Asymmetry in scales enhances learning of new musical structures

Despite the remarkable variability music displays across cultures, certain recurrent musical features motivate the hypothesis that fundamental cognitive principles constrain the way music is produced. One such feature concerns the structure of musical scales. The vast majority of musical cultures use scales that are not uniformly symmetric—that is, scales that contain notes spread unevenly across the octave. Here we present evidence that the structure of musical scales has a substantial impact on how listeners learn new musical systems. Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that nonuniformity facilitates the processing of melodies. Novel melodic stimuli were composed based on artificial grammars using scales with different levels of symmetry. Experiment 1 tested the acquisition of tonal hierarchies and melodic regularities on three different 12-tone equal-tempered scales using a finite-state grammar. Experiments 2 and 3 used more flexible Markov-chain grammars and were designed to generalize the effect to 14-tone and 16-tone equal-tempered scales. The results showed that performance was significantly enhanced by scale structures that specified the tonal space by providing unique intervallic relations between notes. These results suggest that the learning of novel musical systems is modulated by the symmetry of scales, which in turn may explain the prevalence of nonuniform scales across musical cultures.

Literacy effects on artificial grammar learning (AGL) with letters and colors: evidence from preschool and primary school children

abstract Literacy affects many aspects of language and cognition, including the shift from a more holistic mode of processing to a more analytical part-based mode of processing. Here we examined whether this shift impacts the ability of preschool and primary school children to learn the rules underlying a finite-state grammar using an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm implemented with either linguistic (letters) or non-linguistic (colors) materials to further examine if children’s AGL performance was modulated by type of stimuli. Both tasks involved a training phase in which half of the preschool children and half of the primary school children were exposed to a set of either letter or color strings without any information about the rules underlying the construction of those strings. Later, in the test phase, they were asked to decide whether a new set of letter or color strings conformed to those rules to test grammar learning. Results showed that only primary school children showed evidence of learning, and, importantly, only with colors. These findings seem to support the view that learning to read promotes reliance on smaller linguistic units that might hinder the ability of first-graders to learn the rules underlying finite-state grammars implemented with linguistic materials.

Jazz/Rock/Pop - Das Dresdner Modell

The jazz/rock/pop programme at the Dresden College of Music developed into a multifaceted educational complex during the GDR era, despite reservations by cultural politicians, and gained international recognition after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Contemporary witnesses, current teachers and graduates report in 25 essays on their work, experiences, individual views and the interaction between artistic practice and pedagogical activity. This richly illustrated volume provides unique insights into the structure and goals of this field of study in all its breadth, from the children's class and the cooperation with the Saxon State Grammar School for Music to the Bachelor's, Master's and graduate programmes.

The Directions of Changes in the Secondary Comprehensive School System for Girls within the Polish Territories During the Partitions Period and the II Republic of Poland

The manner in which secondary school education for girls was transforming within the Polish territories during the partitions period and under the II Republic of Poland is a complex issue which, on the one hand, inscribes into the educational policy executed by the partitioning states and later on by Polish authorities, while, on the other hand into a broad scope of changes regarding the social position of women. For a long time, girls were perceived, first and foremost, as future wives, mothers, and housekeepers. As a result, the need to create female grammar schools, that is, comprehensive schools that would prepare them for university studies, was disregarded. However, various post-primary schools were established with the aim to prepare girls for their future roles or, alternatively, provide qualifications enabling them to become school teachers. These schools could also be attended by those girls who wished to expand and supplement their general education. Not until the II Republic of Poland was the male and female school system standardised at the secondary level. Yet, girls continued to struggle to complete the secondary level of education due to a smaller number of state grammar schools addressed at female students.

Evolving state grammar for modeling DNA and RNA structures

In this paper, we represent bio-molecular structures (Attenuator, Extended Pseudoknot Structure, Kissing Hairpin, Simple H-type structure, Recursive Pseudoknot and Three-knot Structure) using state grammar. These representations will be measured using descriptional complexity point of views. Results indicate that the proposed approach is more succinct in terms of production rules and variables over the existing approaches. Another major advantage of the proposed approach is state grammar can be represented by deep pushdown automata, whereas no such automaton exists for matrix ins-del system.

Learnability and Learning Algorithms in Phonology

Phonological learnability deals with the formal properties of phonological languages and grammars, which are combined with algorithms that attempt to learn the language-specific aspects of those grammars. The classical learning task can be outlined as follows: Beginning at a predetermined initial state, the learner is exposed to positive evidence of legal strings and structures from the target language, and its goal is to reach a predetermined end state, where the grammar will produce or accept all and only the target language’s strings and structures. In addition, a phonological learner must also acquire a set of language-specific representations for morphemes, words and so on—and in many cases, the grammar and the representations must be acquired at the same time. Phonological learnability research seeks to determine how the architecture of the grammar, and the workings of an associated learning algorithm, influence success in completing this learning task, i.e., in reaching the end-state grammar. One basic question is about convergence: Is the learning algorithm guaranteed to converge on an end-state grammar, or will it never stabilize? Is there a class of initial states, or a kind of learning data (evidence), which can prevent a learner from converging? Next is the question of success: Assuming the algorithm will reach an end state, will it match the target? In particular, will the learner ever acquire a grammar that deems grammatical a superset of the target language’s legal outputs? How can the learner avoid such superset end-state traps? Are learning biases advantageous or even crucial to success? In assessing phonological learnability, the analysist also has many differences between potential learning algorithms to consider. At the core of any algorithm is its update rule, meaning its method(s) of changing the current grammar on the basis of evidence. Other key aspects of an algorithm include how it is triggered to learn, how it processes and/or stores the errors that it makes, and how it responds to noise or variability in the learning data. Ultimately, the choice of algorithm is also tied to the type of phonological grammar being learned, i.e., whether the generalizations being learned are couched within rules, features, parameters, constraints, rankings, and/or weightings.