Search

(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]

One way to provide pitch information to cochlear implant users is through amplitude-modulation rate. It is currently unknown whether amplitude-modulation rate can provide cochlear implant users with pitch information adequate for perceiving melodic information. In the present study, the notes of a song were encoded via amplitude-modulation rate of pulse trains on single electrodes at the apex or middle of long electrode arrays. The melody of the song was either physically correct or modified by compression or expansion. Nine cochlear implant users rated the extent to which the song was out of tune in the different conditions. Cochlear implant users on average did not show sensitivity to melody compression or expansion regardless of place of stimulation. These results were found despite the fact that three of the cochlear implant users showed the expected sensitivity to melody compression and expansion with the same task using acoustic pure tones in a contralateral acoustic ear. Normal-hearing listeners showed an inconsistent and weak effect of melody compression and expansion when the notes of the song were encoded with acoustic pulse rate. The results suggest that amplitude-modulation rate provides insufficient access to melodic information for cochlear-implant and normal-hearing listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. Drag the SQUARE with the house to the TRIangle with the house). The phonemic restoration paradigm was modified to obscure word-initial segmental information uniquely identifying the final word in a spoken instruction, resulting in a stimulus compatible with two lexical alternatives (e.g. mouse/house). In Experiment 1, we measured participants' final interpretations and response times. In Experiment 2, we used the same materials in a crowd-sourced gating study. Sentence interpretations at gated intervals, final interpretations and response times provided converging evidence that the anticipatory deaccenting pattern contributed to listeners' referential expectations. The results illustrate the availability and importance of sentence-level accent patterns in spoken language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of a presentation by composer Robert Rowe at a meeting held by the New York Sector of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) on November 17, 2009. His presentation focused on the relationship between music and cognition. He tackled the limitations of past efforts to analyze musical content by examining Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) signals. He discussed the way humans perceive music and the ways for computers to learn such perception.