The Effects of Artist Adoration and Perceived Risk of Getting Caught on Attitude and Intention to Pirate Music in the United States and Taiwan

Piracy is the greatest threat facing the global music industry today. This study explores the effects of artist adoration and the perceived risk of being caught on the attitude and intention to engage in pirating a digital song among college students. The moderating effect of cultural environment factor is also examined. Experiments using between-group factorial designs were conducted in the United States and Taiwan. The results show that perceived risk of getting caught and cultural environment are important factors that can significantly affect the attitude and intention toward downloading unauthorized music. In addition, a two-way (Perceived Risk × Culture) and a three-way interaction in the model are also observed.     

In Search of Bandhood: Consultation with Original Music Groups

Original music groups present a unique and under-explored example of self-initiated task groups. The intragroup life and negotiation of creative differences in three diverse original music groups from New York City were explored. Establishment of a shared group ideology and management of organizational tensions, identified in Murnighan and Conlon's study of professional string quartets, appeared central in the bands' cohesion. The role of group therapist, as a band consultant, was examined.     

Alexithymia and Affect Intensity of Fine Artists

Research on creative artists has examined mainly their personality traits or cognitive abilities. However, it seems important to explore also their emotional traits to complete the profile. This study examines two emotional characteristics: alexithymia and affect intensity. Even if most research suggests that artists are less alexithymic and experience more intensively their emotions, Botella, M., Zenasni, F., and Lubart, T. (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5 , 251, 2011) observed that art students were as alexithymic as psychology students and more alexithymic than a normative population. The aim of this study was to examine these issues with artists and non‐artists and to compare artists to art students. Results indicate that artists are less alexithymic and present higher affect intensity than non‐artists. Moreover, results show that art students present more difficulties processing their emotions than artists.     

Going backstage: a psychoanalytically informed study with amateur musicians in adult mental health services

Many mental health service users engage in potentially therapeutic amateur music practice, though the role of this in the maintenance of mental health is largely unexplored. The application of psychoanalytic ideas to music-playing gives suggestions for how this activity could helpfully sublimate distress. For this study, six men who attend adult mental health services and play a musical instrument took part in three unstructured hour-long interviews. The material was analysed with a psychoanalytically informed method. Four inter-related themes emerged: ‘Left on the outside’; ‘Playing and linking’; ‘A beautiful gift to myself’; and ‘Frustrating play’. In the lives of these amateur musicians, music’s role as a transitional object and means of containing distress is explored. There is discussion of the narcissistic function of music and the dynamics around music as an exhibitionistic act. The value of paying attention to music in the life of a patient is considered.     

Sounding grief: The Severn Estuary as an emotional soundscape

This paper explores sound infused creative responses to grief and related emotions of loss and landscape in the context of the tidal Severn Estuary (UK) and its particular sonic qualities. We draw principally on the practice of artist Louisa Fairclough, linking to wider discussions of emotion, sound and the body, in shared autotopological explorations of self and family in landscape. Like other estuaries, the Severn Estuary is a deeply rich (in socio-ecological terms) landscape which includes the tidal liminalities of the lower reaches of the Severn river, the mid estuary, and the lower areas which merge into open sea. The whole estuary, in geomorphological, ecological, and related social terms, is particularly dynamic as it has the second highest tidal range in the world. This means that vast volumes of brackish water wash up and down the estuary in a series of rhythmic cycles which play across and between day, month and season, mixing physical spaces and processes (e.g. land-sea; salt-fresh water). This ceaseless ebb and flow brings marked spatial, visual and aural richness to the estuary and places along its shores. This includes the Severn bore which, when at maximum height, is a powerful tidal wave washing up the upper estuary and tidal river with a loud sonic richness. Owain Jones (geographer) has previously written on this landscape and its memorial emotional qualities in relation to his family history and challenged geographical self. Louisa Fairclough (artist) has re-turned to it as performative art practice, to sleep by the River Severn, and produces a series of works consisting of field recordings, drawings and a series of installations of expanded films. These use river sounds and vocal recordings to interact with the tidal landscape and its margins in creative expressions of grief. This paper sets out these works, their background, shared responses to the estuary, and explores in particular the sonic registers of the landscape which, for us, listen, and speak to, loss and trauma.     

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME IN NATURAL SCIENCE

The various aesthetic phenomena found repeatedly in the scientific enterprise stem from the role of God as artist. If the Creator is an artist, how and why natural scientists study the divine art work can be understood using theological aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The aesthetic phenomena considered here are as follows. First, science reveals beauty and the sublime in natural phenomena. Second, science discovers beauty and the sublime in the theories that are developed to explain natural phenomena. Third, the search for beauty often guides scientists in their work. Fourth, where beauty is perceived, feelings of the sublime often also follow upon further contemplation. This linkage of beauty in science with truth and the sublime runs counter to most aesthetic theory since Kant. Scholarship in theological aesthetics has recently argued that the modern and postmodern elevation of the sublime over beauty is merely a preference that reveals a bias against transcendence—against God. If doing and understanding science can show this sundering of the sublime from the beautiful to be in error, science also gives evidence of transcendence.