Music for Mercer's: The Mercer's Hospital Music Collection and Charity Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin

Account of benefit concerts in support of Mercer's Hospital, Dublin 1736-80 and an analysis of extant manuscript and printed music sources dating from c.1736-c.1771

Testing the channel-based model of duration perception

The channel-based model of duration perception postulates the existence of neural mechanisms that respond selectively to a narrow range of stimulus durations centred on their preferred duration (Heron et al Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279 690–698). In principle the channel-based model could
explain recent reports of adaptation-induced, visual duration compression effects (Johnston et al Current Biology 16 472–479; Curran and Benton Cognition 122 252–257); from this perspective duration compression is a consequence of the adapting stimuli being presented for a longer duration than the test stimuli. In the current experiment observers adapted to a sequence of moving random dot patterns at the same retinal position, each 340ms in duration and separated by a variable (500–1000ms) interval. Following adaptation observers judged the duration of a 600ms test stimulus at the same location. The test stimulus moved in the same, or opposite, direction as the adaptor. Contrary to the channel-based
model’s prediction, test stimulus duration appeared compressed, rather than expanded, when it moved in the same direction as the adaptor. That test stimulus duration was not distorted when moving in the opposite direction further suggests that visual timing mechanisms are influenced by additional neural processing associated with the stimulus being timed.

‘At First I Saw It as a Toy’: Life Stories, Social Consciousness and Music Ethnography

This article examines the role of life narratives as discursive spaces for the performance of individual resistance. Through the inspection of three interviews with professional musicians in Athens, the essay will illustrate how the recounting of nodal events in their lives and careers facilitates an assertion of their current social ideology and their disillusionment with the popular music industry in which they operate. Ultimately, what follows will suggest a mode of listening to individual utterances and narratives as discursive forms of resistance that need to be appreciated as social acts as opposed to mere ethnographic data.

Change in psychological distress in longer-term oesophageal cancer carers: are clusters of illness perception change a useful determinant?

Objective: This study provides a longitudinal assessment of distress in longer-term oesophageal cancer carers, while examining illness perception schema as a possible determinant of change in distress over time.
Methods: Oesophageal cancer carers (n=171), 48-months post-diagnosis, were assessed at baseline and 12-months later with the Illness Perception Questionnaire-Revised, Cancer Coping Questionnaire, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and Concerns About Recurrence Scale.
Results: Findings report deterioration from normal to probable anxiety in 35.7% of carers and probable depression in 28.7% carers over time. Fear of recurrence remained stable. Changes in control, consequence and cause beliefs were identified as key determinants of a change in psychological morbidity.
Conclusions: Illness beliefs appear to be valuable targets for psychological intervention to improve wellbeing among carers of people with oesophageal cancer.

Health care professionals’ experience, understanding and perception of need of advanced cancer patients with cachexia and their families: The benefits of a dedicated clinic.

Background: Cachexia has been defined as an on-going loss of skeletal muscle mass that cannot be fully reversed by conventional nutritional support. It can be found in up to 80% of patients with advanced cancer and has profound psycho-social consequences for patients and their families. There is a paucity of studies examining the role and experience of healthcare professionals in relation to cachexia and existing studies suggest that professional staff have limited understanding and do not intervene effectively.
Aim: To identify barriers and facilitators to good practice in cachexia care in order to inform future developments in service provision.
Design: An exploratory qualitative study was conducted employing semi-structured interviews with a range of healthcare professionals recruited purposefully from an Australian hospital. Interviews were conducted in private rooms within the hospital.
Setting/participants: A range of healthcare professionals responsible for cancer care were recruited from a large Australian teaching hospital.
Results: Interviews were conducted with 8 healthcare professionals responsible for delivering cancer care. Four themes were identified: formal and informal education, knowledge and understanding, truth telling in cachexia and palliative care, and, a multi-disciplinary approach. Findings show how improved knowledge and understanding across a staff body can lead to improved staff confidence and a willingness to address cancer cachexia and its consequences with patients and their families.
Conclusion: Comparison with previous studies illustrates the importance of improving knowledge and understanding about cachexia and how this can contribute to staff having the skills and experience necessary to address cachexia and provide an improved care experience for patients and carers.

Music therapy for end-of-life care: an updated systematic review

Background: Music therapy during palliative and end-of-life care is well established and positive benefits for patients have been reported.
Aim: Assess the effectiveness of music therapy versus standard care alone or standard care in combination with other therapies for improving psychological, physiological and social outcomes among adult patients in any palliative care setting.
Data sources: In order to update an existing Cochrane systematic review, we searched MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CENTRAL, ClinicalTrials.gov register, and Current Controlled Trials register to identify randomised or quasi-randomised controlled trails published between 2009 and April 2015. Nine electronic music therapy journals were searched from 2009 until April 2015, along with reference lists and contact was made with key experts in music therapy. Only studies published in English were eligible for inclusion. Two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts, assessed relevant studies for eligibility, extracted data and judged risk of bias for included studies. Disagreements were resolved through discussion with a third reviewer. Data were synthesised in Revman using the random effects model. Heterogeneity was assessed using l2.
Results: Three studies were included in the review. Findings suggest music therapy may be effective for helping to reduce pain in palliative care patients (standard mean deviation (SMD) = -0.42, 95% CI -0.68 to -0.17, P = 0.001).
Conclusions: Available evidence did not support the use of music therapy to improve overall quality-of-life in palliative care. While this review suggests music therapy may be effective for reducing pain, this is based on studies with a high risk of bias. Further high quality research is required.

Adapting to time: duration channels do not mediate human time perception

Accurately encoding the duration and temporal order of events is essential for survival and important to everyday activities, from holding conversations to driving in fast flowing traffic. Although there is a growing body of evidence that the timing of brief events (< 1s) is encoded by modality-specific mechanisms, it is not clear how such mechanisms register event duration. One approach gaining traction is a channel-based model; this envisages narrowly-tuned, overlapping timing mechanisms that respond preferentially to different durations. The channel-based model predicts that adapting to a given event duration will result in overestimating and underestimating the duration of longer and shorter events, respectively. We tested the model by having observers judge the duration of a brief (600ms) visual test stimulus following adaptation to longer (860ms) and shorter (340ms) stimulus durations. The channel-based model predicts perceived duration compression of the test stimulus in the former condition and perceived duration expansion in the latter condition. Duration compression occurred in both conditions, suggesting that the channel-based model does not adequately account for perceived duration of visual events.

Language Experience Affects Grouping of Musical Instrument Sounds

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non-speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non-linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity (variability in sounds, presence of pauses) was manipulated. In this task, participants grouped sequences of auditory chimeras formed from musical instruments. These chimeras mimic the complexity of speech without being speech. We found that, while showing the same overall grouping preferences, the German speakers showed stronger biases than the French speakers in grouping complex sequences. Sound variability reduced all participants' biases, resulting in the French group showing no grouping preference for the most variable sequences, though this reduction was attenuated by musical experience. In sum, this study demonstrates that linguistic experience, musical experience, and complexity affect rhythmic grouping of non-linguistic sounds and suggests that experience with acoustic cues in a meaningful context (language or music) is necessary for developing a robust grouping preference that survives acoustic variability.

Interacção entre estruturas intervalares e estruturas espectrais, na música instrumental/vocal

A presente tese apresenta-se num formato bipartido, sendo a primeira parte uma investigação teórica e a segunda parte um conjunto de composições originais que procuram estabelecer, directa e indirectamente, uma relação com a temática investigada. A investigação incide sobre as diferentes relações que se podem estabelecer entre estruturas intervalares e estruturas espectrais, a partir de um conjunto representativo de obras de diferentes compositores. As obras originais da segunda parte configuram um objecto final de análise e reflexão. As composições que integram a segunda parte da tese são: Inês – sete miniaturas sobre A Castro, para soprano e orquestra, sobre excertos de “Castro”, de António Ferreira; Um sino contra o tempo, para flauta, clarinete, percussão e piano; Terra, para orquestra de cordas; Dor e Amor, para voz, flauta, clarinete, percussão, harpa, piano, violino, viola e violoncelo, sobre poemas de Nuno Júdice; e Ode a Gaia, para soprano solo, coro misto e electrónica, a partir de textos de diversos autores e épocas, desde Homero a Fernando Pessoa. Esta investigação surge a partir da convicção de que é possível e enriquecedor para a composição a coexistência e o estabelecimento de uma relação entre estruturas que valorizam as qualidades dos intervalos que as constituem e estruturas de tipo espectral. Se o pensamento intervalar pode ser relacionado com princípios de estruturação ligados a toda uma tradição musical, desde a música modal, à tonal e à atonal, o pensamento espectral relaciona-se com o estudo do fenómeno sonoro e do timbre e é integrado mais tardiamente no séc. XX como um possível modelo estruturante na composição. A investigação sobre as obras seleccionadas, sobretudo de compositores que colocam o fenómeno da percepção num plano central, procura diferentes interacções entre os dois tipos de estrutura, interrogando-se sobre em que medida é que essa interacção influencia ou é mesmo determinante para o resultado musical final. São analisadas diferentes aplicações, tais como: a procura de qualidades acústicas na criação de estruturas intervalares, a criação de timbres particulares para linhas estruturantes, a manipulação tímbrica de estruturas verticais, a inter-relação de camadas intervalares e espectrais na textura musical de forma sincrónica e diacrónica, e o surgimento de material intervalar a partir de estruturas espectrais. Os principais resultados passam pela confirmação de que o pensamento intervalar é compatível com o pensamento espectral e vice-versa, podendo-se concluir que são essenciais diferentes funções para os dois tipos de estrutura na textura musical e que quer as estruturas intervalares quer as espectrais se relacionam com diferentes aspectos da percepção, tendo, assim, uma influência determinante no resultado musical final, na eficácia da escuta e na sua fruição.