The Populist Message of Australian Country Music

Australian country music is influenced by American country music and Australian bush ballads. This music idealises genuine true blue inhabitants of an idealised rural heartland and fuses nationalism with agrarian mythology. The lyrics of a number of country songs contain a populist political message, which is frequently nationalistic but is a form of nationalism.

The effect of music therapy services on classroom behaviours of newly arrived refugee students in Australia

This pilot study examined the effects of a short-term music therapy program on the classroom behaviours of newly arrived refugee students who were attending an intensive 'English as a Second Language' secondary school. A cross-over design with two five-week intervention periods was employed with group music therapy sessions conducted one or two times per week. Data from the Behaviour Assessment Scale for Children were used to evaluate a range of positive and negative school behaviours. A significant decrease in externalising behaviours was found with particular reference to hyperactivity and aggression. No significant differences were found in other behaviours. Explanations and implications of these findings are discussed.

A retrospective lyrical analysis of songs written by adolescents with anorexia nervosa

Song-writing plays a central role in music therapy with adolescents. A retrospective lyrical analysis of songs written by adolescents with anorexia nervosa was undertaken in order to identify common themes solicited through song-writing interventions. Fifteen participants contributed 17 songs, from which 368 lyrical units were identified. A modified content analysis approach was used with each lyrical unit being categorised to one of six themes determined from the literature and clinical experience. The theme of 'identity' was used most frequently (28%), with the sub-theme of 'exploring new behaviours, positive self-talk' being addressed most often (12.5% of total). The dominance of the developmentally important theme of 'identity' may reflect the relationship between adolescents, music and identity or may be related to the way in which anorexia nervosa has been theorised to assist the adolescent in managing challenges to the emerging sense of self. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Teaching Australian cello music to Intermediate students: An exploratory study of motivation through repertoire

This paper explores the motivational aspects of repertoire for intermediate student cellists. Research into interest and intrinsic motivation related to the learning of instrumental music has been limited to date. As a cello teacher interested in including contemporary and Australian music in my students' studies I started to research availability of Australian repertoire for intermediate cellists and found that there was limited accessibility to such pedagogical material at this level. This study emerged as a way of providing useful information to composers. It investigates intrinsic motivation by questioning students and their teachers about which aspects of music repertoire are most likely to inspire students to practice more and strive for excellence. This paper presents the findings of the purpose-designed questionnaire distributed to cello teachers in Queensland. A similar set of questions has been prepared for student cellists and information gathering from students is still underway. Musical aspects investigated include technique and its development, style, harmony, tempo (speed), and rhythm. The questionnaire gathered information on the most frequently used teaching repertoire and teachers' experiences in teaching contemporary and Australian repertoire. This information was balanced with questions regarding the technical developmental requirements perceived necessary for intermediate students as well as other motivational aspects. It is hoped that information collated from this research will be of benefit in the selection of motivational repertoire for intermediate student cellists and especially in promoting the composition of Australian pieces for intermediate cellists.

Dynamic response: Real-time adaptation for music emotion

Music plays an enormous role in today's computer games; it serves to elicit emotion, generate interest and convey important information. Traditional gaming music is fixed at the event level, where tracks loop until a state change is triggered. This behaviour however does not reflect musically the in-game state between these events. We propose a dynamic music environment, where music tracks adjust in real-time to the emotion of the in-game state. We are looking to improve the affective response to symbolic music through the modification of structural and performative characteristics through the application of rule-based techniques. In this paper we undertake a multidiscipline approach, and present a series of primary music-emotion structural rules for implementation. The validity of these rules was tested in small study involving eleven participants, each listening to six permutations from two musical works. Preliminary results indicate that the environment was generally successful in influencing the emotion of the musical works for three of the intended four directions (happier, sadder & content/dreamier). Our secondary aim of establishing that the use of music-emotion rules, sourced predominantly from Western classical music, could be applied with comparable results to modern computer gaming music was also largely successfully.

Exploring composite acoustic features for efficient music similarity query

Music similarity query based on acoustic content is becoming important with the ever-increasing growth of the music information from emerging applications such as digital libraries and WWW. However, relative techniques are still in their infancy and much less than satisfactory. In this paper, we present a novel index structure, called Composite Feature tree, CF-tree, to facilitate efficient content-based music search adopting multiple musical features. Before constructing the tree structure, we use PCA to transform the extracted features into a new space sorted by the importance of acoustic features. The CF-tree is a balanced multi-way tree structure where each level represents the data space at different dimensionalities. The PCA transformed data and reduced dimensions in the upper levels can alleviate suffering from dimensionality curse. To accurately mimic human perception, an extension, named CF+-tree, is proposed, which further applies multivariable regression to determine the weight of each individual feature. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed structures against state-of-art techniques. The experimental results demonstrate superiority of our technique.