墨子音乐美学思想探微

墨子是小手工业者和小生产者的代表,却是一位卓越人物。其博大精深的学术思想、强国谋略、治世之法对后世影响至深,他所提出的以“兼爱、非命”为中心思想体系的学说可与儒家学说“仁义、礼乐”相媲美。墨子的音乐美学思想是其学说中的一个重要部分,也是我国古代音乐宝库中一颗璀璨的明珠,文章从墨子背景谈起,着重论述了墨子的音乐美学思想的内容,以及与“节用”的经济学说和“兼以易别”、“禁恶而劝爱”的政治思想的关系,从而进一步丰富、完善了墨子音乐美学思想的内涵。     

Music chills: The eye pupil as a mirror to music’s soul

This study evaluated whether music-induced aesthetic “chill” responses, which typically correspond to peak emotional experiences, can be objectively monitored by degree of pupillary dilation. Participants listened to self-chosen songs versus control songs chosen by other participants. The experiment included an active condition where participants made key presses to indicate when experiencing chills and a passive condition (without key presses). Chills were reported more frequently for self-selected songs than control songs. Pupil diameter was concurrently measured by an eye-tracker while participants listened to each of the songs. Pupil size was larger within specific time-windows around the chill events, as monitored by key responses, than in comparison to pupil size observed during ‘passive’ song listening. In addition, there was a clear relationship between pupil diameter within the chills-related time-windows during both active and passive conditions, thus ruling out the possibility that chills-related pupil dilations were an artifact of making a manual response. These findings strongly suggest that music chills can be visible in the moment-to-moment changes in the size of pupillary responses and that a neuromodulatory role of the central norepinephrine system is thereby implicated in this phenomenon.     

Psychotraumatic Stress and Anxiety

Abstract

A systematic review of all available treatment studies for music performance anxiety was undertaken. Interventions were categorised into psychological treatments and pharmacological treatments. Psychological treatments included behavioral, cognitive, cognitive-behavioral, combined treatments and other therapies. Issues such as the number of studies in each treatment modality, their sample sizes and the methodological quality of most of the studies reviewed precluded firm conclusions about the effectiveness of any of the treatments assessed for music performance anxiety. The field is in urgent need of larger scale, methodologically rigorous studies to assist the large minority of musicians who suffer from performance impairing music performance anxiety.     

Musical Memory in Alzheimer Disease

ABSTRACT

This study examines musical memory in 12 patients with moderate or severe AD and 12 healthy, older adult controls. Participants were asked to distinguish familiar from novel tunes, to identify distortions in melodies, and to sing familiar tunes. Comparison of the AD and control groups showed significant impairment of the AD participants. However, a more complex picture emerged as we compared each individual case to the control group. Five of the AD group performed within the control group range on most tasks. An additional four participants showed partial sparing in that they performed below the range of control participants, but their scores were above the level of chance. The final three participants showed near complete loss of musical memory, as their performance was consistently at or near the level of chance. These results are discussed in terms of the literature on the heterogeneity of cognitive presentation in AD.     

From melody to lexical tone: Musical ability enhances specific aspects of foreign language perception

Previous research shows that music ability provides positive effects on language processing. This study aims at better clarifying the involvement of different linguistic subdomains in this cross-domain link, assessing whether or not musicality and music expertise enhance phonological and lexical tone processing of Mandarin Chinese. In two experiments different groups of adults and children with no previous experience in tonal languages, were invited to perform a same–different task trying to detect phonological and tonal variations in pairs of sequences of monosyllabic Mandarin Chinese words. Main results show that all subjects perform significantly better in detecting phonological variations rather than tonal ones. They also show that both melodic proficiency and music expertise are good predictors for a better tonal, but not phonological identification. Data lead to a model of music-to-language transfer effect in which musicality selectively affects linguistic intonation while leaving phonological processing substantially unaffected.     

It's not what you play,it's how you play it: Timbre affects perception of emotion in music

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18–30 years, 24 older adults aged 58–75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.     

The integration of stimulus dimensions in the perception of music

A central aim of cognitive psychology is to explain how we integrate stimulus dimensions into a unified percept, but how the dimensions of pitch and time combine in the perception of music remains a largely unresolved issue. The goal of this study was to test the effect of varying the degree of conformity to dimensional structure in pitch and time (specifically, tonality and metre) on goodness ratings and classifications of melodies. The pitches and durations of melodies were either presented in their original order, as a reordered sequence, or replaced with random elements. Musically trained and untrained participants (24 each) rated melodic goodness, attending selectively to the dimensions of pitch, time, or both. Also, 24 trained participants classified whether or not the melodies were tonal, metric, or both. Pitch and temporal manipulations always influenced responses, but participants successfully emphasized either dimension in accordance with instructions. Effects of pitch and time were mostly independent for selective attention conditions, but more interactive when evaluating both dimensions. When interactions occurred, the effect of either dimension increased as the other dimension conformed more to its original structure. Relative main effect sizes (| pitch η² – time η² |) predicted the strength of pitch–time interactions (pitch?×?time η²); interactions were stronger when main effect sizes were more evenly matched. These results have implications for dimensional integration in several domains. Relative main effect size could serve as an indicator of dimensional salience, such that interactions are more likely when dimensions are equally salient.     

Musical taste,employment, education,and global region

Sociologists have argued that musical taste should vary between social groups, but have not considered whether the effect extends beyond taste into uses of music and also emotional reactions to music. Moreover, previous research has ignored the culture in which participants are located. The present research employed a large sample from five post‐industrial global regions and showed that musical taste differed between regions but not according to education and employment; and that there were three‐way interactions between education, employment, and region in the uses to which participants put music and also their typical emotional reactions. In addition to providing partial support for existing sociological theory, the findings highlight the potential of culture as a variable in future quantitative research on taste.     

Biographic and behavioral factors are associated with music-related motor skills in children pianists

This study aimed to identify biographical and behavioral factors associated with children pianists’ motor skills using an objective assessment of a music-relevant motor task. Motor skills at the piano were assessed in 30 children pianists by measuring temporal unevenness in standardized scale playing using musical instrument digital interface (MIDI)-based scale analysis. Questionnaires were used to collect detailed information about the amount of time playing the piano, practice characteristics, attitudes toward music and practice, and the environment of music and practice. Associations between performance values and variables from the questionnaire were investigated using multivariable linear regression. A higher number of years playing the piano, more frequent parental involvement in the child’s practice, more frequent practice of technical exercises, and greater enjoyment of practice and of the visual arts were associated with better motor performance. In addition to cumulative experience and aspects of practice, extrinsic motivational factors (e.g., parental interest) and intrinsic motivational factors (e.g., an artistic disposition) were associated with better performance on a musically-relevant motor task in children pianists.     

Silent music reading: Auditory imagery and visuotonal modality transfer in singers and non-singers

In daily life, responses are often facilitated by anticipatory imagery of expected targets which are announced by associated stimuli from different sensory modalities. Silent music reading represents an intriguing case of visuotonal modality transfer in working memory as it induces highly defined auditory imagery on the basis of presented visuospatial information (i.e. musical notes). Using functional MRI and a delayed sequence matching-to-sample paradigm, we compared brain activations during retention intervals (10 s) of visual (VV) or tonal (TT) unimodal maintenance versus visuospatial-to-tonal modality transfer (VT) tasks. Visual or tonal sequences were comprised of six elements, white squares or tones, which were low, middle, or high regarding vertical screen position or pitch, respectively (presentation duration: 1.5 s). For the cross-modal condition (VT, session 3), the visuospatial elements from condition VV (session 1) were re-defined as low, middle or high “notes” indicating low, middle or high tones from condition TT (session 2), respectively, and subjects had to match tonal sequences (probe) to previously presented note sequences. Tasks alternately had low or high cognitive load. To evaluate possible effects of music reading expertise, 15 singers and 15 non-musicians were included. Scanner task performance was excellent in both groups. Despite identity of applied visuospatial stimuli, visuotonal modality transfer versus visual maintenance (VT > VV) induced “inhibition” of visual brain areas and activation of primary and higher auditory brain areas which exceeded auditory activation elicited by tonal stimulation (VT > TT). This transfer-related visual-to-auditory activation shift occurred in both groups but was more pronounced in experts. Frontoparietal areas were activated by higher cognitive load but not by modality transfer. The auditory brain showed a potential to anticipate expected auditory target stimuli on the basis of non-auditory information and sensory brain activation rather mirrored expectation than stimulation. Silent music reading probably relies on these basic neurocognitive mechanisms.