Vocabulary to speak about touch: analysis of the discourse of electric guitar players

This work presents a multidisciplinary approach to vibrotactile perception, applying linguistic methods to musical acoustics. We are interested more particularly in the sense of touch as a part of the multisensory experience of playing a musical instrument. Six words and their inflections are chosen from the literature in musical acoustics dealing with vibrotactile perception: “comfort”, “dynamics”, “response”, “feeling”, “touch” and “vibration”. Their use by musicians in playing situation is analyzed. The data used in this article comes from transcripts of two previous studies, conducted in French with professional guitarists natively speaking French. The linguistic analysis of the corpus is based on different features which help to categorize the utterances according to each observed parameter, namely the relationship with the sense of touch, the object that is qualified by the words under study and the implication in discourse of the interviewee. The results permit to understand the use of the six categories of words in relationship with the sense of touch, and provide perspectives to use some of these words to focus the discourse on the sense of touch in future studies.

Neural entrainment is strongest to the spectral flux of slow music and depends on familiarity and beat salience

Neural activity in the auditory system synchronizes to sound rhythms, and brain environment synchronization is thought to be fundamental to successful auditory perception. Sound rhythms are often operationalized in terms of the sound's amplitude envelope. We hypothesized that, especially for music, the envelope might not best capture the complex spectrotemporal fluctuations that give rise to beat perception and synchronize neural activity. This study investigated 1) neural entrainment to different musical features, 2) tempo dependence of neural entrainment, and 3) dependence of entrainment on familiarity, enjoyment, and ease of beat perception. In this electroencephalography study, 37 human participants listened to tempo modulated music (1 to 4 Hz). Independent of whether the analysis approach was based on temporal response functions (TRFs) or reliable components analysis (RCA), the spectral flux of music, as opposed to the amplitude envelope, evoked strongest neural entrainment. Moreover, music with slower beat rates, high familiarity, and easy to perceive beats elicited the strongest neural response. Based on the TRFs, we could decode music stimulation tempo, but also perceived beat rate, even when the two differed. Our results demonstrate the importance of accurately characterizing musical acoustics in the context of studying neural entrainment, and demonstrate the sensitivity of entrainment to musical tempo, familiarity, and beat salience.

Musical perception and teaching-learning of French language-culture: Some acoustic and neuroscientific elements for the French music teacher

The musical nature of the sounds of a modern language emitted in the spoken mode, as well as their rhythmic and melodic combinations, exert a considerable "power" on teaching-learning: they provoke, in the learner, decisive auditory reactions, the variables of which are difficult to control, lead to more or less pleasant sensations, (in) understanding, interpretation, produce meaning. Musical perception is at the heart of successful teaching-learning. A language teacher is first and foremost a language music teacher. A French language-culture teacher is above all and always a French music teacher. Among the multidisciplinary relations of the discipline in which it is located, namely Didactology-didactics of the music of the French language-culture, are acoustics and cognitive neurosciences. Despite the extreme complexity of perceptual and neurological processes, turning to musical acoustics at first and then to musical neurosciences secondly makes it possible to recall and discover essential elements and data likely to be of interest to teaching practices.

A History of the Spectrum

This chapter traces the history of spectral audio, from Ancient Greece to the 20th century. Looking first at the first studies of ratios and pitch and the establishment of the early musical scale systems, then through the development of musical instruments, the chapter discusses the most important achievements in musical acoustics that led to the modern concept of the spectrum. It discusses the ideas put forward by Classical Physics, which culminated in the work of Fourier. The seminal discoveries and ideas proposed by Helmholtz are covered in some detail and the chapter closes with an overview of acoustics and audio engineering in the 20th century, and the development of electronic and computer music.