Reduced Memory Representations for Music

We address the problem of musical variation (identification of different musical sequences as variations) and its implications for mental representations of music. According to reductionist theories, listeners judge the structural importance of musical events while forming mental representations. These judgments may result from the production of reduced memory representations that retain only the musical gist. In a study of improvised music performance, pianists produced variations on melodies. Analyses of the musical events retained across variations provided support for the reductionist account of structural importance. A neural network trained to produce reduced memory representations for the same melodies represented structurally important events more efficiently than others. Agreement among the musicians' improvisations, the network model, and music-theoretic predictions suggest that perceived constancy across musical variation is a natural result of a reductionist mechanism for producing memory representations.     

Enhancing mental health and well-being outcomes for psychotherapy and counselling through idiographic analysis: A four-quadrant approach

Mental health and well-being outcomes in psychotherapy and counselling have largely been studied through the use of standardised nomothetic measurement. A key limitation is that nomothetic measurement and current statistical analyses do not necessarily capture the outcomes of the complicated and individual psychotherapy processes. There is an increased interest in the use of idiographic patient-reported outcome measures (I-PROMs), which are uniquely useful because they may explore areas of importance that are unexplored by nomothetic outcome measures. We argue that to optimise the value of I-PROMs, it is necessary to consider their contribution alongside standardised nomothetic measures. However, there are important considerations with respect to whether or not I-PROMs from different clients, or indeed from the same client, can be meaningfully explored at a team/service level, and alongside standardised nomothetic outcomes. We provide worked examples on real client data to show that delineating four quadrants of analysis is important to explore the breadth of information: (a) individual progress on single items, (b) individual progress by aggregated scores, (c) team/service-level progress by goal item/theme and (d) team/service-level progress by aggregated scores.