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The purpose of this study was to examine music education faculty members' perceptions of admissions and selection criteria for entering master's students in music education degree programs. Using multistage sampling, we distributed a questionnaire to music education faculty at National Association of Schools of Music (NASM)-accredited institutions in the United States that offered master's degrees in music education. Results indicated that music education faculty were involved in most admission decisions, and that transcripts, interviews, and letters of recommendation were the most common materials submitted for review. In response to open-ended questions, participants reported that their admission decisions are usually determined by four criteria: academic skills, demonstration of potential as a graduate student, demonstration of teaching ability, and less measurable indicators. This exploration of the admissions and selection criteria that music education faculty use when making admission decisions provides music teacher educators a greater understanding of this important transition point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Theory of Social Representations as a theoretical and methodological framework, the purpose of this study was to describe children's representations of music, musical identities, and musical engagement across middle childhood. Participants were primary students aged 8 to 11 (N = 132) from four schools in a large city in the Southeastern United States. Previous studies have documented that projective techniques (linguistic associations with textual stimuli) can access latent dimensions of thinking. Accordingly, linguistic associations with the textual stimuli "music," "music and me," music at school," and "music outside school" were used to gain insight into children's representations of music, musical identities, and musical engagement. Participants were also asked to provide socio-demographic data that might influence their responses. The Correspondences Analysis technique was used to reconstruct representational fields associated with the stimuli. For each stimulus, a three-factor extraction identified hidden dimensions in children's linguistic responses and summarized the links between contextual variables and children's representations. Major findings suggest that children at increasingly younger ages express preferences and construct their own representations of music and musical identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we examine the effects of experience and culture on choral teachers' description of choral tone across a range of genres. What does a "good" choral music performance sound like? Is there an objective standard of performance excellence, or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? In teacher preparation programs, choral directors in the United States have been taught to identify and teach particular, culturally-bounded standards of choral tone in their students. Choral directors evaluate their students' voices along two dimensions: health and appropriateness. They discern and describe whether the student's musical instrument—their voice—is producing sound in a healthy and non-damaging way. They also judge whether the style of their sound is appropriate for the music they are singing. However, teacher preparation programs do not provide common standards or lexicon for describing tone. This may increase implicit bias of individual directors, and inadvertently exacerbate ethnocentrism and harm students' self-perception. Using a computational text analysis approach, we evaluate the content of open-ended survey responses from teachers, finding that the language used to describe and rate choral performance varies by experience, and by the choral selection (e.g., whether it is a traditional Western or non-Western song). We suggest that regularizing the terminology and providing common training through professional organizations can minimize potential bias and generate more systematic, precise use of qualitative descriptors of health and appropriateness, which will benefit students and teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt our lives in unimagined ways, families are reinventing daily rituals, and this is likely true for musical rituals. This study explored how parents with young children used recorded music in their everyday lives during the pandemic. Mothers (N = 19) of child(ren) aged 18 months to 5 years living in the United States played the role of home DJ over a period of one week by strategically crafting the sonic home environment, based on resources provided by the authors, in response to their children's mood and state. Using a newly developed data collection tool, inspired by the Experience Sampling Method, a total of 197 episodes were collected about children's engagement with recorded music. Findings showed that while mothers utilized music to fulfill various emotional needs, they tended to use it to maintain or reinforce their child's positive mood rather than to improve a negative mood. Also, mothers' reports suggested various ways that young children engaged with music, being aligned with the multimodal nature of their musical experiences. Lastly, mothers reported that their strategic approaches to use recorded music seemed to help their children feel less distressed and happier, and this, in turn, aided in the reduction of some of the burdens associated with parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a "gay-sounding" voice on heterosexual music teachers' perceptions of music teaching effectiveness. Music teachers across the United States (N = 575) listened to two men between the ages of 18 and 25 years old with stereotypically gay and straight voices, respectively, reading a short paragraph. After hearing each speaker in counterbalanced order, participants rated the likelihood of each speaker's ability to demonstrate top skills and behaviors associated with effective teaching using a 4-point Likert-type scale. Listeners rated the gay voice higher on measures of maintaining high musical standards and organization; they rated the straight voice higher on measures of leadership, classroom management, and maturity. Strategies to combat these stereotypes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from homelessness into mainstream society involves external factors, such as obtaining housing and employment. Research also indicates that social support and perceptions of self-efficacy are important psychological factors in escaping homelessness. Music interventions, such as participation in performing ensembles, have been shown to aid in the development of social skills among marginalized populations and improve participants' psychological well-being. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of a music intervention on perceptions of social support and self-esteem among individuals experiencing homelessness. Members of The Shelter Band included residents at a large emergency homeless shelter in the Southeast United States, shelter staff and university music education students. The band rehearsed a variety of rock songs weekly and performed regularly for civic events. Researchers investigated the effects of band participation on perceptions of social support and self-efficacy using a mixed-method approach. Qualitative data were obtained over a three-year period through interviews with band members, shelter staff and the participant researchers. These data were transcribed and analysed for themes according to a priori and in vivo codes by the participant researchers. Social support and self-esteem were also specifically investigated by comparing differences in responses to the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List (ISEL) between band members and non-member shelter residents. Qualitative data indicated that participants in The Shelter Band demonstrated improved perceptions of social support and self-esteem. In a few cases, participation in the band was identified as a key factor in individuals escaping decades-long chronic homelessness. Other themes emerged from participants, including reduced recidivism and improved case management. Quantitative data of perceptions of social support and self-esteem between Shelter Band members and non-member residents of The Shelter revealed no statistically significant results. As music educators continue to explore opportunities for their work, it is useful to consider collaborations with community partners. By involving shelter staff in The Shelter Band, staff and music educators were able to direct the intervention towards individuals' needs. These collaborations can be beneficial for both the university and community partners. In addition, possibilities for this kind of socially responsive pedagogy in music teacher training are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of dynamic pitch in target speech on older and younger listeners' speech recognition in temporally modulated noise. First, we examined whether the benefit from dynamic-pitch cues depends on the temporal modulation of noise. Second, we tested whether older listeners can benefit from dynamicpitch cues for speech recognition in noise. Last, we explored the individual factors that predict the amount of dynamic-pitch benefit for speech recognition in noise. Method: Younger listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with varying levels of hearing sensitivity participated in the study, in which speech reception thresholds were measured with sentences in nonspeech noise. Results: The younger listeners benefited more from dynamic pitch for speech recognition in temporally modulated noise than unmodulated noise. Older listeners were able to benefit from the dynamic-pitch cues but received less benefit from noise modulation than the younger listeners. For those older listeners with hearing loss, the amount of hearing loss strongly predicted the dynamic-pitch benefit for speech recognition in noise. Conclusions: Dynamic-pitch cues aid speech recognition in noise, particularly when noise has temporal modulation. Hearing loss negatively affects the dynamic-pitch benefit to older listeners with significant hearing loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates prototypically “turn-final” pitch features (fall-to-low) at points of possible turn-completion where the same speaker continues. It is shown that points of possible turn-completion accompanied by fall-to-low and followed by same-speaker continuation only rarely engender incoming talk. It is shown that such points are frequently accompanied by nonpitch talk-projecting phonetic features and that the presence of these features may constrain the nature of any incoming talk. The results of the study should serve as caution to researchers with regard to an overemphasis on intonation when describing and analyzing talk-in-interaction. Data are from audio recordings of American English telephone calls. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports that the scientific advances have increased the survival of infants born before 30 weeks of pregnancy. Topics include examines these preterm babies remain at high risk for delays in developing motor, cognitive and language skills as well as behavioral problems and considered the ability to detect those at highest risk for developmental and behavioral disorders help guide work to identify appropriate early interventions.

Objective: Previous research has shown the usefulness of utilizing auditory chimeras in assessing a listener’s perception of the envelope and fine structure for an acoustic stimulus. However, research comparing and contrasting behavioral and electrophysiological responses to this stimulus type is scarce.Design: Two sets of chimeric stimuli were constructed by interchanging the envelopes and fine-structures of the rising/yi2/and falling/yi4/Mandarin pitch contours that were filtered through 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 frequency banks. Behavioral pitch-perception tasks were administered through a two-alternative, forced-choice paradigm. Electrophysiological responses were measured through scalp-recorded frequency-following responses (FFRs) to the lexical-tone chimeras.Study sample: Twenty American and twenty Chinese adults were recruited.Results: A two-way analysis of variance showed significance (p < 0.05) within and across the filter bank and language background factors for the behavioral measurements, while the frequency-following response demonstrated a significance only across the filter banks.Conclusions: Perceptual importance of envelope cues increases starting from 16 filter banks, while the FFR accuracy and magnitude decreases with increasing number of filter banks. These results can be useful in assessing experience-dependent neuroplasticity and in designing speech processing strategies for cochlear-implant users who speak tonal or non-tonal languages around the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO TEST THE cross-cultural musical understanding of trained and untrained listeners from two distinct musical cultures by exploring the influence of enculturation on musical memory performance. Trained and untrained participants (N = 150) from the United States and Turkey listened to a series of novel musical excerpts from both familiar and unfamiliar cultures and then completed a recognition memory task for each set of examples. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their native culture and there were no performance differences based on musical expertise. In addition, Turkish participants were better at remembering Western music, a familiar but nonnative musical culture, than Chinese music. The results suggest that our cognitive schemata for musical information are culturally derived and that enculturation influences musical memory at a structural level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the musical perception of a heavy metal drummer. Reference to various works on music perception; Establishing an ethnography of the practice of perception among rock and metal musicians; Examining the concepts of additive and divisive time; Role of multi-functionality in examining the temporal levels of musical perception.