12:00-12:30

The Internet Age and Popular Culture as Reflected in the Mindset of Today's Guitar Students

Mika Sihvonen

Senior Researcher, University of Tampere, TRIM Research Center, Tampere, Finland.

NNIMIPA Coordinator, UTA

In this presentation I will discuss the recent technology-related factors that popular culture has brought into the musical experience. The presentation is based on my observations as a guitar teacher during the last 14 years. Different technologies and trends, alongside with the development of the World Wide Web have changed the musical experience, music learning and comprehension of music cultures. When I started to work as a guitar teacher in music school, most of my guitar students hardly recognised any music apart from their own culture. Now, the media hits such as Guitar Hero and Singstar, have increased awareness of different music styles. Also, the computer software and tablet PC applications make it possible to produce music with high quality sound and publish it online for free.

Some argue that video-gaming experience, for instance, will foster a rather mechanistic mindset in students. Computer-based systems give instant feedback if the singing or "playing" are performed in the right way or wrong way.  Perfect timing and perfect pitch are not the whole story, however. Successful TV-competition concepts such as Idols or Talents are offering mega-class popularity for a few lucky ones. On some occasions the music student may lose his or her interest for the hard work that learning music usually requires.

Of course, there are pros and cons in every new application or music competition concept. For instance, the students are able learn to know music from different periodx and recognize songs upon hearing them when they play the games. The TV singing competition may inspire teenagers to sing and learn music. In spite of the accumulation of top-of-the-chart songs, other music may also become part of a young person's life.  In some cases teenagers could learn to recognize music from their parents' era and in some cases even start to listen to that music.

The main challenge may lie beneath the rapid development of the technology. Yet there are not suitable pedagogical approaches for supporting students with their different combinations of popular culture concepts and experimentations with music technology. The know-how might fragment into pieces and teachers are unable to follow the new trends in the world of the next generation. Also, the teacher's basic attitude may be reluctant.  A teacher can be seen also as a guide to music cultures and students really need guidance to survive in the complex media field with its be-a-celebrity kind of attitude.

Sometimes students do not reveal what their sources of inspiration have been when they wish to learn music. In short: to move ahead, there must be enough time for dialogue between teacher and student in order to attain mutual understanding.

12:30-13:00

Variations in Bass Strength over Time in Popular Music

Kristoffer Jensen

Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University Esbjerg
NNIMIPA Coordinator, Aalborg University Esbjerg, Esbjerg, Denmark 

I will discuss recent finding in the evolution of the relative strength of low frequencies (bass) over time in popular music. In part, I have discovered that there is a static law, saying that the relative bass strength is static until a given year, which is different depending on the frequency, but there exist also modulations on top of these static changes. The goal of this presentation is to discuss the reasons for these modulations that may be related to genre, or perhaps societal changes. As such, this may be an indication of how music and society are related.

13:00-13:30

The Development of Some Empirical Approaches to Integrating the Physicality of Musical Performance with the Philosophy of Music

Cynthia M. Grund (on site)

Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Chief Coordinator for NNIMIPA and NNIMIPA-coordinator for SDU; NordForsk Project Manager

William Westney (via video conference)

Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Piano, Browning Artist-in-Resid​ence; School of Music, Texas Tech University. Hans Christian Andersen Guest Professorial Fellow at SDU 2009-2010. NNIMIPA delegate representing the University of Southern Denmark.

In this paper we report and reflect on an in-progress empirical study of piano performance and how it is perceived. Selected as one of the charter projects funded within a groundbreaking initiative to promote transdisciplinary research at Texas Tech University in 2012, the study is specifically designed to address philosophical concerns about the interrelationship of musical meaning and embodiment. This research is being carried out by an international team comprising a concert pianist, a philosopher (the authors and presenters of the paper here summarized), a neuroscientist and an engineer specializing in motion-capture technology.  

     We introduced this study at last year's London NNIMIPA meeting, and much has happened since then:  
     Inspired by prior work on musical gesture by Godøy, Leman, Jensenius and others, the presenters are pursuing the investigation of musical meaning and expression by first distilling the movements of performing instrumentalists into the movements of their avatars generated by markered motion capture technology. This remediation of their performances reduces the movement and gesturing of the performers to something that is perceived far more clearly in terms of form than is the case in raw video recordings.
     During lab sessions conducted in October 2012, each pianist in the study was asked to give two renditions of an expressive piece by Grieg (“Cowherd’s Song”) and two renditions of a crisply technical one (“Scherzo”) by Hummel. In every case the first rendition was to be played according to one specific instruction given by the researchers, and the second one according to a contrasting instruction. This pair of instructions was identical for all performers.
     The next phase of experimentation in May 2013 moved the motion capture results into an innovative context of investigation. Two groups of subjects – (1) trained classical-music performers, and (2) others who have been identified as appreciators of classical music, but without any training as instrumentalists – were placed inside an fMRI apparatus wearing noise-cancelling headphones and positioned so as to view a computer screen. They watched and listened to the performances as reproduced on the avatar videos. A battery of questions answerable on a seven-point Likert scale was posed on the screen after each performance, and the subjects answered these questions by simple cursor manipulation. The questions gauged degree of engagement, level of experienced congruence between the motions of the avatars and the music produced, experienced meaningfulness of the performances, and the like.

     Much base-line neuroscientific research is available regarding the location of emotional, imaginative, and pleasure-related responses within the brain. Among the main motivations for involving brain-scanning technology are thus (1) to see what effects the clearly different performance strategies give rise to in the various brain centers; and (2) to compare the stated reactions of subjects with what is revealed by these brain patterns.

     Video and audio documentation of the experiments will be shown, and this is interesting in its own right. There is much data processing left to do before definitive results are available; hopefully the full research team will be able to present some of these at the NNIMIPA-CMMR meeting in Marseille in October 2013.

     We hope that - ultimately - we will be provided with some clues as to the character of the physical mechanisms that underlie our attribution of meaning to music. 
    

Friday, July 19, 2013

Day One of the Third Annual Conference of the RMA-MPSG.  Please see the RMA-MPSG conference program here for details.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Day Two of the Third Annual Conference of the RMA-MPSG.  Please see the RMA-MPSG conference program here for details. Please note that during Parallel session III a. Gesture and Touch, Kristoffer Jensen (Aalborg University Esbjerg & NNIMIPA) & Søren R. Frimodt-Møller (Aalborg University Esbjerg & NNIMIPA) - will be presenting NNIMIPA-related work in a paper entitled Capturing the Role of Gesture in Music Performance.