Digital technologies and musical participation for people with intellectual disabilities

Research on the aspirations of people with intellectual disabilities documents the importance of alternative zones of inclusion where they can assert their own definitions of ability and normality. This stands in contrast to assumptions concerning technology and disability that position technology as ‘normalising’ the disabled body. This paper reports on the role of a digital music jamming tool in providing access to creative practice by people with intellectual disabilities. The tool contributed to the development of a spatio-temporal zone to enable aesthetic agency within and beyond the contexts of deinstitutionalised care. The research identifies the interactions among tools, individuals and groups that facilitated participants’ agency in shaping the form of musical practice. Further, we document the properties of emergent interaction - supported by a tool oriented to enabling music improvisation - as potentially resisting assumptions regarding normalisation.

A Parallel Processing Model of Musical Structures

Euterpe is a real-time computer system for the modeling of musical structures. It provides a formalism wherein familiar concepts of musical analysis may be readily expressed. This is verified by its application to the analysis of a wide variety of conventional forms of music: Gregorian chant, Mediaeval polyphony, Back counterpoint, and sonata form. It may be of further assistance in the real-time experiments in various techniques of thematic development. Finally, the system is endowed with sound-synthesis apparatus with which the user may prepare tapes for musical performances.

Form, fi gure, and the experience of time in seven southern composers of the 1950s-60s

After the 1980s it is diffi cult, following stylistic criteria, to draw a map of contemporary academic music. All styles are compossible, and all are practiced. In this context, the geographical entity “South of Italy” does not stand out for a musical identity with special technical-stylistic features. Rather, at a socio-cultural level, the South remains today – in music no less than in all areas where there is a gap between top development and stagnation – a land of emigrants: six out of the seven composers treated (Ivan Fedele, Giuseppe Colardo, Rosario Mirigliano, Giuseppe Soccio, Nicola Cisternino, Biagio Putignano, Paolo Aralla) live in the North of Italy. The positive aspect of this is the affi nity of the South with the transnational and superstructural community of contemporary music, which from European and Western has now become almost global. The composers under consideration belong to the generation of the ‘50s, rooted in the serial and post-serial movements (from which Franco Donatoni, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino, Giacinto Scelsi, are the principals models, to mention only the Italians), dipped in the general phenomenon of timbrism (particularly spectralism), and acquainted with electronics. They draw from these sources various instruments of compositional technique and aspects of their poetics. In particular these composers, active from the ‘80s, develop new ways of construction of the temporal form of music. They share the goal to establish a new continuity, different from the tonal one but at the same time transcending the serial and post-serial disintegration and fragmentation. The primary means to this end is a new enhancement of the category of fi gure, as a clear and distinct, recognizable aggregate of pitches, intervals, register, durations, timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture. Each composer elaborates the atonal fi gural material in different ways, emphasizing one aspect or another. For example, Fedele (1953) is a master in the management of form per se, Colardo (1953) in the activation of disturbed harmonic effects, Mirigliano (1950) in the creation of a slight tension from the smallest vibrations of sound, Soccio (1950) in the set up of movement by means of accumulations and discharges of energy, Cisternino (1957) in a Cagean-Scelsian emphasis on sound as such, Putignano (1960) in the suspension of time through the succession and transformation of images, Aralla (1960) in the foundation of form from below, from the concreteness of sound.

‘Med Hondo’s Sarraounia: The musical articulation of cultural transformation’

This article examines music in Med Hondo’s Sarraounia, considering how it contributes to the dramatic form of the movie while concurrently articulating narratives regarding cultural transformation through both its extrinsic (cultural) and intrinsic (formal) dimensions. Examining how the use of traditional and contemporary African music politicises diegetic space by referring us to the relationships between indigenous musical forms and their global, culturally hybrid descendents, it then demonstrates the complex manner in which the film uses the formal specificities of African and Western musical idioms to articulate a narrative regarding the cultural transformations that occur when an oral culture (Africa) encounters a literate, modernised culture (the West).

Expertise is perceived from both sound and body movement in musical performance

Music is a rich form of nonverbal communication, in which the movements that expert musicians make during performance can influence the perception of expressive and structural features of the music. Whether the actual skill of a musician is perceivable from vision of movement was examined. In Experiment 1, musicians and non-musicians rated performances by novice, intermediate and expert clarinettists from point-light animations of their movements, sound recordings, or both. Performances by clarinettists of more advanced skill level were rated significantly higher from vision of movements, although this effect was stronger when sound was also presented. In Experiment 2, movements and sound from the novice and expert clarinettists' performances were switched for half the presentations, and were matched for the rest. Ratings of novice music were significantly higher when presented with expert movements, although the opposite was not found for expert sound presented with novice movements. No perceptual effect of raters' own level of musicianship was found in either experiment. These results suggest that expertise is perceivable from vision of musicians' body movements, although perception of skill from sound is dominant. The results from Experiment 2 further indicate a cross-modal effect of vision and audition on the perception of musical expertise. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

Inhabiting Sound: Tactile-sonic links in musical meaning

Connections can be suggested between music’s occupation of physical space, its relative ‘presence’ (using Edward Hall’s notion of proxemics), and the various senses of movement which pervade it. Movement might be seen to operate with respect to music at a variety of levels of metaphorisation – as increasingly complex chains of analogy which point back to our early physical experience of the world. But of course music is, fundamentally, action. Humans put energy into systems - external or internal to themselves - which transduce that energy into the movement of air. At the acoustic level music is, emphatically and unmetaphorically, movement. Perhaps such simple physical perceptions form one route through which we might understand and explore shared senses of meaning and their capacity for ‘transduction’ between multiple individuals. Our (developmentally) early sensory models of the world, built from encounters with its physical resistances and affordances, might be a route to understanding our more clearly encultured and abstracted ('higher' level) understandings of music.

Transposing Musical Skill: Sonification of movement as concurrent augmented feedback enhances learning in a bimanual task

Concurrent feedback provided during acquisition can enhance performance of novel tasks. The ‘guidance hypothesis’ predicts that feedback provision leads to dependence and poor performance in its absence. However, appropriately-structured feedback information provided through sound (‘sonification’) may not be subject to this effect. We test this directly using a rhythmic bimanual shape-tracing task in which participants learned to move at a 4:3 timing ratio. Sonification of movement and demonstration was compared to two other learning conditions: (1) sonification of task demonstration alone and (2) completely silent practice (control). Sonification of movement emerged as the most effective form of practice, reaching significantly lower error scores than control. Sonification of solely the demonstration, which was expected to benefit participants by perceptually unifying task requirements, did not lead to better performance than control. Good performance was maintained by participants in the sonification condition in an immediate retention test without feedback, indicating that the use of this feedback can overcome the guidance effect. On a 24-hour retention test, performance had declined and was equal between groups. We argue that this and similar findings in the feedback literature are best explained by an ecological approach to motor skill learning which places available perceptual information at the highest level of importance.

Analyse de mon langage musical à travers trois œuvres

La version intégrale de ce mémoire est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université́ de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).

Constructing the Australian musical child

This paper makes use of Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine some of the current directions in Arts education and Music Education, in particular, that are being promoted by education authorities in Australia. Foucault's concept of discourse, and analytical procedures developed from his ideas, have been much discussed recently but have not been applied very rigorously or very widely other than by Foucault himself. This paper will introduce some of the basic concepts and demonstrate how application of these concepts can identify, explain or elucidate basic misconceptions that are currently being promoted as the way forward in arts education.

Curriculum development and implementation has become an important focus for educational policy in the past ten years. Inspired by the work of the Federal Labour government between 1989 and 1994 which developed the national curriculum Statements and Profiles, many states have adopted a model of centralized curriculum development in which learning is mapped out for all students up to the age of eighteen. These learning "profiles" have been developed and disseminated at great expense in terms of time, money and effort. They represent a considerable investment of educational resources. Typically, however the resulting curriculum documents are complex, difficult to understand and use, and can appear unrelated to many of the normal practices in school. This has placed teachers in the position of having either to ignore them or to work against much of their own training and personal assumptions about what constitutes music education.

It will be suggested that there are some basic flaws in the way that many curriculum documents in Australia have conceived of music education and learning. With recent new developments in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, there is no indication that this process of profiling student development is really devoted to improving our understanding either of learning or of teaching. In fact, it would appear to be developing a life of it's own, oblivious to the practices and structures of our educational systems. It will be suggested that a more realistic assessment of our practices needs to form the basis of our frameworks and that they should not be developed as abstract theoretical models.

A sonoridade do violão na execução musical : um estudo sobre os seus aspectos formadores e análise de duas gravações das Quatro Peças Breves de Frank Martin

A sonoridade é um aspecto importante para a execução violonística. Esse trabalho tem por objetivo estudar a sonoridade com um elemento da execução musical, entender os seus aspectos formadores dentro do âmbito técnico, textual e perceptivo, utilizando-se como exemplo duas gravações das Quatro Peças Breves de Frank Martin. Os resultado são discutidos à luz do embasamento teórico, fazendo-se considerações a respeito das possibilidades de execução musical e como a sonoridade do violão atua nesse contexto.

Práticas de organizar na indústria criativa: a produção de um espetáculo de teatro musical em São Paulo - SP

Esta tese tem por objetivo compreender as práticas e ações de organizar necessárias à produção/organização de um espetáculo de teatro musical em São Paulo, a fim de explorar como as relações e articulações materialmente heterogêneas o sustentam e permitem suas apresentações. O foco nas práticas está alinhado à preocupação dos Estudos Organizacionais (EO) acerca de como “as organizações acontecem”, e na compreensão dos processos e práticas de organizar do cotidiano organizacional, remetendo ao entendimento das organizações como processos (organising) em constante estado de (re)constituição. O campo das indústrias criativas apresenta ainda lacunas pouco exploradas, referentes aos bens e serviços criativos. Seu foco de estudos está mais voltado para o consumo de tais bens e poucas pesquisas dedicam-se à sua produção e/ou organização. A própria noção de criatividade é entendida apenas como um atributo humano, talento ou habilidade, sem se enfatizar que alguns bens e serviços criativos e culturais apenas são possíveis a partir das relações e ações entre humanos e não-humanos. Na literatura organizacional, o teatro é amplamente estudado como uma metáfora ou como uma ferramenta de intervenção em processos de mudança ou aprendizado, sendo ainda raros estudos dedicados a explorar um espetáculo teatral como forma particular de organização. O teatro musical, inserido nas indústrias criativas, parece se consolidar no Brasil, principalmente pelo aumento de montagens de grandes musicais oriundos da Broadway, NYC, EUA, e sua crescente profissionalização, sobretudo na última década e, especialmente, na cidade de São Paulo, SP. Sua produção difere de outros gêneros teatrais pelo número de profissionais, investimentos e presença da tecnologia evidenciada em seus projetos de som, luz, cenografia e gestão de palco, tornando-o um campo fértil para a exploração sobre como atores se reúnem e formam o espetáculo visível (visto pelo público no palco) e o invisível (oculto nos bastidores). Sobre tal aspecto, a Teoria Ator-Rede (TAR), aqui utilizada como referencial teórico-metodológico, fornece um repertório analítico para a compreensão da organização como efeito de uma rede heterogênea de elementos, com uma estabilidade temporariamente alcançada. Para concretizar meu objetivo de explorar a organização de um musical, realizei uma pesquisa qualitativa, com inspiração etnográfica, na qual permaneci em campo durante dez meses junto a uma companhia cujo espetáculo esteve em cartaz em São Paulo entre os anos de 2013 e 2014. Descrevo, assim, como ocorreram as associações a articulações entre atores humanos e não-humanos, permeadas por esforços no sentido de gerar uma estabilização, um ordenamento, mesmo que precário, o qual é aqui entendido o musical (macro-ator ou rede-de-atores) em si e suas mais de trezentas apresentações durante a temporada, resultantes de ações em contínua (re)constituição. Negociações referentes a aquisições de direitos autorais, aspectos particulares da língua portuguesa, do público brasileiro, dos corpos e vozes do elenco brasileiro, as restrições estruturais do teatro, a produção de documentos, a marcação na sala de ensaios, a união do espetáculo via sistemas de som e imagem, a aquisição de equipamentos específicos e o sistema que permite “chamar o show” durante a apresentação são alguns dos temas que exploro. Com esta pesquisa, busquei assimilar o crescente interesse dos EO em relação organising e algumas das possibilidades oferecidas pela TAR quanto à multiplicidade e heterogeneidade inerentes às práticas organizativas, com o intuito de enriquecer a discussão acerca da organização e produção de bens e serviços criativos, destacando como a organização “espetáculo de teatro musical” é múltipla e materialmente heterogênea, e não apenas uma ideia exclusiva à ação humana ou criatividade como insumo de produção, tal como apregoa a maior parte das descrições referentes às indústrias criativas.

Corporeidade e educação: sinfonia de saberes na educação musical

This study investigates the implications between the musical theory and pedagogical practice based on a study that questions the reasons why some students feel incapable of learning the music language, as well as, if the musical codes are truly so difficult to be apprehended by them. To answer these questions takes itself as reference, the classes I have minister while teaching the disciplines: Music Workshop and Music Language I in the Art Department, Scenic Art Course at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. I have searched the knowledge that constitutes the teacher formation based on the union between the pedagogical efficiency and sensibility, searching in the Corporality the theoretical port for my investigation. This way, advocating is a methodological principle for musical education originated from the experience of knowledge: creating, playing, feeling, thinking, and the interaction among them, conducting the students not only to music learning, but to a process of human formation. It adopts itself as methodological resource, amongst the qualitative methods, some of the techniques that are associated with the ethnographic research, for having as its main objective, to study the meaning of the actions and events of the investigated group. The analysis of the data leads to the conclusion that when the teacher displays his or her pedagogical knowledge in an environment constructed with affectivity, in a playful and pleasant form, the assimilation and construction of the musical concepts happen naturally and efficiently, surpassing the taboo that music learning is only possible to the especially well endowed people for music. Very aware that the scientific debate is important for the strengthening of formative programs involved in the growth and consolidation of the musical teaching and learning area, it is expected to promote this research discussions and reflections in the general educational field with this research, as well as, to contribute significantly to the specific growth of musical education

Como se fora brincadeira de roda: a ciranda da ludopoiese para uma educação musical humanescente

The present work concerns an auto-ethnographic study based on life experiences and reflections of an educator at Escola Viva Preschool and Elementary-Middle School, located in the city center of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. As a cognitive model of operation, we use the metaphor of the Circle Dance. The objective of this study is to identify, interpret and describe the ludopoetics that are achieved through a Musical Education program, which we denominate, Humanescent. The data of this investigation was derived from the music making by Preschool and Elementary-Middle School students at Escola Viva during 2007, 2008 and 2009, from which 20 learners were selected to form the corpus, along with the description and interpretation of photos of their experiences and sand tray scenes. We justify the methodological systemization of the research based on our own pedagogical practice, which supports Musical Education in the schools based on the principals of Embodiment, Autopoesis and Flow. The methodological systemization was developed through an Action Research model and on the concepts of Systemic Development, with the goal of re-reading the context investigated through the structuring of categories of Ludopoesis: Self-esteem, Self-territory, Self-connectivity, Self-realization and Selfworth. We used an observant-participant research approach with regard to the perception of emergent knowledge, the surroundings, the experience lived and the contextual and vibration of the circumstances. Besides this, we used projection to interpret the experiences lived, in the form of drawings, short poems, letters or sand tray scenes as symbolic interpretations of experience. In the unfolding of the Ludopoetic Process (Selfesteem, Self-territory, Self-connectivity, Self-realization and Selfworth) we draw conclusions about the relevance of the ludic musical experience, which foments the formation of the self based on music learning, and which is demonstrated in the Embodiment of the learners. In the auto-formative process (of learners and educators) we observe the importance of pedagogical work based on Musical Humanescent Education that gives value to the music making path to the construction of music and performance in play, creativity, and sensibility. The experience of making music in a playful way allows for organization of the self and its autonomous production in the joy of living within a ludopoetic process. These findings highlight the educator as in a permanent state of selfformation, which generates moments of flow. However, in Musical Humanescent Education, music is learned collectively, doing a circle dance, experiencing love, fostering an expansion of the creative spirit, and giving recognition to playfulness as a necessary condition for education and to the value of music made with the true nature and sensibilities of the educators

Educação musical na infância: um estudo com educadoras infantis de uma escola pública de Dracena/SP

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Gênero discursivo cinema, o filme musical: análise dialógica de Across the Universe

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)