Musicae Scientiae

The role of professional musicians playing in healthcare settings is largely non-documented, chiefly because musicians have worked on a voluntary basis or outside established music programmes. However, research in arts and health suggest that these musicians have acquired a level of expertise and that they have consequently developed a professional identity related to their work. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two groups of musicians performing in healthcare settings in UK (N = 8) and Italy (N = 9) to investigate their motivations and perceived musical and interpersonal skills developed in their work. Interview data suggest that such musicians are highly motivated, wanting to perform in a variety of healthcare settings, often for strongly moral reasons, occasionally because of religious reasons. Musicians were conscious of the fact that any positive outcome of their performance was unlikely without possessing specific skills in social interaction, entailing empathy, appreciation, openness, flexibility of response and a sense of humour. The results are discussed in the light of the literature on professionalism and professional identity in healthcare settings.

Contemporary microtonal music poses considerable challenges to professional performers. Here, we investigate five renditions of Klaus Huber’s “…Plainte…” for viola d’amore in third-tone tuning with respect to pitch accuracy at the acoustic level. The analysis also includes examining tones on open strings, which were played on the composer’s instrument. Significant differences between intended and realized fundamental frequency values were observed. The tuning of instruments deviated 14 to 42.5 cents from theoretical values. Influences of sound production on fundamental frequencies in performances were analysed, supplemented by additional analyses using the composer’s instrument. In each performance, the range of fundamental frequency deviations of tones played on open strings was considerably narrower than when tones were played with fingerboard stopping. In latter case, the range of deviations exceeded a third-tone interval (67 cents) in all performances and was larger than reported on tonal music in twelve-tone equal temperament. These results suggest specific limitations in the realization of third-tone music as performed on a fretless string instrument by highly-trained professional performers. The fact that three of the analysed recordings are commercially available further suggests that rather large deviations of fundamental frequencies from values described by music theory are accepted aesthetically.

The experience of earworms, a type of involuntary musical imagery, may reflect a systematic failure in mental control. This study focused on how individual differences in each of two factors, schizotypy, or “openness to experience”, and thought suppression might relate to the appearance of the involuntary musical image (earworm). Schizotypy was measured by Raine’s schizotypal personality questionnaire (SPQ; Raine, 1991) and thought suppression was measured by the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI; Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). Each was found to contribute independently to the overall experience of involuntary musical imagery. Schizotypy was correlated with the length and disruptiveness of earworms, the difficulty with which they were dismissed and the worry they caused, but was not correlated with the frequency of such intrusive imagery. In turn, schizotypy was predicted by suppression and intrusion components of WBSI. The WBSI is associated with the length, disruptiveness, difficulty dismissing and interference but not with the worry caused or the frequency of earworms. The assumption of “ownership” of earworms was also found to affect the extent to which the earworms were considered worrying. Multiple regression analysis showed that both schizotypy and the WBSI predicted the difficulty with which unwanted musical images were dismissed, but that the WBSI accounted for additional variance on top of that accounted for by schizotypy. Finally we consider how earworm-management might relate to wider cognitive processes.

Synthetically modelled performances and commercial recordings of orchestral minuets were used in three rating tests and a synchronisation test to investigate two issues. The first one addresses the impression of authenticity and plausibility, i.e., the impression of a human-rendered performance, questioning whether smooth mathematical functions are adequate means of modelling timing and dynamics, or whether it is the deviations from smooth functions observed in human performances that contain hidden information contributing to the impression of authenticity and plausibility. The second question investigated whether the subjective impression of plausibility is also reflected in the anticipation of musical events, such as that required in a synchronisation task. In the plausibility tests, there was no significant difference between participants’ ratings of synthetic performances modelled with smooth functions and those including hidden information . In the synchronisation test, participants showed a higher standard deviation – proportionally to the mean beat length – in the tap-onset difference when tapping to the beat of a synthetic performance that had been rated implausible in the previous tests.

This article reports on initial exploratory trials of a methodological extension of zygonic theory, through which this psychomusicologically-based approach was used to analyse patterns of musical influence within pieces created by groups of primary school children aged 9–11 years in England and Japan. Previously, the theory had been used in educational and therapeutic contexts to gauge the musical impact of each participant on the other in one-to-one musical interactions. The preliminary findings reported here suggest that zygonically-derived analytical techniques may potentially be of value not only in defining children’s musical contributions and patterns of influence as they seek to create pieces in groups, but also in comparative studies that examine the potentially dissimilar improvisatory approaches adopted by different cohorts of pupils. It is further argued that zygonic measures of musical influence may be of value as inverse proxy measures of creativity.

Show elements are indispensable in live rock performances and have an impact on the recipients’ performance evaluations. We conducted two studies on the persuasive function of show elements (e.g., multi-finger tapping, over-under techniques, or playing with the tongue) in rock guitar solo performances. In Experiment 1 professional guitarists (N = 12) classified performance features, such as show elements, playing difficulty in terms of academic standards, tempo and visible engagement of the performer based on a selection of 15 audio-visual performances by popular virtuosos. In Experiment 2 these features were then used to obtain evaluations of perceived playing difficulty and impressiveness of the solos from subjects differing in musical competence (N = 59). Results revealed interactions between subjects’ musical competence and evaluations of show elements: (a) Music students gave higher ratings than did musically untrained subjects for the perceived playing difficulty and impressiveness of solos played in fast tempo; (b) surprisingly, solos with show elements were rated as more impressive – but only by the music students; (c) the visible engagement of the performer resulted in high ratings for playing difficulty – but only from the musically untrained subjects. We conclude that the technical difficulty of a performance is not self-evident to the recipient and depends on the rater’s degree of musical competence. The evaluations of a guitar performance by the majority of musically untrained recipients rely more on visible cues of engagement than on virtuosic playing (i.e., fast tempo, difficult techniques).

The emotional content expressed through musical performance has become a widely-discussed topic in music psychology during the past two decades. However, empirical evidence regarding children’s abilities in interpreting the emotional content of a musical performance is sparse. We investigated 3–7-year-old children’s abilities to interpret the emotional content expressed through performance features in music. Short musical pieces previously rated as inexpressive of emotion were recorded by three musicians with five emotional expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry and neutral) and played to 3–7-year-old children (N = 94), adult non-musicians (N = 83), and adult musicians (N = 118) who made a forced-choice judgement about the emotion that each excerpt conveyed. Significant differences were observed between children, adult non-musicians and musicians in their ability to interpret the emotional content of a performance. Especially for children, the easiest emotions to identify proved to be happiness and sadness, while anger, fear and emotional neutrality appeared to be more difficult to identify. The most salient confusion patterns of the emotions (categorizing angry performance as happy, neutral performance as sad, or mixing up fear with sadness in performance) as well as the least salient ones (mixing up happiness with sadness, as well as anger with emotions other than happiness) are discussed in the context of general theories of emotion.