8Embodying Music Flashcards
(36 cards)
Describe some innate musical capacities
Hearing and decoding frequency – pitch, timbre (key, harmony); perceiving beat, rhythm, tempo (meter); sensitivity to loudness; multisensory neural connections; motor skill capabilities; genetic predisposition for body attributes (e.g. piano players need long fingers, wide digit span)
At what stage can babies in utero react to loud noises?;
What occurs at about 25-26 weeks?
9 weeks;
Maturation of sensory organs (cochlear) & CNS; sensitive to sounds of the mother; can hear rhythmic sounds (e.g. breathing, heart); digestive sounds; vocal sounds; sensitive to external environment sounds; pitch, timing & loudness (dampened approximately 30dB)
Infants are sensitive to melodic contour. What kind of speech do they prefer?
Motherese/infant-directed speech (sensitive to speech prosody rather than language)
Why do mothers communicate through different pitch contours?;
What can motherese enhance & facilitate?
Approval, comfort, emotion, attention & warning;
Bonding & language development (emotional context; found across cultures)
What can infants discriminate from 6 months?;
From 2 months?;
Through what methods are these measured?
Pitch intervals, consonance & dissonance;
Rhythms;
Habituation-dishabituation method; head-turn procedure (includes training to maintain interest; increase reliability)
What kinds of intervals/sounds do infants prefer?
Consonant over dissonant
Describe some environmental influences on children’s musical development
Situational exposition (frequency & duration of music exposure; e.g. listening, playing, watching, singing); enculturation (sensitivity to, & familiarity with music of their own culture); home environment - parent’s (social standing, education level, music interests) & siblings (shared & unshared environmental influences)
How do individuals connect music with their interactions with the environment?
Personality & temperament (readily participate in musical opportunities or not); seeking to shape their environment (request musical activities); social influence (peers; contemporary music consumption); quality teaching
How many hours of deliberate practice is necessary to achieve world-class performance (in music, chess, sport, etc)?
About 10,000 (10 years)
Music experts employ skilled memory processes, such as what?
Strategies to rapidly encode, store & retrieve information from LTM; avoid STM capacity limitations (by chunking)
What are mental schemata (or schemas)?
Mental frameworks for organizing & interpreting information; extension of memory
How are mental schemata developed?
Through active learning; involves effort; builds on basic motor & perceptual capabilities (e.g. learning to play an instrument, sing or read music); develops domain specific cognitive & motor skills (procedural knowledge & automaticity) & declarative knowledge
Describe a novice’s musical schema
They learn passively; through exposure (e.g. radio, tv, mother singing); develop implicit knowledge
Roger Chaffin suggested the use of performance cues to retrieve a performance plan from LTM. What are examples of these?
Basic, interpretive & expressive; hierarchical chunking or motoric information
What do improvising musicians rely on?
Schemata & “grammar” knowledge, drawing on rehearsed motifs
Describe the processes of WM in music performance
Hand-eye span limited to about 5-6- notes; memory retrieval for performance is incremental (holding some, but not all information); serial chain –A-B-C (behaviourist perspective); but content can be maintained when things are misplaced (e.g. spoonerisms – “what a dovely lay!”)
How does WM deal with musical errors?
Slot-filter mechanism – hitting a note appropriate with the structure context (e.g.. a note in the key rather than just the nearest note) – can be perseveratory (play a note that has passed) or anticipatory (play an upcoming note); range model
What is the range model?
Accounts for the range of events accessible in WM as melodies are planned & executed; infers serial proximity (notes closer are more accessible); metrical similarity (notes are more accessible if associated with a similar metrical accent)
Why is the Audio-visual (AV) or multimodal perception a faster & more effective communication of content?
When you can see the face talking to you, you get more information & accuracy of what’s being said;
Describe the McGurk effect
A mismatch of auditory & visual information leads to & a perceived third sound (e.g. auditory – ba; visual – ga; perceived – da/tha); perceptual illusion
At what level are low musical attributes communicated between performer & audience, & what do they include?
Perceptual – including note duration, timbre, lyrics, & adaptive gestures linked to performance quality
At what level are high musical attributes communicated & what do they include?;
What attributes lie somewhere in the middle?
Cognitive – performance quality; expressive/emotional intentions & audience interest;
Phrasing, tension, dynamics, rubato & overall expression
The influence of expressive bodily movement on judgements of solo marimba performances was investigated showing either a projected/deadpan performance manner. Participants were presented with 2 different sets of 16 excerpts (AV & A).The range of tempos, difficulty levels & styles were manipulated, counterbalanced & repeated. What was recorded?;
What were the results?
Judgements of expressiveness & interest on two separate 7-point Likert scales;
Projected performances were considered more expressive & more interesting when presented as AV; Deadpan performances were considered more expressive & interesting when presented as A only
Gesturing begins early in infancy & develops through childhood alongside speech. What has been found with bodily gestures in music performance?
They’re a natural facet of advanced music rehearsal & performance; there are regularities (e.g. music structure & gestural types – people do a particular gesture at the end of a phrase); but style & deployment are highly individual
