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The convenience of mobile devices has driven the widespread use of voice technology in mobile health communication, significantly improving the timeliness of online service. However, the issue of listening to therapeutic content, which requires great cognitive effort and may exceed the patient's information processing capacity (i.e., information overload), is of concern. Based on information processing theory, this study reports how online physicians' voice characteristics (pitch range and filled pauses) affect patient satisfaction. We obtained 10,585 mobile voice consultation records of 1,416 doctors from China's largest mHealth platform and analyzed them using audio mining and empirical methods. Results showed that pitch range (β = 0.0539, p <.01) and filled pauses (β = 0.0365, p <.01) in doctors' voice positively influenced online patient satisfaction. However, the effect of filled pauses becomes weaker for patients with higher health literacy and higher disease risk. This suggests that there is heterogeneity in the way different patients process audio information. This study provides important insights for guiding online physician behaviors, enhancing patient satisfaction, and improving mobile health platform management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for a recalibration of how cultural geography engages with music, lyrics, motion, and emotion. Within existing geographical work on music, research on the music itself remains scarce, with reflection on lyrics rarer still. This paper addresses this via a close reading of the work of the Glaswegian group, The Blue Nile. It examines how the trio – and especially their principal songwriter, Paul Buchanan – used lyrics as a means for articulating distinctive conceptions of movement and stillness. The significance of song-words themselves is considered, but so too is their mode of delivery, and their relationship to the enveloping musical settings they are embedded in. The importance of time, space and place in The Blue Nile's work is analysed and the methods by which they are evoked is investigated. The paper moves discussion on from well-covered terrain regarding music as a conduit for expressing youth focussed tropes, such as rebellion and speed, focusing instead on music's facility for voicing ideas of slowness and immobility, particularly in urban settings. In doing so, it demonstrates popular music's value for articulating sensations that are now being encountered with ever greater frequency, including those of stasis, drift, and disconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music making is linked to improved cognition and related neuroanatomical changes in children and adults; however, this has been relatively under-studied in aging. The purpose of this study was to assess neural, cognitive, and physical correlates of music making in aging using a dual-task walking (DTW) paradigm. Study participants (N = 415) were healthy adults aged 65 years or older, including musicians (n = 70) who were identified by current weekly engagement in musical activity. A DTW paradigm consisting of single- and dual-task conditions, as well as portable neuroimaging (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), was administered. Outcome measures included neural activation in the prefrontal cortex assessed across task conditions by recording changes in oxygenated hemoglobin, cognitive performance, and gait velocity. Linear mixed effects models examined the impact of music making on outcome measures in addition to moderating their change between task conditions. Across participants (53.3% women; 76 ± 6.55 years), neural activation increased from single- to dual-task conditions (p < 0.001); however, musicians demonstrated attenuated activation between a single cognitive interference task and dual-task walking (p = 0.014). Musicians also displayed significantly smaller decline in behavioral performance (p < 0.001) from single- to dual-task conditions and faster gait overall (p = 0.014). Given evidence of lower prefrontal cortex activation in the context of similar or improved behavioral performance, results indicate the presence of enhanced neural efficiency in older adult musicians. Furthermore, improved dual-task performance in older adult musicians was observed. Results have important clinical implications for healthy aging, as executive functioning plays an essential role in maintaining functional ability in older adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring non-linguistic predictors of phonological awareness, such as musical beat perception, is valuable for children who present with language difficulties and diverse support needs. Studies on the musical abilities of children on the autism spectrum show that they have average or above-average musical production and auditory processing abilities. This study aimed to explore the relationship between musical beat perception and phonological awareness skills of children on the autism spectrum with a wide range of cognitive abilities. A total of 21 autistic children between the ages of 6 to 11 years old (M = 8.9, SD = 1.5) with full scale IQs ranging from 52 to 105 (M = 74, SD = 16) completed a beat perception and a phonological awareness task. Results revealed that phonological awareness and beat perception are positively correlated for children on the autism spectrum. Findings lend support to the potential use of beat and rhythm perception as a screening tool for early literacy skills, specifically for phonological awareness, for children with diverse support needs as an alternative to traditional verbal tasks that tend to underestimate the potential of children on the autism spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In certain contexts, processes of perception, action and skill development and those related to aesthetic experiences can have mutual influence upon each other. Concepts from the domains of ecological psychology and aesthetics may therefore be distinct but entangled. These entanglements are explored here through observations from an experiment in which musicians' behaviours and experiences were recorded while they interacted with a computer music controller instrument operating different modes of sound synthesis. Processes of action-perception exploration and enacting the instrument's various affordances had an impact upon the musicians' aesthetic judgements about the instrument, and their imagining its virtual potential for application in music cultural practices. Conversely, musicians' prior experience in different aesthetic cultures constrained the affordances of the instrument that were discovered and taken up by them. These insights are used to expand upon the different ways that perceptual-motor and social aesthetic processes can constrain and shape each other. Ongoing and further directions for both theoretical and empirical research are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Of Sound Mind" by Nina Kraus is a book that explores the neurological aspects of sound and the ways in which it affects our perception and processing of information. The author emphasizes the active nature of listening and highlights the multidimensional aspects of sound, including its impact on sensations, movement, thought, and emotion. Kraus discusses the concept of the "sound mind," which refers to the brain's ability to process external sound waves and create meaning from them. The book also delves into the various ingredients of sound processing and their role in our neurological responses. Additionally, Kraus examines the connection between sound and health, including the potential benefits of music therapy for individuals with speech and language impediments. However, some critics argue that the book overlooks the cultural and socio-political dimensions of sound and fails to fully explore the concept of deep listening. Overall, "Of Sound Mind" offers groundbreaking research on the biology of sound and its relevance to our understanding of listening beyond the cochlear. [Extracted from the article]

While Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and P300 have been found to correlate with the processing of acoustic and phonological information involved in speech perception, there is controversy surrounding how these two components index acoustic and/or phonological processing at pre-attentive and attentive stages. The current study employed both passive and active oddball paradigms to examine neural responses to lexical tones at the two stages in Cantonese speakers, using the paradigm of categorical perception (CP) where the between- and within-category deviants share the same acoustic distance from the standard but differ in the involvement of phonological information. We failed to observe a CP effect in P300, which might indicate that this component doesn't necessarily index phonological processing, while MMN does, as reflected by the finding of a greater MMN amplitude elicited from the between-category than within-category deviant. Nevertheless, phonological processing might be overridden by acoustic processing among participants who were sensitive to pitch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The average attention span of humans is decreasing. To adapt to the change, researchers investigate visual and auditory techniques that alter the perception of time passing. However, the auditory technique is underexplored in comparison to visual techniques, which are becoming increasingly important as voice assistants, speech interfaces or time-aware computational/robotic systems proliferate. This paper investigated the effect of pitch and interval variables on time perception. Three pitch levels (static, falling, rising) and two interval patterns (static, narrowing) for a total of six auditory stimuli were compared. Principal findings indicated that rising/falling pitch and interval narrowing, as well as their combinations, can be used to shorten the perception of time. This research contributes to a better understanding of end-users' subjective temporal estimation of auditory stimuli, which can be used to further develop audio-based interactive devices/agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult Directed Speech (ADS). Some evidence indicates that vowel space expansion in IDS facilitates infants' speech perception, thus promoting language development, whereas other studies have questioned these benefits and have proposed that any processing benefits of IDS are due to its other prosodic features such as exaggerated and variable pitch. This study aimed to tease apart the effects of vowel space expansion and prosodic exaggeration in IDS on 18-month-old infants' speech processing. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, two between-subjects conditions were compared: Exaggerated Pitch (with exaggerated pitch height and range, but without vowel space expansion) and Expanded Vowel Space (with vowel space expansion, but no exaggeration in pitch height and range). Our results showed that infants recognized the meanings of the words more accurately in the Expanded Vowel Space compared to the Exaggerated Pitch condition. This suggests that vowel space expansion in IDS facilitates infants' lexical processing even when it does not cooccur with the prosodic exaggeration typical of IDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used the categorical perception (CP) paradigm, a fine-grained perceptual method, to investigate the perceptual performance of lexical tones in Chinese people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA). Twenty patients with post-stroke aphasia (10 Broca's and 10 Wernicke's) and ten neurologically intact age-matched control participants were recruited to complete both identification and discrimination tasks of the Mandarin Tone 1–2 continuum. In addition, all participants completed tests on their auditory comprehension ability and working memory. The results showed that both Broca's and Wernicke's patients exhibited reduced sensitivity to within-category and between-category information but preserved CP of lexical tones. The degree of CP of lexical tones related to working memory in aphasic patients. Furthermore, lower-level acoustic processing underpinned higher-level phonological processing on the CP of lexical tones since both patient groups' unbalanced pitch processing ability extended to their CP of lexical tones. These findings are significant for researchers and clinicians in speech-language rehabilitation, clinical psychology, and cognitive communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Playing music can be a form of symbolization and helpful in processing emotions. Research shows that therapists use music in clinical settings both as music therapy and as an adjunct therapy to talk therapy. However, unlike other forms of art, music is an objectless form of art, which makes it strikingly similar to inner subjective experiences. This means that the role musical instruments play to connect the two objectless sides is important but is difficult to define causation between the two. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative research was to understand the role of the musical instrument and the role it plays as the transitional object for adults; the instrument was used as the breast object, in line with Klein's Object Relations Theory. There were 20 interviews with musicians of different ages, instruments, and skill levels to understand the experiences alongside the breast object. The results from the research reveal that participants anthropomorphized their musical instruments and subjectively perceived them as possessing parental attributes and the ones associated with romantic partners. The result can help inform therapists working with patients who have some musical skills to instill an endopsychic structure and repair the impacts of insecure attachment styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making music together relies, among other things, on the mutual hearing amongst co-performers and on the visual monitoring of each other's actions and gestures. This is better facilitated when musicians share a mutual visual space where hearing and seeing play a primary role. However, drawing from workplace studies, linguistic anthropology, anthropology of the senses and multimodal interactional studies of sensoriality, we observed how mutual visibility was (tacitly) more important for coordination among musicians than they themselves were willing to admit. Thanks to the video recording of trio rehearsals, by experimentally suspending the sense of hearing, often regarded as a predominant sense in the playing of a musical instrument and to make music together, we realized that mutual visibility not only enables musicians to notice pertinent/relevant visual cues and professional gestures, but also to make sound visible and then audible, activating what we call visual hearing, a specific hybrid sense, that we captured in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In daily life, failure to perceive emotional expressions can result in maladjusted behaviour. For cochlear implant users, perceiving emotional cues in sounds remains challenging, and the factors explaining the variability in patients' sensitivity to emotions are currently poorly understood. Understanding how these factors relate to auditory proficiency is a major challenge of cochlear implant research and is critical in addressing patients' limitations. To fill this gap, we evaluated different auditory perception aspects in implant users (pitch discrimination, music processing and speech intelligibility) and correlated them to their performance in an emotion recognition task. Eighty-four adults (18–76 years old) participated in our investigation; 42 cochlear implant users and 42 controls. Cochlear implant users performed worse than their controls on all tasks, and emotion perception abilities were correlated to their age and their clinical outcome as measured in the speech intelligibility task. As previously observed, emotion perception abilities declined with age (here by about 2–3% in a decade). Interestingly, even when emotional stimuli were musical, CI users' skills relied more on processes underlying speech intelligibility. These results suggest that speech processing remains a clinical priority even when one is interested in affective skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We sought to validate our proposed tool for estimating channel discrimination of cochlear implant (CI) users along the full electrode array and to assess associations between place-pitch discrimination and speech perception. In two tests, participants identified one stimulus (probe) as the odd-one-out compared with two reference stimuli. Probe stimuli were evoked using dual electrode stimulation characterised by the current steering coefficient α. The first test measured psychometric functions (PFs) on pre-defined contacts, with just a noticeable difference (JNDα) as the outcome variable. The second test estimated channel discrimination on the full electrode array, yielding a discrimination score of Dα. We measured speech perception as free-field consonant-vowel-consonant phoneme recognition scores. We included 25 adults with at least 6 months of CI experience. JNDα and Dα scores measured on the same contact correlated significantly (rs = 0.64, p < 0.001). Mean JNDα and speech perception scores showed significant relationships in quiet and in noise. Dα correlated strongly with JNDα scores obtained with the PFs. For poor performers, the full-array test may underestimate JNDα. The full-array pitch discrimination test could be a helpful clinical tool, such as for fitting regions of lesser pitch discrimination ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status of the referent was either new or given and the referring expression was presented with one of three pitch contours (flat f0, monotonal (~H*), or bitonal (~L+H*)). In Experiment 1, toddlers looked reliably longer to a target referent when it was either new to the discourse or carried a non-flat pitch contour. In Experiment 2, the referring expression was removed to observe effects of information status alone on looking to a target referent. Toddlers looked significantly longer to a target when it was new versus given. More fine-grained time course analyses of eye movements revealed differences in the speed and duration of fixation to a target. Overall, the experiments show that discourse reference in toddlers is mediated by the presence of newness and pitch contours, even in the case of given information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the book "Sonic Bodies: Text, Music and Silence in Late Medieval England" by Tekla Bude, the author challenges the assumption that flesh and body are the same thing and explores the concept of sonic embodiment beyond the limitations of a single human form. The book is divided into six chapters, each examining different aspects of sonic embodiment in medieval literature. Bude analyzes texts such as Jacobus's Speculum, Richard Rolle's work on canor, Walter Hilton's Of Angels Song, The Boke of Margery Kempe, the mystical diaries of John Norton and Richard Methley, and Piers Plowman. The final chapter explores the idea of sonic embodiment as a disabled body in Geoffrey Chaucer's work. The book offers valuable insights for scholars in Sound Studies and encourages further exploration of the role of sonic bodies in medieval racial discourses. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of this study was to assess central auditory processing (CAP) tests in patients with single sided deafness (SSD)and to study the effect of central auditory processing disorders(CAPD) on the contralateral routing of signal (CROS) hearing aid performance in these subjects. This case-control study was performed in Audiovestibular unit, ENT Department. The study included 20 children with SSD and 20 healthy control children. All participants were subjected to CAP tests including pitch pattern sequence (PPS), gap in noise (GIN) and speech intelligibility in noise (SPIN) tests. The child was fitted with CROS and evaluated by SPIN test and bern benefit in single - sided deafness (BBSS) questionnaire. There were lower SPIN, PPS, and GIN total correct scores in children with SSD than the control group. The group with normal central test battery has higher SPIN score and significant performance with questionnaire when fitted with CROS. Children with normal central auditory processing test battery performed better when fitted with CROS than those with abnormal test battery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this quality improvement project was to examine a newly-implemented music admissions assessment process at a small liberal arts university and students' perceptions of that process, which was intended to provide a holistic view of prospective students' pre-admission achievement and to offer feedback regarding their readiness and potential success for meeting degree requirements. Faculty designed a three-part assessment process, integrating an inclusive perspective to provide them with a more complete view of a student's skills, strengths, and areas in need of development prior to initiating their music studies. This process was designed to place students at the center of the assessment process and ensure that they have the opportunity to demonstrate their broad scope of skills. Music, human development and learning (i.e., music education) and music therapy students were invited to be interviewed regarding their experiences of the revised assessment process. Nine students participated in a focus group and were interviewed individually. Data analysis revealed four themes: Connecting with Others; Professional Identity; Developing as a Musician; Seen as an Individual. This redesigned process provided students with opportunities to create connections with their peers and faculty, serving as a means of support and belonging in the social and academic environment. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2021.1937761. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a lack of research regarding the use of the still-face procedure to assess infants' comfort and reengagement in stressful situations. While previous studies have already investigated the transitional phenomenon based on Winnicott's theory, this study uses "stuffed toy" and "song and musical play" with the still-face procedure. This study aimed to examine the transition phenomenon of infants in "song and musical play" and provide a new perspective regarding psychological support for infants. Infant responses and maternal availabilities were also analyzed. The study participants were 32 infants (M age = 17.97 months, SD = 1.43) and their mothers (M age = 32.28 years, SD = 2.96). The results showed that infants were receptive to the "stuffed toy" and displayed positive responses. Additionally, the appearance ratios of "song and musical play" imitations increased. This suggests that the infants used "song and musical play" to manage and control their affect in stressful situations. Furthermore, when the mothers exhibited maternal availability as an emotional rhythm, the infants' responses became positive. Therefore, the infants demonstrated the transitional phenomenon to symbolize inner objects for social participation using "song and musical play" as the transitional object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The delay in digital hearing aids is known to cause distortions due to the mixing of the delayed hearing aid sound with the undelayed direct sound. The most apparent delay-based distortion is a pitch sensation referred to as coloration-pitch. This study investigated coloration-pitch discrimination at the lower end of typical hearing aid delays and aimed at establishing thresholds where a large change in coloration-pitch is just perceptible. Simulations were verified against a reference hearing aid for numerous conditions of delay, insertion gain and incident direction. The simulations were used in a psycho-acoustics experiment in which coloration-pitch discrimination thresholds were measured as a function of hearing aid delay and gain. Participants discriminated between coloration-pitches produced by delay changes of 12%. Insertion gains compensating for mild to moderate hearing losses were used. Nine normal-hearing and twelve hearing-impaired participants with mild to moderate hearing loss participated. The simulations accurately reflected the acoustics of the open-fit hearing aid. Discrimination thresholds were between 0.3 ms and 1 ms depending on insertion gain and hearing status. High sensitivity for changes in coloration-pitch was found for delays >1 ms. For shorter delays participants were increasingly insensitive to changes in coloration-pitch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic Change Complex (ACC) is a cortical auditory evoked potential elicited in response to a change in an ongoing sound. Since it is supposed to reflect auditory discrimination at the cortical level, recording of this potential has recently gained much attention. From a technical standpoint, the stimulus used should be long enough to accommodate the needed change. This research addresses the development and standardization of short duration tonal stimuli which can be implemented in most of the Evoked Potential (EP) equipment used in regular Audiology clinics. Short duration tonal stimuli (500 msec.) were generated and edited using Audacity software. Temporal change was done using gap-in-tones stimuli (6, 10, 30 and 50 msec. in 1000 Hz tone). Frequency change was represented by frequency pairs (2%, 4%, 10% and 25% change from 1000 Hz base frequency). The developed stimuli were then used to generate ACC potential in 41 normal hearing children ranging in age from 2 to 10 years. A comparison was held between ACC response recorded using the different stimuli in reference to percent identifiability, morphology, latency and amplitude measures. Gap-in-tones at 10 msec. and 4% frequency change could elicit ACC response in 100% of subjects. ACC had the same morphology of the onset response in the majority of subjects, with longer latency and smaller amplitude. ACC amplitude was consistently affected by magnitude of change. ACC was successfully recorded in 100% of normal hearing children using the developed short duration tonal stimuli for temporal change (10 msec.) and frequency change (4%). These stimuli can be uploaded in clinical EP equipment. ACC amplitude could be a better indicator of cortical discrimination compared to latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effect of semantic focus on pitch auditory feedback control in the production of phrasal prosody through an experiment using pitch-shifted auditory feedback. We hypothesized that pitch-shift responses would be mediated by semantic focus because highly informative focus types, such as corrective focus, impose more specific constraints on the prosodic form of a phrase and require greater consistency in the production of pitch excursions compared to sentences with no such focus elements. Twenty-eight participants produced sentences with and without corrective focus while their auditory feedback was briefly and unexpectedly perturbed in pitch by +/−200 cents at the start of the sentence. The magnitude and latency of the reflexive pitch-shift responses were measured as a reflection of auditory feedback control. Our results matched our prediction that corrective focus would elicit larger pitch-shift responses, supporting our hypothesis that auditory feedback control is mediated by semantic focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music therapy, like red-pink (soothing) music, is an important treatment for neurological disorders associated with learning and memory. Magnetic fields have been proved to have a similar regulating effect. However, the effect of magnetic fields with musical rhythm generated by the combination of the two has not been confirmed. This study aimed to investigate the regulation of magnetic stimulation with music rhythm on LTP (long-term potentiation) of Schaffer-CA1. This article selected three sorts of music tracks in different frequencies (music track (1) Turkish March, music track (2) Moonlight Sonata, music track (3) Funeral March) and four sorts of pure sinusoidal tracks of four different harmonic frequency (music track (4) the frequency is 3500 Hz; music track (5) the frequency is 2500 Hz; music track (6) the frequency is 1500 Hz; music track (7) the frequency is 500 Hz). These music tracks are converted into analog signals by the external sound card and power amplifier and fed into a homemade coil that meets the demand for this frequency bandwidth. The coil can generate seven sorts of time-varying magnetic fields with musical rhythm with a mean intensity of about 2 mT. We used multi-electrode array (MEA) to record the LTP signals of Schaffer-CA1 synaptic induced by seven sorts of musical rhythmic magnetic fields and analyze the regulation of them. The musical rhythmic magnetic fields generated by track 1 and track 2 have a remarkable enhancing effect on the amplitude of fEPSPs (field excitatory postsynaptic potentials) (p <.05), and these effects intensify with the increase of frequency. Nevertheless, there is no significant enhancing effect on LTP of the rhythmic magnetic field generated by track 3 (p >.05). The sinusoidal magnetic fields generated by track 4 and track 5 have an enhancing effect on the amplitude of fEPSPs (p <.05), and the enhancement is better than track 1 and track 2. The sinusoidal magnetic fields generated by track 6 and track 7 have an inhibiting effect (p <.05). We found that the enhancing effect of musical rhythmic magnetic fields generated by track 1 was the most significant. The frequency of 1500 Hz could be a turning-point frequency in the regulation of magnetic field on LTP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Musical Emotion Discrimination Task (MEDT) is a short, non-adaptive test of the ability to discriminate emotions in music. Test-takers hear two performances of the same melody, both played by the same performer but each trying to communicate a different basic emotion, and are asked to determine which one is "happier", for example. The goal of the current study was to construct a new version of the MEDT using a larger set of shorter, more diverse music clips and an adaptive framework to expand the ability range for which the test can deliver measurements. The first study analysed responses from a large sample of participants (N = 624) to determine how musical features contributed to item difficulty, which resulted in a quantitative model of musical emotion discrimination ability rooted in Item Response Theory (IRT). This model informed the construction of the adaptive MEDT. A second study contributed preliminary evidence for the validity and reliability of the adaptive MEDT, and demonstrated that the new version of the test is suitable for a wider range of abilities. This paper therefore presents the first adaptive musical emotion discrimination test, a new resource for investigating emotion processing which is freely available for research use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the film "Little Women" directed by Greta Gerwig. Particular focus is given to the performance of Sonata Pathétique in key scenes in Louisa May Alcott's and Gerwig's projects. The author discusses the characters' willingness or unwillingness to perform music and pays attention to the characters' rhetorical strategies and modes of expression.

(Grassi p 6) There are various approaches to writing about music and psychoanalysis. It reminded me of the concept of "Remembering, Repeating and Working through" (Freud [1]) Overall I think Grassi is offering a wonderfully stimulating contribution to the literature on music and psychoanalysis but I must confess it is not an easy read. Ludovica Grassi's book The Voice of the Unconscious Psychoanalysis as Music 2021 is a welcome addition to a fairly limited but growing repertoire of books on psychoanalysis and music. In her book, Ludovica Grassi wishes to go 'beyond the application of psychoanalysis to music in order to achieve a musically informed psychoanalysis'. [Extracted from the article]

At another moment, Wilson links subjective experience and art, juxtaposing the realist theory of art 'which accounts for (aesthetic) experience, subjectivity and the relation between imagination and perception' and the realist theory of science (192). Rather, it is because I take as my starting point the idea that our current approaches to art and the arts, and our cultures that sustain these, are characterised by a TINA compromise form: where the truth in practice - that art is (only) what artists do in the arts, is combined with the falsity in theory - that art is (only) what artists do in the arts. To the extent that my argument enables art to be liberated from the culturally limiting contexts of "aesthetics" or "sciences", I would say I am for aesthetics (and art) in science, just as I am for science in the arts. The "bold" and "ambitious" claim of my realist theory of art is just this - in all instances of art, not just those where the designation "art" is conferred by representatives of "the arts" or the "artworld", art is caring about experience. This is all very reasonable until art is connected back to Wilson's particular view of the aesthetic: 'I have defined aesthetic experience as our emergent experience of being-in-relation with the natural necessity of the world ... and art as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our aesthetic experience' (192). [Extracted from the article]

David Byrne's electrifying show American Utopia was the last live performance I attended before the Covid-19 lockdown in NYC. James My youngest patient, James, a singer/songwriter, found his rock band on hiatus. Bill, almost 60 years old, lost several musician friends to Covid early on and, as a result, accessed his sadness, fear, and sense of mortality. [Extracted from the article]

Research has shown that memory is influenced by emotion. Several studies demonstrated the effectiveness of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions to modulate emotional memory pursuing clinical and educational aims. Music has been identified as a potential memory modulator, with results differing widely depending on whether the participant had musical training or not. The current study examined the effect of listening to music on musicians' and non-musicians' positive (study 1) and negative (study 2) emotional memory, in a group of 163 volunteers, aged 18–40. After the information was encoded, the groups of participants were exposed to arousing music (Symphony No. 70, D major by Joseph Haydn) or a control stimulus (white noise) for three minutes. Then memory was evaluated through free recall and recognition (immediate and deferred measures). Memory performance was compared between musicians (people with five or more years of music education) and non-musicians. Positive and negative images were better recalled than neutral ones, positive images were better recognized than neutral ones however neutral images were better recognized than negative ones. In Study 1, listening to white noise enhanced recall compared to listening to music. In Study 2, listening to arousing music enhanced recall compared to listening to white noise, and this effect was more pronounced in musicians than non-musicians. Our findings suggest that music has a great impact on memory, especially in those with experience in the field, which is reflected in cognitive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suprasegmental features are often affected by brain damage, and are typically accompanied by motor speech disorders such as dysarthria, apraxia of speech (AOS), and foreign accent syndrome (FAS). However, there is no report of a selective pitch accent disorder without motor speech impairments or FAS. We describe a female Japanese patient who developed a selective pitch accent disorder without motor speech impairments or FAS, with accompanying mild Wernicke's aphasia due to head injury, in order to investigate the mechanism of pitch accent disorder based on speech production models. We analysed her spontaneous speech, confrontation naming, repetition, reading aloud, and the error patterns in her pitch accents in two sessions. Additionally, we gave her a reading aloud test of homonyms with different accent patterns and an auditory discrimination task of pitch accents. The patient exhibited a significant recovery from aphasia, and paraphasia was observed to almost disappear, although the pitch accent errors remained in all speech modalities. While she was able to auditorily distinguish between correct and incorrect pitch accents, she was unaware of her own abnormally accented speech. The results of the analysis of the error patterns in her pitch accents revealed that they, even if incorrect for the selected words, did not actually deviate from the correct patterns in the Osaka dialect, her native dialect. Our observations suggest that the process of pitch accent production may be independent of that of phoneme production. Moreover, it may be that her accent abnormalities were not produced randomly during the process of articulation, but instead may have been due to a problem in selecting pitch accent patterns from the repertoire of Osaka accent patterns allocated to the corresponding words. This suggests that the patient's pitch accent disorder was a problem in a higher level of linguistic processing, i.e., lexical pitch accent encoding, rather than the motor control of speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article encourages further discussion of certain concepts and practices for the music theatre creations by the composer Constança Capdeville (1937-92) in keeping with the time and context of her compositions. Her music theatre works incorporate by a certain hybridism as they juxtapose various artistic expressions such as dance, music, and theatre. Throughout the 1970s, the performance concept as understood today was not fully recognized, either by composers or by the performers, who collaborated with Capdeville within the context of the Portuguese music scene. In this regard, the composer António de Sousa Dias believes this stemmed from the tendency to connect the term with performance art or with certain positions linked to happenings or free improvization, which were not the main concern of Capdeville. Given the difficulty in classifying her musical works, we here discuss some etymological issues around the performance and re-performance concepts. Capdeville's music theatre works combine different artistic expressions leading us to reflect on documentation strategies including interdisciplinary approaches from fields such as (digital) philology, computer science, archiving research and performing arts documentation, detailing here some perspectives and practices currently applied for preserving such artistic productions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Voice feminization for transgender women remains a challenge. The fundamental frequency of the voice (fo) is one of the main parameters contributing to the perception of gender. One of the aims of voice therapy is to help transgender women acquire a new vocal motor behavior to increase their fo. We hypothesized that ambulatory biofeedback could help extend the new vocal behavior to daily life. Materials and methods: This prospective case study assessed the impact of two weeks of ambulatory vibrotactile biofeedback (VTBF) applied to one transgender woman, following two weeks of voice therapy (three 60-minute sessions). The VTBF was activated when the participant's voice was lower than 150 Hz for more than 500 ms and was accompanied by two 60-minute counseling sessions. Results: The results showed that mean fo monitored in daily activities tended to increase following the two weeks of voice therapy (Δ = 8 Hz or 1 semitone) and then increased significantly immediately after the two weeks of VTBF (Δ = 13 Hz or 1.5 semitones). The increase in mean fo from day to day and the decrease in the activation percentage from the first to the second week of VTBF (Δ = 6%) indicated a gradual integration of the motor behavior, making it possible to achieve the targeted female frequency. Conclusions: The results suggest that ambulatory VTBF helped the participant to generalize the techniques acquired during the voice therapy sessions to real-life communication situations. These results are promising for therapeutic programs that integrate tools that can be used outside the clinical context. Design: Prospective case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To explore the effect of music in pain perception and the molecular mechanism. Methods: Mice were separated to control, music, music + inhibitor, and saline group. Percentage pain reduction of mice in each group was determined. The contents of 5-HT, Glu, and NE in cerebrospinal fluid of mice in the four groups were determined by HPLC. FISH was used to analyze the distribution characteristics of GRIK5 in hippocampal tissues. The protein expressions of GRIK5, NMDA 1, and TRPC1 in the hippocampal tissues were determined via western blot. Results: Mice exposed to music showed a higher percentage of pain reduction compared to model animals, while injection of GRIK5 inhibitor weakened the effect of music. It increased the contents of 5-HT, Glu, and NE in mouse models of depression. The fluorescence signal in music group was significantly stronger than saline group. Music remarkably increased the expression of GRIK5, DLG4, NMDA 1, and TRPC1 proteins when compared with saline group. Conclusion: Music promoted the secretion of Glu. The glutaminergic pathway sensed Glu, subsequently activated GRIK5, DLG4, and NMDA 1 proteins to excite dopaminergic neurons, and finally promoted the production of 5-HT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have recently queried whether musical activities that express mathematical concepts enhance young students' math skills. The use of abstract notations for math learning is also debated. The current study examined the effect of a music intervention program on pattern and symmetry knowledge. Simple graphical notation-writing was used for clarifying the abstractness of the music form and its relation to mathematical concepts. Four third-grade classes attended ten lessons on patterns and symmetry: two music classes (n = 48), and two comparison classes (n = 48). The students in the music classes were taught to write symbolic representations of musical properties and to recognize patterns and symmetry via the symbols they wrote. Pre- to post-intervention analyses indicated that the integrated music/math intervention groups had higher pre-to-post gains on math tests scores that were retained 6-months post-intervention. Students in the music groups also showed effective learning of notation-writing and transfer of note writing knowledge to a different musical piece. The music-math intervention enabled students to acquire knowledge about patterns and symmetry through repeated experiences, particularly through music-related notation-writing, suggesting that multiple representations facilitated deeper understanding and learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johnson's first two case studies explore what he sees as inherent links between the convenient lies or exaggerations told by organized religion and the duplicitous core of musical theater. With the rise and sustained prominence of shows such as I West Side Story, Into the Woods, Spring Awakening i , and more recently I Strange Loop i , it seems mystifying that the common perception of musical theater revolves around frivolous notions of joy, escape, and lighthearted excess. [Extracted from the article]

They are not the "only" design artifacts that could be analyzed and there are clear areas for future research to explore other design artifacts in relation to the design philosophy and theory of slow technology. This will help support various stages of the design process by assisting design decision-making earlier in the design process when assessing possible design alternatives and variations in the divergence phase. Both design artifacts illustrate an extended way that slow technologies could be designed while also resonating with conceptual propositions core to the original slow technology design philosophy. Core to Hallnäs and Redström ([21]) argument is that, beyond designing "calm" or ubiquitous technology that merely makes it easier to integrate technology into our everyday lives, design practice needs to change to actively promote moments of reflection and mental rest in the environments people inhabit. [Extracted from the article]

Listening to music is often used as a self-help intervention to improve sleep quality, but its efficacy among individuals without sleep disorder remains unclear. A search was performed on five databases to identify for studies that examined the use of music-based intervention to improve sleep quality among individuals without sleep disorder. Random-effects meta-analysis was performed, and the certainty of evidence was evaluated using GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation). Twenty-two articles which recruited 1,514 participants were included for review. Meta-analysis of six studies including 424 participants did not find an improvement in sleep quality among recipients of music-based intervention compared to those with standard care (mean difference: −0.80; 95% CI: −2.15 to 0.54, low-quality evidence). Subgroup analysis showed a clear improvement in sleep quality when interventions were administered for at least 3 weeks (−2.09; −3.84 to −0.34, n = 3). No difference in terms of sleep onset latency (standardized mean difference (SMD) −0.32; 95% CI −0.88 to 0.25, n = 4, very-low quality evidence) and sleep efficiency (SMD: −0.59; 95% CI −3.15 to 1.97, n = 2, very-low quality evidence) were observed. The effect of music-based intervention on anxiety, depression and quality of life were mixed with suggestions of possible benefits. Music-based intervention in addition to standard care appears to be a promising strategy to improve sleep quality when delivered for 3 week or longer. However, effects are inconsistent across studies and larger randomized controlled studies reporting long-term outcomes are needed before it can be recommended for routine use. CRD42018081193 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The aim of this study was to analyze the gamma-band frequency and motor performance of children with and without music training. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 31 right-handed children, 6–11 years old, who were allocated to two groups: 1) the music group (MG), including children who attended preschool and musical training (n = 16), and 2) the no-music group (NMG), including children who attended preschool but received no additional music training (n = 15). The outcomes were gamma-band frequency measured by electroencephalography, manual dexterity, aim-and-catch, and static and dynamic balance abilities measured by the Movement Assessment Battery for Children, and fine motor skills, overall motor skills, balance, corporal body scheme, spatial organization, temporal orientation, and general motor quotient (GMQ) by a Brazilian scale for motor development. Results: There 1was a significant difference between groups in the peak frequency (p = 0.0195) and median frequency (p = 0.0070) in the F3–F4 regions. Static and dynamic balance (p = 0.03), temporal orientation (p < 0.01), and GMQ (p < 0.03) were higher in MG than in NMG. Conclusion: The musically trained children had increased gamma-peak frequency in the frontal region and greater temporal orientation, balance, and the overall motor quotient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematical methods, specifically Network Theory, are used here to investigate musical complexity as a marker of stylistic development. Proceeding from the premise that an 18th century classical composer's musical language becomes more complex over time, we suggest that this method, insofar as it quantifies and graphically represents complexity, could be a useful tool for exploring musical style, compositional maturity, and also issues of authorship or chronology. As a preliminary study of this concept, we chose a sample of six minuet movements (and one scherzo) from Haydn's string quartets from throughout his career, and analysed the melodic content of the first violin part. This intentional limitation to a small sample of works in a single genre whose authorship and chronology are beyond question allows us to focus on fundamental issues of musical content, and how that might develop and change during the period in which the works were composed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We addressed how circadian rhythms influence daily musical activities of performing musicians, who exhibit fine temporal control. Music performances often occur in the evening and late at night; evidence suggests that composing musicians tend to be later chronotypes than non-composing musicians. However, chronotype and daily music-making in performing musicians have yet to be investigated. The current study examined chronotype in actively practicing and/or performing musicians and non-musicians, and whether it was related to the daily timing of music performance. To test influences of daily changes due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to musical, athletic, social, and sleep habits were also measured. Performing musicians, active (practicing but non-performing) musicians, inactive musicians, and non-musicians, residing in Canada, completed a 7-day online daily activity and sleep diary in Summer 2020. There were more evening chronotypes than morning chronotypes in the sample. Active/performing musicians tended to be earlier chronotypes than all other groups. Musicians' chronotype, but not nightly sleep timing, predicted the time of day that musicians made music: Late chronotypes made music later in the day and early chronotypes made music earlier in the day. Music performance and practice amount decreased during the COVID-19 period, but the daily timing of these activities did not change. All participants reported later sleep onset during the COVID-19 period; the amount of social interaction decreased during the COVID-19 period, while exercise increased for some and decreased for others. No changes in the daily timing of exercise, social interaction, or morning wake-up were reported. These findings suggest that performing musicians may be slightly earlier chronotypes than non-performing musicians and non-musicians, despite music performances often occurring in the evening. Chronotype was related to the time of day of music-making independent of nightly sleep timing, suggesting that times of day for making music reflect an individual's circadian rhythm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that bird vocalizations and music share acoustic similarities. Unsurprisingly, bird sounds inspired a number of music composers. In music, complexity plays an important role in auditory attractiveness. Would sound complexity also be important to explain the attractiveness of bird vocalizations to humans? In our study, we experimentally assessed the preference for vocalizations according to their level of complexity, indicated by objective measurements. Further, given that men and women enjoy music similarly, we verified whether the taste for the sound of birds differs between the sexes. The study was conducted on 114 adults living in a rural district in the northeast of Brazil. The results showed a significant and linear preference for sounds, with the most complex ones being preferred. Moreover, both men and women were attracted to the songs of these animals. For the first time, the importance of complexity in humans' appreciation for bird vocalizations has been objectively demonstrated. Our results stress the relationship between bird vocalizations and music for people. In addition to its theoretical nature, this study might be useful to predict, based on the sound complexity, which birds would be subject to a higher risk of capture, information that would help in reducing the loss of biodiversity. Moreover, giving the apparently universal aspect of bird song attraction to humans, it would be advisable in terms of conservation efforts to elect singing birds as flagship species. We hope that our research will serve as a motivation for further efforts in this area, as it clearly brings important insights into ethnozoology and other interdisciplinary fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Listeners perceive high or rising pitch as stressed – at the word and sentence level (high-pitch bias). Since stressed syllables can also be low-pitched, this bias may lead to misinterpretations of word and sentence stress and thus slow down speech comprehension. We investigate the effect of immediate exposure with high- vs. low-pitched stressed syllables on the identification of word and sentence stress. Participants were exposed to utterances containing only high- vs. low-pitched stressed syllables. In experimental trials, they then heard either trisyllabic words with word stress on the second syllable (Experiment 1) or three-word-sentences with sentence stress on the second word (Experiment 2) and indicated the position of word/sentence stress. Stimuli were presented in three intonation conditions (high-pitched first, second, or third syllable/word). Both experiments endorsed the high-pitch bias, with an increase after high-pitch exposure. Our results suggest a speaker-independent re-weighting of acoustic cues to stress, which is driven by experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, the conservation literature around installation and performance artworks has increasingly relied on concepts and analogies from the philosophy of music to reformulate the concept of authenticity for artworks that recur in multiple instances. Within these frameworks, authenticity is often framed as a quality ascribed to a manifestation on the basis of its compliance with the artist's explicit directives or a precision of formal resemblance with past manifestations. This article resituates the concept of authenticity invoked in fine art conservation within a wider discourse in analytic philosophy on the type-token distinction and artworks as abstract entities that are instantiated in time and space. Given the intersubjective nature and situatedness of authenticity judgements pertaining to a work's manifestations, this article considers the limitations of authenticity frameworks predicated exclusively on score compliance and considers how a type-token ontology is more capacious. This article demonstrates how this distinction already underpins existing frameworks and discourses, how it aids in conceptualising the relationship between an artwork's potentially multiple versions or variants and their manifestations, and how it accommodates the ways perceptions of an artwork's identity are socially mediated through time and may differ across its viewership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music and metronomes differentially impact movement performance. The current experiment presented metronome and drum beats in simple and complex rhythms before goal-directed reaching movements, while also quantifying enjoyment. Auditory conditions were completed with and without visual feedback and were blocked and counterbalanced. There were no differences between simple and complex rhythms, indicating that rhythmic information alone is sufficient to benefit performance. The drum elicited shorter movement times and higher peak velocities, without an increase in spatial variability. Reaction times were moderately correlated with ratings of enjoyment. These data provide evidence that the source of an auditory stimulus impacts movement performance of a goal-directed reaching task. Results are contextualized within models of goal-directed reaching to elucidate mechanisms contributing to performance improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomy revisited While our case studies are not directly of autonomous systems (typically involving quite simple interaction algorithms rather than the overt use of artificial intelligence, and in which systems are tightly coupled to humans rather than being independent of them), both I Broncomatic i and I Climb! Our observations have implications for the design of a wide variety of autonomous systems from human interactions with autonomous robots and vehicles to increasingly everyday interaction modalities involving gaze control, breath control, physiological sensing, and even voice, face, and gesture recognition, all of which may involve involuntary and unaware human actions. Embodied interaction revisited Our paper directly addresses calls for HCI to focus on the role of the body in embodied interaction, and in particular to adopt a more holistic approach toward designing for both mind and body (Höök et al., [28]; Klemmer et al., [36]). This mind-body dualism is reflected in much of HCI's thinking about interaction, for example, in the separation of cognitive goals from physical systems, the so-called gulfs of execution and evaluation in Norman's ([45]) "cognitive engineering". [Extracted from the article]

Signal processing algorithms are the hidden components in the audio processor that converts the received acoustic signal into electrical impulses while maintaining as much relevant information as possible. Signal processing algorithms should be smart enough to mimic the functionality of external, middle and the inner-ear to provide the cochlear implant (CI) user with a hearing experience as natural as possible. Modern sound processing strategies are based on the continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) strategy proposed by B. Wilson in 1991, which provided envelope information over several intracochlear electrodes. The CIS strategy brought significant gains in speech perception. Translational research activities of MED-EL resulted in further improvements in speech understanding in noisy environments as well as enjoyment of music by not only coding CIS-based envelope information, but by also representing temporal fine structure information in the stimulation patterns of the apical channels. Further developments include "complete cochlear coverage" made possible by deep insertion of the intracochlear electrode, elaborate front end processing, anatomy based fitting (ABF), triphasic pulse stimulation instrumental in the suppression of facial nerve stimulation, and bimodal delay compensation allowing unilateral CI users to experience hearing with hearing aids on the contralateral ear. The large number of hardware developments might be exemplified by the RONDO, the world's first single unit audio processor in 2013. This article covers the milestones of translational research around the signal processing and audio processor topic that took place in association with MED-EL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although both fathers and mothers speak differently in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), the acoustic characteristics of present-day paternal IDS are still insufficiently understood. To extend this understanding, 11 fathers and 17 mothers in The Netherlands were recorded interacting with their infant (260–476 days old; for IDS) and with an adult experimenter (for ADS). Both fathers and mothers were found to raise their average pitch, expand their pitch variability within utterance, and increase their pitch variability across utterances in IDS. Moreover, fathers increased their pitch variability within and across utterances more than mothers. The IDS produced by present-day Dutch-speaking fathers is thus acoustically highly dynamic, in line with fathers' energetic interaction style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]