Teaching prosody awareness in spontaneous speech for non-linguistic students

The paper reports on the findings of the study of prosody in teaching spontaneous speech production. Insufficient development of a scientifically based methodology for building oral language skills, taking into account its prosodic characteristics, determines the relevance of the study. The main goal of the research is to correct the methodology of teaching spontaneous learner talk, based on the results of experimental phonetic research. The research methodology is based on an integrated approach using linguistic methods of experimental phonetic research, as well as methods of psychological and pedagogic research. The results of phonetic experiment of 97 monolingual utterances of undergraduate students, non-English majors (total running 190 minutes) show a summary of commonly occurring problems that lead to non-native intonation. These problems are mostly related to improper segmentation, wrong distribution of the utterance stress, incorrect rhythmic organisation of speech, break of intonation continuum, inappropriate intonation patterns and melodic contour. The proposed prosodic focus on teaching spontaneous monologue speech includes the following stages: sensitisation, imitation, reading with prosody and practice activities. Methodological recommendations contain specific proposals for teaching sentence stress, syntagmatic division, pausing, intonation and rhythmics of spontaneous speech.

Simulating musical rotation, contour and notes: perception of (e)motion in nonmusicians

The meaning of music may rely upon perceived motion (Zuckerkandl, 1971). Recently, the framework of embodied music cognition, which draws on the discovery of mirror neurons and the theory of embodied simulation (Gallese, 2007), makes the claim that our understanding of human-made sounds draws upon our experience of making the same or similar movements and sounds, which involves imitation of the source of visual and auditory information (Cox, 2011). This paper investigates perceived motion and embodied music experience in non-musicians across three musical dimensions: melodic contour (ascending, descending and flat), melodic complexity (low, medium, high) and, following from Hanson and Huron (2019), note pattern (binary, ternary, quaternary). As part of an initiative to adhere to a high aesthetic standard, 27 ten-second piano tracks were created in collaboration with a film composer. In the computer task, participants rated stimuli on a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) ranging from 0 to 100 for perceived Direction, Rotation, Movement, and Emotional and Physical Involvement. Results showed that: 1) Quaternary conditions were perceived as having significantly more Rotation, Movement and being more Physically Involving than Ternary and Binary, 2) High Complexity conditions were perceived as evoking significantly more Movement and being more Emotionally Involving than Low and Medium, and 3) Ascending conditions were perceived as having significantly more Movement, Rotation and being more Emotionally and Physically Involving than Descending and Flat. Results indicate that greater embodiment evoked by musical ascent may be modulated by greater perceived exertion or ‘effort’ to reach higher pitches, in line with the mimetic subvocalization hypothesis (Cox, 2017). Future studies are needed to investigate whether perceived rotation is driven by note pattern (i.e. metre) or note density and pitch., and how musical contour and rotation impact sensorimotor activation in the brain.

Traces of Tourism and Transnationalism in Liszt’s Heine Settings

Shortly after touring the Rhinelands in the early 1840s, Liszt began setting two poems by Heine that feature the Rhine: ‘Im Rhein’ (S. 272) and ‘Die Lorelei’ (S. 273). They were published together in 1843 in a collection of mostly German songs and one Italian song, which Liszt titled Buch der Lieder after Heine’s own collection of poems published in 1827 and from which ‘Im Rhein’ and ‘Die Lorelei’ are drawn. Based on a public letter written while Liszt was on holiday in Nonnenwerth and published in Paris during his lifetime, this essay argues that two life experiences that happened within days of each other in the summer of 1841 indelibly link these two songs in Liszt’s biography and offer insights in how to read his musical settings. Firstly, Liszt travelled passed the Lorelei rock by steamship, which was so noisy and created so much smoke that he complained he could not properly take in either the landscape or the soundscape of the famed location along the river, which, according to a newly minted legend, inhabited by a siren-figure called Lorelei. Secondly, he was invited by the citizens of Cologne to provide a benefit concert to help raise funds to finish the construction of the Cologne cathedral, which had lain incomplete since the fifteenth century. Although he had already composed ‘Im Rhein’, shortly after his success in Cologne, he composed ‘Die Lorelei’. In 1856, Liszt published substantially revised versions of both songs. By then, he had settled in Weimar and was no longer the cosmopolitan visitor with a multitude of national allegiances, which opens the different versions to an analysis through Liszt’s own lived experience – that is, through the lens of tourism versus transnationalism. The essay compares the two versions as contrasting reactions to the loco-descriptive elements in Heine’s poems. Through a close analysis of Liszt’s choices of form, harmony, melodic contour, and accompanimental figuration, I argue that, in the case of ‘Im Rhein’, Liszt’s revision reveal a greater intimacy with the monuments described in Heine’s poem and, in the case of ‘Die Lorelei’, the setting becomes more idyllic over time, suggesting an erasure of Liszt’s own traumatic journey and the technological developments in shipping that had drowned out and obscured the sonic and visual aura of the famous and perilous bend in the river. In both cases, the transnational perspective brings to the fore ways in which the sense of flow, movement of light, navigation, boundaries, and the crossing of thresholds are either facilitated or hampered in Heine’s poems and Liszt’s music.

Auditory local–global temporal processing: evidence for perceptual reorganization with musical expertise

The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local–global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local–global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.

NGELIK SILIHAN DALAM KARAWITAN GAYA SURAKARTA

This study examines ngelik silihan in Surakarta style music. The problems revealed in this study are (1) How can ngelik in Surakarta style music, (2) Why does the Eling-eling ladrang dish generally use ngelik?, (3) Any factors that support a loan of ngelik silihan. This research is a qualitative research, data obtained from literature studies, observations, and interviews. The theory used as the basis for analyzing in accordance with the formulation of the problem is the creativity theory by Wallas about the process of creativity, and the theory of musical interaction by Benjamin Briner about musical interactions that occur in gending, and the theory of melodic contour by Judith Bekker about the melody flow obtained in theory worked on by Rahayu Supanggah, in the theory of the melodic contour it can emphasize the problem of the melody flow in the interconnected selection. The results of this study found that the use of ngelik silihan there are three factors, namely: 1. Shifting the function of the presentation, 2. Creativity of the artists. The use of ngelik silihan with consideration of the same melodic and song gong grooves, so that it is aligned with the borrowed portion of the loan, 3. Pathet factors for the lending and borrowed selection. In addition there is a historical statement that the Pangkur ladrang borrowed the Eling-eling ladrang. Information on the artist community that the Eling-eling ladrang borrowed the Pangkur ladrang, the reasons are: 1. Recognition of the perpetual artists acquired, 2. Manuscripts in the Mloyowidodo notation book, 3. Commercial cassette tapes which first popularized the Eling-ladrang ladrang from at Pangkur ladrang.Keywords: Ngelik, Silihan, Song, Sèlèh, Gending.

Auditory local-global temporal processing: Evidence for perceptual reorganization with musical expertise

The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local-global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local-global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.

Generation of Melodies for the Lost Chant of the Mozarabic Rite

Prior to the establishment of the Roman rite with its Gregorian chant, in the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France the Mozarabic rite, with its own tradition of chant, was dominant from the sixth until the eleventh century. Few of these chants are preserved in pitch readable notation and thousands exist only in manuscripts using adiastematic neumes which specify only melodic contour relations and not exact intervals. Though their precise melodies appear to be forever lost it is possible to use computational machine learning and statistical sequence generation methods to produce plausible realizations. Pieces from the León antiphoner, dating from the early tenth century, were encoded into templates then instantiated by sampling from a statistical model trained on pitch-readable Gregorian chants. A concert of ten Mozarabic chant realizations was performed at a music festival in the Netherlands. This study shows that it is possible to construct realizations for incomplete ancient cultural remnants using only partial information compiled into templates, combined with statistical models learned from extant pieces to fill the templates.