Oxford handbook of music therapy

In the Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy, international leaders in the field from 10 countries have contributed their expertise to showcase contemporary music therapy.

Music therapy and medical ethnomusicology: distinctive and connected

A music therapist and an ethnomusicologist who is also qualified as a music therapist explore some of the ways in which music therapy and medical ethnomusicology might engage a dialogue that is helpful to expanding thinking and practice in both fields. We begin by describing music therapy and outlining some core concepts of therapeutic work. We then discuss ethnomusicology and reflect on the ways in which music therapy and ethnomusicology may complement one another in the field of medical ethnomusicology. We consider how an exploration of concepts informing cultural safety might be enacted in healthcare through the use of music and whether this might serve as a useful joint future enterprise between music therapists and medical ethnomusicologists. Finally we explain why we encourage medical ethnomusicologists to cease attempts to become applied therapeutic practitioners without further therapy skills training.

Music in worship: making spiritual connections through sound

Music has played a significant role in religion and spiritual settings over the centuries and continues to be included throughout church history, forming an important aspect of worship, contributing to spiritual growth and wellbeing. This article situates itself within a wider study on Spirituality and Wellbeing: Music in the community. Drawing on narrative reflection, the authors discusstheir experiences across Melbourne (Australia) and Potchefstroom (South Africa) and include some interview data from church musicians from the wider study in Melbourne in relation to how church music contributes to spirituality and impacts on wellbeing. As church musicians they argue that music in church settings can offer parishioners the opportunity to experienceand express spirituality in their life through sound. They recognize and acknowledge that music through singing, playing, improvising and listening is an aspect of spiritual connection that is not confined to the institution of the church or to a religion but is concerned with the connection wefeel and sense in mysterious and unknown places and spacesThe findings of this study are limited as it only focuses on the experience of the authors, hence, generalizations to other musicians or church settings cannot be made. The authors argue that music in church settings can enliven andtransform worship through music in which spiritual connections can be fostered between God and man that positively engender wellbeing.

Privacy preserving data release for tagging recommender systems

Tagging recommender systems allow Internet users to annotate resources with personalized tags. The connection among users, resources and these annotations, often called a folksonomy, permits users the freedom to explore tags, and to obtain recommendations. Releasing these tagging datasets accelerates both commercial and research work on recommender systems. However, tagging recommender systems has been confronted with serious privacy concerns because adversaries may re-identify a user and her/his sensitive information from the tagging dataset using a little background information. Recently, several private techniques have been proposed to address the problem, but most of them lack a strict privacy notion, and can hardly resist the number of possible attacks. This paper proposes an private releasing algorithm to perturb users' profile in a strict privacy notion, differential privacy, with the goal of preserving a user's identity in a tagging dataset. The algorithm includes three privacy-preserving operations: Private Tag Clustering is used to shrink the randomized domain and Private Tag Selection is then applied to find the most suitable replacement tags for the original tags. To hide the numbers of tags, the third operation, Weight Perturbation, finally adds Laplace noise to the weight of tags. We present extensive experimental results on two real world datasets, De.licio.us and Bibsonomy. While the personalization algorithm is successful in both cases, our results further suggest the private releasing algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving users' identity.

Privacy-preserving topic model for tagging recommender systems

Tagging recommender systems provide users the freedom to explore tags and obtain recommendations. The releasing and sharing of these tagging datasets will accelerate both commercial and research work on recommender systems. However, releasing the original tagging datasets is usually confronted with serious privacy concerns, because adversaries may re-identify a user and her/his sensitive information from tagging datasets with only a little background information. Recently, several privacy techniques have been proposed to address the problem, but most of these lack a strict privacy notion, and rarely prevent individuals being re-identified from the dataset. This paper proposes a privacy- preserving tag release algorithm, PriTop. This algorithm is designed to satisfy differential privacy, a strict privacy notion with the goal of protecting users in a tagging dataset. The proposed PriTop algorithm includes three privacy-preserving operations: Private topic model generation structures the uncontrolled tags; private weight perturbation adds Laplace noise into the weights to hide the numbers of tags; while private tag selection finally finds the most suitable replacement tags for the original tags, so the exact tags can be hidden. We present extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets, Delicious, MovieLens, Last.fm and BibSonomy. While the recommendation algorithm is successful in all the cases, our results further suggest the proposed PriTop algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving privacy.

A inovação do AMV: o Anime Music Video e suas relações com a pós-modernidade e a cibercultura

Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Mestrado em Comunicação da Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul - USCS

Is 'tagging' a rationale for affirmative action in education?

In this paper, we try to rationalize the existence of one of the most common affirmative action policies: educational quotas. We model a two period economy with asymmetric information and endogenous human capital formation. Individuals may be from two different groups in the population, where each group is defined by an observable and exogenous characteristic. The distribution of skills differ across groups. We introduce educational quotas into the model by letting the planner reduce the effort cost that a student from one of the groups has to endure in order to be accepted into a university. Affirmative action policies can be interpreted as a form of ``tagging" since group characteristics are used as proxies for productivity. We find that although educational quotas are usually efficient, they need not subsidize the education of the low skill group.

New Ventures Brasil (Forum 2008) - Echo music

Echo music, empresa produtora de instrumentos musicais ecologicamente corretos

Interactive music visualization: implementation, realization and evaluation

This thesis describes all process of the development of music visualization, starting with the implementation, followed by realization and then evaluation. The main goal is to have to knowledge of how the audience live performance experience can be enhanced through music visualization. With music visualization is possible to give a better understanding about the music feelings constructing an intensive atmosphere in the live music performance, which enhances the connection between the live music and the audience through visuals. These visuals have to be related to the live music, furthermore has to quickly respond to live music changes and introduce novelty into the visuals. The mapping between music and visuals is the focus of this project, in order to improve the relationship between the live performance and the spectators. The implementation of music visualization is based on the translation of music into graphic visualizations, therefore at the beginning the project was based on the existent works. Later on, it was decided to introduce new ways of conveying music into visuals. Several attempts were made in order to discover the most efficient mapping between music and visualization so people can fully connect with the performance. Throughout this project, those attempts resulted in several music visualizations created for four live music performances, afterwards it was produced an online survey to evaluate those live performances with music visualization. In the end, all conclusions are presented based on the results of the online survey, and also is explained which music elements should be depicted in the visuals, plus how those visuals should respond to the selected music elements.

Processing of hierarchical syntactic strusture in music

Hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is a key feature of human language and can be identified theoretically in most pieces of tonal music. However, previous studies have argued against the perception of such structures in music. Here, we show processing of nonlocal dependencies in music. We presented chorales by J. S. Bach and modified versions inwhich the hierarchical structure was rendered irregular whereas the local structure was kept intact. Brain electric responses differed between regular and irregular hierarchical structures, in both musicians and nonmusicians. This finding indicates that, when listening to music, humans apply cognitive processes that are capable of dealing with longdistance dependencies resulting from hierarchically organized syntactic structures. Our results reveal that a brain mechanism fundamental for syntactic processing is engaged during the perception of music, indicating that processing of hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is not just a key component of human language, but a multidomain capacity of human cognition.