An Introduction to Musical Interactions

The article presents a contextual survey of eight contributions in the special issue Musical Interactions (Volume I) in Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. The presentation includes (1) a critical examination of what it means to be musical, to devise the concept of music proper to MTI as well as multicultural proximity, and (2) a conceptual framework for instrumentation, design, and assessment of musical interaction research through five enabling dimensions: Affordance; Design Alignment; Adaptive Learning; Second-Order Feedback; Temporal Integration. Each dimension is discussed and applied in the survey. The results demonstrate how the framework provides an interdisciplinary scope required for musical interaction, and how this approach may offer a coherent way to describe and assess approaches to research and design as well as implementations of interactive musical systems. Musical interaction stipulates musical liveness for experiencing both music and technologies. While music may be considered ontologically incomplete without a listener, musical interaction is defined as ontological completion of a state of music and listening through a listener’s active engagement with musical resources in multimodal information flow.

How did I use music therapy to foster connections between residents, and between residents and others in a rest home and hospital environment

<p>Abstract This study is submitted in part fulfilment of a Master of Music Therapy degree through Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). Group and individual music therapy sessions were undertaken within a rest home and hospital environment in response to the rest home managers request to bring residents out of isolation and increase socialisation. Facility notes, plans and observations, meeting notes, and reflective and reflexive journaling were written during a six-month period from February to July 2019. This clinical data was then used, with informed consent, to investigate how music therapy was used to foster connections between residents, and between residents and others within the rest home and hospital environment. Findings from Secondary Analysis of the data showed the overarching category of rapport led to the interplay of four main themes: interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork, therapeutic approaches, physical and musical resources, and environmental conditions. The Community Music Therapy (CoMT) ethos supported the flexible work within the context to achieve the manager’s goals resulting in increased connection between residents, and residents and others. The use of reflexivity enabled the development of richer therapeutic relationships and helped align the researcher’s community musician skills to those of a community music therapist. Further studies which focus on rapport, connection and relationships, in music therapy with older people, are needed.</p>

How did I use music therapy to foster connections between residents, and between residents and others in a rest home and hospital environment

<p>Abstract This study is submitted in part fulfilment of a Master of Music Therapy degree through Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). Group and individual music therapy sessions were undertaken within a rest home and hospital environment in response to the rest home managers request to bring residents out of isolation and increase socialisation. Facility notes, plans and observations, meeting notes, and reflective and reflexive journaling were written during a six-month period from February to July 2019. This clinical data was then used, with informed consent, to investigate how music therapy was used to foster connections between residents, and between residents and others within the rest home and hospital environment. Findings from Secondary Analysis of the data showed the overarching category of rapport led to the interplay of four main themes: interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork, therapeutic approaches, physical and musical resources, and environmental conditions. The Community Music Therapy (CoMT) ethos supported the flexible work within the context to achieve the manager’s goals resulting in increased connection between residents, and residents and others. The use of reflexivity enabled the development of richer therapeutic relationships and helped align the researcher’s community musician skills to those of a community music therapist. Further studies which focus on rapport, connection and relationships, in music therapy with older people, are needed.</p>

Shakespeare and Music

William Shakespeare entertained many ideas about music, some of them conflicting, and he frequently represented these ideas in his plays. Music was a multifaceted art and science in early modern England, and debates over the nature and interpretation of music played out in a variety of contexts: academic, religious, political, commercial, and aesthetic. At the same time, music was a vital part of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. He made use of his company’s musical resources to include performed music in his plays, and his characters frequently sing and quote popular ballads and songs that would have been recognized by his audiences. The combination of words about music and musical performances gave Shakespeare the opportunity to test various theories of music in complex and original ways. His plays are especially demonstrative of the ways in which certain views of music were connected to other ideological perspectives. Shakespeare’s most modern idea about music is the notion that musical meaning derives from its contexts and conventions rather than from an inherent, universal nature. Taken together, his plays provoke skepticism about unified theories of music. At the same time, they demonstrate that the seeming universality of music makes it an extremely powerful tool for both the polemicist and the dramatist.

‘We Are the Dead’: The War Poets, metal music and chaos control

During the course of the First World War, the generation of British authors known collectively as the War Poets revolutionized the popular culture of their time. Due to their changing attitudes towards armed conflict, their portrayal of war chaos included realist descriptions of life in the trenches, unusual choices of subject matter and an eventual challenge to the political and religious establishment of their time. Metal music, a genre with an inherent lyrical and musical concern about chaos and control, has crafted several songs inspired on the First World War poetry. This specific relationship has not been studied before. Based on Weinstein’s and Walser’s insights on chaos and control in metal music, the aim of this article is to evaluate the ability of metal music to either transmit or refute the War Poets’ discourse on chaos, and to study the textual and musical resources metal bands use to relay and control said discourse. For this purpose, I perform a comparative analysis of nine metal music adaptations and appropriations of six different First World War poems they are based on. A chronological path of the evolution of the First World War poetry is followed. The study concludes that, besides effectively transmitting or contesting the War Poets’ discourse on chaos, metal music exerts chaos control through its use of musical resources, especially in the case of extreme metal subgenres.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY MUSIC BROADCASTING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE AUDIO RECORDING MEDIA EVOLUTION (UNTIL 1970s)

The purpose of the article is to determine the stages of development of music broadcasting and to reveal their features in the context of the evolution of audio recording means. The methodology consists of the application of general scientific and special methods, namely: information and system approaches, terminological and historical methods, as well as methods of analysis and generalization of source information, comparison and interrelation of theory and practice. Scientific novelty. The significance of musical resources has been brought to the development of radio communications and the early stages of development of musical radio communications have been clarified in the context of the evolution by means of audio recording. Conclusions. Radio has played one of the leading roles in the field of music and, conversely, without music, radio broadcasting has not received the appropriate technical development and, accordingly, would not have had such an impact on society. Clusters of music radio recordings on the rights of subsystems are connected to the metasystem of information communications. Music publishers, who were then the most influential part of the industry, allied with the musicians. At the time of birth, radio notes were the main musical product, and songwriters were real stars. However, when the whole world began to buy records instead of music, the power from publishers and singers passed to record companies and cooperated with them performers. In the early stages of its existence, musical radio broadcasting underwent an evolutionary path from the musical telegraph (1876), the first radio shows with magnetic recording (1914), the rapid development of radio engineering and recording technology (1920–1940), and 3-minute rock ‘n’ roll from artisanal records (1950s) to «pirate music», which was broadcast from ships (1960s). The study of the historical and cultural preconditions for the formation and development of musical radio broadcasting at an early stage in the context of the evolution of audio recording allowed to identify three main stages: «search» (1870–1920), 2) «competitive» (early 1920s – second half of the 1940s). .), 3) «vinyl-tape» (first half of the 1950s – 1970s). The term «music broadcasting» is proposed to mean technological means of sound transmission to an unlimited number of listeners of musical compositions and / or other musical information on the radio, as well as wired radio networks or packet-switched networks, classifying them as «active phonograms». , broadcast) and «passive phonograms» (performed a functional role and transferred to the archive). Key words: Archive, Records, Storage, Music, Digitization, Radio.

Sweet Thing

Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form is a historical and analytical study of one of the most productive and enduring shared musical resources in North American vernacular music. Many of us learn the form as children, when we sing “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,” and we hear it frequently in popular music, but usually without realizing that this poetic and rhythmic pattern has been penetrating the minds of musicians and listeners for centuries. The antecedents of the form date back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England, and appear in seventeenth-century English popular music; eighteenth-century English and American broadside balladry; nineteenth-century American folk hymnody, popular song, gospel hymnody, and ragtime; and American folk repertoire collected in the early twentieth century. It continued to generate many songs in early twentieth-century popular genres, including blues, country, and gospel music, through which it entered into many postwar popular genres like rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, country pop, the folk revival, and rock music. This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the centuries-long history of the scheme, and defines its musical parameters in twentieth-century popular music.

Punk and the White Atlantic

Punk emerged as a fully formed and recognizable style in the mid-1970s in the United Kingdom, primarily in London, and in the United States, primarily in New York and Los Angeles. British punk musicians such as the Damned, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols during this period put together elements from American punk and its precedents, including elements that were previously heard in distinction from each other, such as the riff-based blues of the Stooges and back-to-basics rock and roll songs of the Ramones. Although this period is marked by a preoccupation with whether punk was “invented” in the US or UK, in fact, punk is a product of exchanges between musicians across the Atlantic, with much of the music continuing a long history of white people using a vocabulary of Black musical resources, including blues and reggae, to explore identity, class distinctions, and the nature of whiteness itself. These exchanges in punk are comparable to the so-called “British Invasion” of the prior decade. The discourse of making the mid-1970s UK a starting point for punk also appears to be an idea that American musicians were primarily invested in, and an idea that further dissociated punk from its basis in Black American music.

Intro: The Meanings of a Musical Style

Punk is an extraordinarily meaningful and productive set of musical approaches, and exploring punk rock’s history based on an analysis of its musical style leads to conclusions that are often in conflict with the stories that have been told. This chapter establishes several premises that are investigated in the rest of the book, including punk’s complicated relationship to American whiteness and the suburbs, and punk’s underappreciated basis in African American musical resources.