The Evaluation of Music Department Students of Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta in Modes Identification

Modes in Modality concept is a musical thinking that was used before 1600s. After 1600s (Baroque Era), the concept of modes changed into a contrast concept called Tonality (major-minor) and still exist today, in our era. Musical knowledge will evolve along with technological advances, but in fact there are so many composers today using the concept of modes to give another nuance and interpretation in their musical works. As academic musicians, surely the students of Music Department of ISI Yogyakarta got the concept of modes in several subject such as music theory, music structure and style, music analysis, and etc. However, the tonality concept that always used by common academic musicians today makes the concept of Modality become so hard to identify if they are heard a musical work that contains modes. This research will show us how many students of Music Department of ISI Yogyakarta who can’t identify a musical work that contains modes.

The human language system does not support music processing

Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some argue for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing, but others fail to find overlap. Using fMRI, we examined the responses of language brain regions to diverse music stimuli, and also probed the musical abilities of individuals with severe aphasia. Across four experiments, we obtained a clear answer: music does not recruit nor requires the language system. The language regions′ responses to music are generally low and never exceed responses elicited by non-music auditory conditions, like animal sounds. Further, the language regions are not sensitive to music structure: they show low responses to both intact and scrambled music, and to melodies with vs. without structural violations. Finally, individuals with aphasia who cannot judge sentence grammaticality perform well on melody well-formedness judgments. Thus the mechanisms that process structure in language do not appear to support music processing.

Zhuang Opera --- A study of Chinese Minority Arts in Guangxi Province, China

This article is a study of Zhuang Opera in the Guangxi Province in China. There are three general genres of Zhuang Opera, the analysis of selected musical pieces of these four types focuses on the music structure of Pingban melody, and the rhyme of the song texts --- Yaojiaoyun. This study is a pioneering work on the Zhuang Opera's musical form as there is currently no published work on the music of the opera and its association with related music categories. Except for very few research collections on national opera, most studies mainly focus on the history, literature, and folklore of traditional Zhuang Opera. In general, this study utilized new research methodologies producing different results from previous research, while at the same time, confirming earlier studies on the music and performance styles of the opera.

Distinct roles of cognitive and sensory information in musical expectancy

Expectation is crucial for our enjoyment of music, yet the underlying generative mechanism remains contested. While sensory–acoustic models derive predictions based on the short-term auditory input alone, cognitive models assume the use of abstract knowledge of music structure acquired over the long-term. To evaluate these two contrasting mechanisms, we compared simulations from computational models of musical expectancy against subjective surprise ratings of chords sampled from US Billboard pop songs in musicians and non-musicians. Bayesian model comparison revealed that probabilistic knowledge of music structure and auditory short-term memory both explained unique behavioural variance without mediation. However, probabilistic knowledge accounted for nearly four times as much variance in musicians, and over twice as much in non-musicians. Incorporating both probabilistic knowledge and auditory short-term memory together furthermore improved predictive accuracy over the individual models. Our findings thus motivate an alternative to the current debate by emphasising the distinct, albeit complementary, roles of cognitive and sensory information in forming expectations during music-listening in humans.