters; moreover, it studies the relationship between creation and reception, as expressed in the novel. It also examines what is at stake in this dialogue: the power of art in its relation to reality, to History. How may music become the echo of contemporary catastrophes? The article offers a close reading of the novel’s descriptions of listening to music: what literary techniques enable the author to put it into words?

Absorption, Transmission, Reflection

This chapter discusses the genealogy of construction materials testing at acoustic laboratories founded in the late 1920s and 1930s, through the example of Norges Tekniske Høgskole (NTH) in Trondheim, Norway. Whereas architectural acoustics entailed mainly fieldwork, in the form of on-site research and consulting, the standardized testing of materials required idealized laboratory conditions where acoustic behavior could be isolated and reduced to the parameters of absorption, transmission, and reflection. With the rise of the acoustic laboratory, “objective” measurement systems replaced musical listening as a crucial skill for acousticians. Electroacoustic media technologies quickly spread on a global scale, yet acoustic laboratories still catered to the needs of local markets. One of these requirements was resource optimization, and the objective of standardized testing generally was less to improve the quality of construction than to optimize its cost. Traditional materials and buildings often exhibited better acoustic properties than the new constructions based on scientific principles.

Queer Music in the Queen’s Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siècle

This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.