This study investigates the use of musical intelligence to improve the English pronunciation of Chinese third level students. It is relevant for a human-centred systems engineering approach to cross-cultural interaction. Language learning is important as valid communication can help interactions and cultural understanding between countries, this also may benefit international stability. There are natural barriers between the English and Chinese language which are reflected in teaching approaches. The teaching of English in Chinese classrooms is removed from real-world English (...) learning environments. The academic environments and approaches focus on the learning of grammar, spelling and writing with little real-life conversation and interaction with native English speakers. English language learning in China is from a more academic perspective rather than practical utilisation. Correct pronunciation and accent is therefore diminished. This study demonstrates that a musical intelligence e-Learning approach can benefit Chinese English language students. (shrink)

In the near future, vehicles will gradually gain more autonomous functionalities. Drivers’ activity will be less about driving than about monitoring intelligent systems to which driving action will be delegated. Road safety, therefore, remains dependent on the human factor and we should identify the limits beyond which driver’s functional state (DFS) may no longer be able to ensure safety. Depending on the level of automation, estimating the DFS may have different targets, e.g. assessing driver’s situation awareness in lower levels of (...) automation and his ability to respond to emerging hazard or assessing driver’s ability to monitor the vehicle performing operational tasks in higher levels of automation. Unfitted DFS (e.g., drowsiness) may impact the driver ability respond to taking over abilities. This paper reviews the most appropriate psychophysiological indices in naturalistic driving while considering the DFS through exogenous sensors, providing the more efficient trade-off between reliability and intrusiveness. The DFS also originates from kinematic data of the vehicle, thus providing information that indirectly relates to drivers behaviour. The whole data should be synchronously processed, providing a diagnosis on the DFS, and bringing it to the attention of the decision maker in real time. Next, making the information available can be permanent or intermittent (or even undelivered), and may also depend on the automation level. Such interface can include recommendations for decision support or simply give neutral instruction. Mapping of relevant psychophysiological and behavioural indicators for DFS will enable practitioners and researchers provide reliable estimates, fitted to the level of automation. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem highlights the opportunities and rewards associated with the application of AI in the creative arts. Featuring an array of voices, including interviews with Jacques Attali, Holly Herndon and Scott Cohen, this book offers interdisciplinary approaches to pressing ethical and technical questions associated with AI. Considering the perspectives of developers, students and artists, as well as the wider themes of law, ethics and philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem is an essential introduction for anyone (...) interested in the impact of AI on music, including those studying and working in the creative arts. (shrink)

Music is the carrier through which human beings express their emotions. It can clean up their hearts and seek emotional resonance. The combination of music and artificial intelligence, when music meets artificial intelligence, the mathematical logic part of data and algorithm replaces the image thinking, resulting in automatic music production. The basic principle of music creation is to use artificial intelligence technology to conduct in-depth training on a large number of songs, and then build a database. Then, (...) within a certain period of time, extract a segment from several songs, and then decompose it to form a new melody. The automatic music production is the collision of music and technology. With the flying of code and notes, it creates a different kind of beauty. Music culture is a new field of music application. With its refreshing audio-visual effect, it has made people have a new understanding of music and has become a hot topic in current mass cultural activities. The sound quality characteristics of music culture programs determine the characteristics of simple, fast and efficient design. However, the current audio and video design still stays in the traditional audio and video form design, with low design efficiency, long cycle, high cost and high requirements for designers. In view of the fact that the traditional audio and video design mode in China's music and cultural programs cannot meet the needs of performance programs at present, this paper proposes a design scheme of audio and visual effects of music and cultural programs with intelligent devices as the core, and develops a complete set of audio and visual effects aided design system on this basis. (shrink)

Music and affects share a long history. In recent times, 4E cognitive sciences (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended), situated affectivity, and related ecological theoretical frameworks have been conceptualizing music as a case of a tool for feeling. Drawing on this debate, I propose to further theorize the role of music in situating our affectivity by analyzing how the very affective affordances of music are technologically situated. In other words, I propose to shift the attention from music as a tool for (...) feeling to the tools for feeling music. I argue that the experience of music as a tool for feeling may be altered, enhanced, or lessened depending on the tools for feeling music. I investigate the extent to which AI might be a case of a tool for feeling music and examine the influence it could exert over musical affectivity. I conclude that AI can be considered a tool for feeling music of curatorial type and that the limitations and/or biases of AI as a method risk lessening the power of musical affective affordances. (shrink)

In their thought-provoking paper, Legg and Hutter consider a certain abstrac- tion of an intelligent agent, and define a universal intelligence measure, which assigns every such agent a numerical intelligence rating. We will briefly summarize Legg and Hutter’s paper, and then give a tongue-in-cheek argument that if one’s goal is to become more intelligent by cultivating music appreciation, then it is bet- ter to use classical music (such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven) than to use more recent pop (...) music. The same argument could be adapted to other media: books beat films, card games beat first-person shooters, parables beat dissertations, etc. We leave it to the reader to decide whether this argument tells us something about classical music, something about Legg-Hutter intelligence, or something about both. (shrink)

Music education is one of human kind most universal forms of expression and communication, and it can be found in the daily lives of people of all ages and cultures all over the world. As university life is a time when students are exposed to a great deal of stress, it can have a negative impact on their mental health. Therefore, it is critical to intervene at this stage in their life so that they are prepared to deal with the (...) pressures they will face in the future. The aim of this study was to see how music education affects university students’ mental health, with emotional intelligence functioning as a moderator. The participants in this research were graduate students pursuing degrees in music education. Non probability convenience sampling technique was used to collect and evaluate the data from 265 students studying in different public and private Chinese universities. The data was gathered at a time, and therefore, the study is cross-sectional. The data was collected from January 2022 till the end of March 2022. Many universities have been closed because to COVID-19, therefore data was also gathered online through emails. The data was analyzed quantitatively using the partial least squares –structural equation modeling technique. The findings backed up the hypotheses. The results revealed that there is a significant effect of music education on student’s mental health. Also, emotional intelligence as a moderator significantly and positively moderates the relationship between music education and students’ mental health. Music has numerous physiological aspects, and listening to it on a daily basis may be beneficial to your general health and well-being. Furthermore, musicians and music students with a high level of emotional intelligence have a better chance of not just performing well in school, college and university or in the music industry, but also of maintaining mental health and improving it. (shrink)

Intelligent Guided Learning System is a computer system that uses computers to imitate the experience and methods of teaching experts to assist in teaching; ITS provides learners with personalized learning resources and adaptive teaching methods, thus reducing students’ dependence on teachers and realizing independent learning. After years of research and development, and with the help of artificial intelligence technology, ITS has basically formed a stable structure and unified implementation specifications and has given birth to many excellent products in disciplines (...) such as basic computer, language, medicine, and mathematics. Based on the above background, this paper takes the system structure of universal ITS as the basis, combines the characteristics of music sight-singing subject in teaching contents and teaching methods, researches the intelligent guidance system model of music sight-singing, and completes the design of the overall system architecture. The specific strategies and implementation methods of the teaching methods, resource recommendation, and ability assessment components of the teaching model are studied. The research includes the definition of the difficulty characteristics of the score, the design of the score recommendation algorithm, the design of the sight-singing scoring algorithm, and the experimental analysis of each algorithm. It is proposed that the difficulty feature-based score recommendation algorithm is the core component of resource recommendation in the teacher model, and the sight-singing scoring algorithm is the basis for ability assessment and learner model update. (shrink)

Combining images with music is a music visualization to deepen the knowledge and understanding of music information. This study briefly introduced the concept of music visualization and used a convolutional neural network and long short-term memory to pair music and images for music visualization. Then, an emotion classification loss function was added to the loss function to make full use of the emotional information in music and images. Finally, simulation experiments were performed. The results showed that the improved deep learning-based (...) music visualization algorithm had the highest matching accuracy when the weight of the emotion classification loss function was 0.2; compared with the traditional keyword matching method and the nonimproved deep learning music visualization algorithm, the improved algorithm matched more suitable images. (shrink)

This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment. As I understand it, sensemaking is fully embodied, fundamentally affective, and thoroughly embedded in a social environment. I begin by presenting an enactivist conceptualization of affective intentionality and describing how this general mode of intentional directedness to the world is disrupted in cases of major depressive disorder. Next, I utilize this enactivist framework to unpack the notion of ‘temporal desituatedness,’ and (...) maintain that the characteristic symptoms of depression result from a disruption to the future-directed structure of affective intentionality. This can be conceptualized as a loss of “online intelligence” and a shrinking of the field of affordances. Then, I argue that two of the standard modes of treatments for depression, medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, are not fully sufficient means of restoring online intelligence, and that these limitations stem partly from the approaches’ implicit commitment to a brain-bound, overly cognitivist view of the mind. I recommend expressive arts interventions such as dance-movement therapy and music therapy as important supplementary treatment methods that deserve further consideration. Insofar as they revitalize subjects’ bodies and emotions, cultivate an openness to the future, and promote self-insight and social synchrony, these treatment modes not only reflect key insights of enactivism, but also offer great potential for lasting healing. (shrink)

Streaming media server is the core system of audio and video application in the Internet; it has a wide range of applications in music recommendation. As song libraries and users of music websites and APPs continue to increase, user interaction data are generated at an increasingly fast rate, making the shortcomings of the original offline recommendation system and the advantages of the real-time streaming recommendation system more and more obvious. This paper describes in detail the working methods and contents of (...) each stage of the real-time streaming music recommendation system, including requirement analysis, overall design, implementation of each module of the system, and system testing and analysis, from a practical scenario. Moreover, this paper analyzes the current research status and deficiencies in the field of music recommendation by analyzing the user interaction data of real music websites. From the actual requirements of the system, the functional and performance goals of the system are proposed to address these deficiencies, and then the functional structure, general architecture, and database model of the system are designed, and how to interact with the server side and the client side is investigated. For the implementation of data collection and statistics module, this paper adopts Flume and Kafka to collect user behavior data and uses Spark Streaming and Redis to count music popularity trends and support efficient query. The recommendation engine module in this paper is designed and optimized using Spark to implement incremental matrix decomposition on data streams, online collaborative topic model, and improved item-based collaborative filtering algorithm. In the system testing section, the functionality and performance of the system are tested, and the recommendation engine is tested with real datasets to show the discovered music themes and analyze the test results in detail. (shrink)

100 years ago, the editors of the Journal of Educational Psychology conducted one of the most famous studies of experts' conceptions of human intelligence. Reason enough to prompt the question where we stand today with conceptualizing 'intelligence'. In this paper, I provide a synopsis of the latest research on human intelligence(s). I embrace the notion of intelligence as a non-unitary faculty with pluralistic forms. Even though I do not provide a definition of 'intelligence' of my (...) own, I provide good reasons for this reluctance. Nonetheless, I specify the term as complex, gradual, embedded, multidirectional, and dynamic. Furthermore, I argue for the special status of musical, not linguistic, intelligence. (shrink)

The research expects to explore the application of intelligent music recognition technology in music teaching. Based on the Long Short-Term Memory network knowledge, an algorithm model which can distinguish various music signals and generate various genres of music is designed and implemented. First, by analyzing the application of machine learning and deep learning in the field of music, the algorithm model is designed to realize the function of intelligent music generation, which provides a theoretical basis for relevant research. Then, by (...) selecting massive music data, the music style discrimination and generation model is tested. The experimental results show that when the number of hidden layers of the designed model is 4 and the number of neurons in each layer is 1,024, 512, 256, and 128, the training result difference of the model is the smallest. The classification accuracy of jazz, classical, rock, country, and disco music types can be more than 60% using the designed algorithm model. Among them, the classification effect of jazz schools is the best, which is 77.5%. Moreover, compared with the traditional algorithm, the frequency distribution of the music score generated by the designed algorithm is almost consistent with the spectrum of the original music. Therefore, the methods and models proposed can distinguish music signals and generate different music, and the discrimination accuracy of different music signals is higher, which is superior to the traditional restricted Boltzmann machine method. (shrink)

In this book review essay, Justus discusses Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (2001) by David Cope. The review begins by drawing a parallel between the Turing Test and evaluating the compositions of Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) before providing an overview of how this computer programme works and the commentaries included in the book (by Douglas Hofstadter, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Bernard Greenberg, Steve Larson, Jonathan Berger, and Daniel Dennett). The essay then raises questions of absolute (...) music versus music with referential meaning, asking whether EMI’s compositions represent a sort of “musical Jabberwocky” (in reference to Lewis Carroll’s 1871 poem) in which syntax and semantics have become dissociated. (shrink)

From artistic performances in the visual arts and in music to motor control in gymnastics, from tool use to chess and language, humans excel in a variety of skills. On the plausible assumption that skillful behavior is a visible manifestation of intelligence, a theory of intelligence—whether human or not—should be informed by a theory of skills. More controversial is the question as to whether, in order to theorize about intelligence, we should study certain skills in particular. My (...) target is the view that only a particular class/kind of skill (i.e., ‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’, or ‘embodied’ skills) manifests intelligence, or especially does so. I call this view ‘Intelligence Elitism’. Intelligence Elitism is pervasive in popular culture, in academic culture, as well as in psychometrics. It has, arguably, a long pedigree in philosophy (though explicit arguments for it are rare). But it is a substantive view which, if false, can promote unfairness. In this article, I defend Intelligence Socialism—the claim that intelligent behavior is everywhere skillful behavior is. I go on to isolate the best case for the further Elitist claim that, even if all skillful behavior is intelligent in some modest sense of ‘intelligence’, there is a principled difference in intelligence between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, on one side, and practical, or embodied skills, on the other, and I show it wanting. (shrink)

In this article the central philosophical issues concerning human-level artificial intelligence (AI) are presented. AI largely changed direction in the 1980s and 1990s, concentrating on building domain-specific systems and on sub-goals such as self-organization, self-repair, and reliability. Computer scientists aimed to construct intelligence amplifiers for human beings, rather than imitation humans. Turing based his test on a computer-imitates-human game, describing three versions of this game in 1948, 1950, and 1952. The famous version appears in a 1950 article in (...) Mind, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing 1950). The interpretation of Turing's test is that it provides an operational definition of intelligence (or thinking) in machines, in terms of behavior. ‘Intelligent Machinery’ sets out the thesis that whether an entity is intelligent is determined in part by our responses to the entity's behavior. Wittgenstein frequently employed the idea of a human being acting like a reliable machine. A ‘living reading-machine’ is a human being or other creature that is given written signs, for example Chinese characters, arithmetical symbols, logical symbols, or musical notation, and who produces text spoken aloud, solutions to arithmetical problems, and proofs of logical theorems. Wittgenstein mentions that an entity that manipulates symbols genuinely reads only if he or she has a particular history, involving learning and training, and participates in a social environment that includes normative constraints and further uses of the symbols. (shrink)

Regular musical activity as a complex multimodal lifestyle activity is proposed to be protective against age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. This cross-sectional study investigated the association and interplay between musical instrument playing during life, multi-domain cognitive abilities and brain morphology in older adults from the DZNE-Longitudinal Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Study study. Participants reporting having played a musical instrument across three life periods were compared to controls without a history of musical instrument playing, well-matched for (...) reserve proxies of education, intelligence, socioeconomic status and physical activity. Participants with musical activity outperformed controls in global cognition, working memory, executive functions, language, and visuospatial abilities, with no effects seen for learning and memory. The musically active group had greater gray matter volume in the somatosensory area, but did not differ from controls in higher-order frontal, temporal, or hippocampal volumes. However, the association between gray matter volume in distributed frontal-to-temporal regions and cognitive abilities was enhanced in participants with musical activity compared to controls. We show that playing a musical instrument during life relates to better late-life cognitive abilities and greater brain capacities in OA. Musical activity may serve as a multimodal enrichment strategy that could help preserve cognitive and brain health in late life. Longitudinal and interventional studies are needed to support this notion. (shrink)

In a society where mobility, globalization and contact with people from other cultures have become its basic descriptors, the enhancement of plurilingualism and intercultural understanding seem to be of the utmost concern. From a Positive Psychology Perspective, agency is the human capacity to affect other people positively or negatively through their actions. This agentic vision can be related to mediation, a concept rooted in the socio-cultural learning theory where social interaction is considered a fundamental cornerstone in the development of cognition. (...) Social interactions in the language learning setting may be facilitated through musical activities due to its social bonding effect. This paper tries to offer insights on how a musical-mediated experience in language learning may develop students’ interpersonal and collaborative competences to become active members of a more inclusive society. Mediation, considered as a paradigm shift in the foreign language classroom and the different out-of-class language learning possibilities, could also provide an environment where learners maximize their emotional intelligence. Our paper focuses on this paradigm shift spearheaded by the CEFR Companion Volume and the considerable repercussions it is bound to have for foreign language didactics, as cooperative tasks become central to foreign language learning. We hypothesize that mediated language learning experiences imply a socioemotional change in learners, focusing on the others, on their needs and interests, by trying to help them understand texts, concepts or facilitating communication with their peers. An intervention with a musical-mediated language learning experience was designed and implemented in the classroom. A self assessment scale with mediation descriptors and the socioemotional expertise scale (SEE) were administered. Results show that students become more mindful of their strengths, of their capacity for collaborating and team working. This leads to more awareness of their mediation skills. Students’ mediation skills correlate significantly with their socio-emotional skills, more concretely with their expressivity. The implementation of a musical-mediated experience also promoted tolerance and enhanced learners’ intrinsic motivation for language learning at the same time as they acknowledged their diversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 11.2 (2003) 200-202 [Access article in PDF] Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education:advancing the Vision, Third Edition. (upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice In his third and greatly revised edition of A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer fulfills the promise of his subtitle, Advancing the Vision. While incorporating essentials and a few passages of his previous edition, its thrust is to present (...) and argue for a new theory of musical intelligences. Here Reimer is pushing into a theoretical frontier, one that he sees as crucially relevant to the music education concerns that have so long been at the heart of his thinking.So although this is a new edition, third time around, of a classic in the field of philosophy of music education by one of its "elder statespersons," it is in many ways a new book. Reimer has never been a thinker to rest on his past achievements. He demonstrates here his ongoing curiosity about issues he has been wrestling with for decades. He engages in debate (as sympathetically as possible) with others who are also forging new ideas. Interacting with their ideas and his own former ones, he generates new ways of thinking about what is involved in musical composing, performing, listening, and theorizing. He uses all this as ground for challenging students and teachers of music to reflect on their own philosophical or pre-philosophical assumptions, their learning and teaching practices, and their [End Page 200] opportunities to make music even more meaningful in their lives and the lives of others. All this is informed by his evident (without his ever making an overt claim for it) love of music, love of philosophizing about music and music education, and his love of teaching about music. I will comment here on just some of the many notable features of the new edition.Reimer announces his approach as synergistic—that is, looking for areas of agreement beneath the surface of what seem to be radically opposing positions (between absolutism and relativism concerning musical value, for instance). What is especially noteworthy is that he demonstrates this moderation throughout his book. This does not lead to his being uncritical; in fact, he is highly critical of some stances and in Chapter 1 makes a devastating attack on postmodernism in music education. But generally he seeks to find what is worthwhile in the views of others and what he can assimilate from their thinking.While valuing musical performance and especially the successful record on teaching performance in American schools, Reimer believes that music education should have much wider concerns: to provide the groundwork for students interested in composing, conducting, improvising, arranging, reviewing, theorizing, and above all listening. Listening, he persuasively argues, is the core skill for all the other activities or roles, and it is also the skill probably most useful in the long run for the greatest number of students. Few, after all, will go on to become professional performers or music creators in some other role, and not many will even become highly competent performing amateurs. But almost everyone can develop some skills in active listening, and they deserve the attention in music education that has been mostly lacking. In the program Reimer advocates, the largest potential student population will become (in his aptly chosen term) aficionados—intelligent, discriminatory listeners. Some of this is attended to in colleges and universities, but by then the opportunity for many has passed.Building on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, Reimer points out the limitations of analysis in terms of simply one musical intelligence. The abilities needed for musical activities are not all the same, even though they have the common requirement of listening skill. The notion of multiple musical intelligences (specifically composing, performing, improvising, listening, music theory, musicology, and music teaching) provides a rich basis and suggests new possible methods for broadening music education at all school levels. It also indicates a worthwhile area both for future research and for application beyond the field of music. Education, Reimer says, should be thought of... (shrink)

Studies on associations between music training and cognitive abilities typically focus on the possible benefits of music lessons. Recent research suggests, however, that many of these associations stem from niche-picking tendencies, which lead certain individuals to be more likely than others to take music lessons, especially for long durations. Because the initial decision to take music lessons is made primarily by a child's parents, at least at younger ages, we asked whether individual differences in parents' personality predict young children's duration (...) of training. Children between 7 and 9 years of age ( N = 170) with varying amounts of music training completed a measure of IQ. Their parents provided demographic information as well as ratings of their own and their child's Big Five personality dimensions. Children's personality traits predicted duration of music training even when demographic variables and intelligence were held constant, replicating findings reported previously with 10- to 12-year-olds and 17-year-olds. A novel finding was that parents' openness-to-experience predicted children's duration of training, even when characteristics that pertained to children (demographic variables, intelligence, and personality) were controlled statistically. Our findings are indicative of passive and active gene-environment correlations, whereby genetic predispositions influence the likelihood that a child will have certain experiences, such as music training. (shrink)

Robert Sharpe examines the humanist conception of music as a language--as expressive and intelligible--which has been a dominant theory in Western culture. He argues against the view that music is expressive by causing certain states in us. Rather, he contends that our beliefs about music are integral to our appreciation of it. Differences in musical taste are then not just irresolvable differences in sensitivity, but the result of variations in circumstance and upbringing, of associations and ideology.

Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not in a (...) hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression. (shrink)

This is a revised version of AI Memo No. 616, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. An earlier published version appeared in Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music (Manfred Clynes, ed.) Plenum, New York, 1981 Why Do We Like Music? Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. It is astonishing how little curiosity (...) we have about so pervasive an "environmental" influence. What might we discover if we were to study musical thinking? (shrink)

This handbook for advanced students explains the various applications to music of methods derived from linguistics and semiotics. The book is aimed at musicians familiar with the ordinary range of aesthetic and theoretical ideas in music; no specialized knowledge of linguistic or semiotic terminology is necessary. In the two introductory chapters, semiotics is related to the tradition of music aesthetics and to well-known works like Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music, and the methods of linguistics are explained in language intelligible (...) to musicians. There is no limitation to one school or tradition; linguistic applications not avowedly semiotic, and semiotic theories not connected with linguistics, are all included. The book gives clear and simple descriptions with ample diagrams and music examples of the 'neutral level', 'semiotic analysis', transformation and generation, structural semantics and narrative grammar, intonation theory, the ideas of C.S. Peirce, and applications in ethnomusicology. (shrink)

In order to solve the problem of the influence of feature word position in lyrics on music emotion classification, this paper designs a music classification and detection model in complex noise environment. Firstly, an intelligent detection algorithm for electronic music signals under complex noise scenes is proposed, which can solve the limitations existing in the current electronic music signal detection process. At the same time, denoising technology is introduced to eliminate the noise and extract the features from the signal. Secondly, (...) from the perspective of audio and lyrics of song sentiment analysis and the unique characteristics of lyrics text, a lyric sentiment analysis method based on text title and position weight is proposed. Finally, considering the influence of the weight of feature words in different positions on the classification of lyrics, the analytic hierarchy process is used to calculate the weight of feature words in different positions of text title and lyrics before, in, and after the text. The results show that in the complex noise environment, the accuracy of music classification and detection of the proposed model is more than 90%, which is far beyond the control range of the actual application of music processing. The effect of music classification and detection is better than that of the contrast model, which has a certain practical application value. (shrink)

The development of the mind follows the path of biological evolution towards the accumulation and transmission of information with increasing efficiency. In addition to the cognitive constants of speech (Solntsev, 1974), which greatly improved the transmission of information, people have created computing devices, from the abacus to the quantum computer. The capabilities of computers classified as artificial intelligence are developing at a rapid pace. However, at the present stage, artificial intelligence (AI) lacks an emotion module, and this makes (...) AI fundamentally different from human intelligence, since the life of the mind in humans cannot be separated from their feelings (Damasio, 2010; Panksepp, 1997). Consciousness itself is formed through the sensory and motor systems, that is, it is embodied (Foglia & Wilson, 2013), which means that our mental life is inseparable from our sensory motor experience (Wellsby & Pexman, 2014). Evolutionarily, our minds rely on ancient survival mechanisms that influence our decisions and choices. Hence, for example, the question whether the choice of Artificial Intelligence will always be favorable for humanity. (shrink)

The ties between music and philosophy are strong and venerable, as they date back to the very beginnings of the latter. According to the ancient tale, Pythagoras, when passing by a smithy one day, noticed that the hammers make sounds of different pitch and, more importantly, that some of the pitch combinations feel pleasant on the ear while the others sound rather harsh. Intrigued by this phenomenon, the ancient sage began to further investigate it with the so called monochord (being (...) just a plank with a string attached to it which could be shortened at any chosen position to alter the pitch). Thus he discovered that the successions of two sounds that sound pleasant (or, to use a more technical term, consonant) could be achieved if the string is being shortened by 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4. Pythagoras could not be more satisfied with this finding, as it proved his claim that the universe is, on its hidden and true level, based upon an intelligible mathematical structure, and, moreover, that a key to understanding this structure is the Holy Tetractys, a figure representing the first four natural numbers in the form of a regular triangle. (shrink)

For some time there has been debate about differing perspectives on musical gift and musical intelligence. One view is that musical gift is innate: that it is present in certain individuals from birth and that the task of the teacher is to develop the potential which is there. A second view is that musical gift is a complex concept which includes responses from individuals to different environments and communities. This then raises the possibility that (...) class='Hi'>musical excellence can be taught. We have already explored this idea with practising musicians. Our research has now expanded to include music teachers in formation, and, in this paper, we look at the influences in their musical development which have either ‘crystallised’ or ‘paralysed’ the musical talent which they possess. Our research has a comparative dimension, being carried out in Scotland and in Australia. We conclude that there are several key influences in the musical development of the individual, including home and community support, school opportunities and teaching styles and that there may be education and culture‐specific elements to these influences. (shrink)

Music is at the centre of what it means to be human – it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual 'patterns of action' which we have identified as our innate ‘communicative musicality’. To support our argument, we present short case studies of infant interactions using micro analyses of video and audio recordings to show the (...) timings and shapes of intersubjective vocalisations and body movements of adult and child while they improvise shared narratives of meaning. Following a survey of the history of discoveries of infant abilities, we propose that the gestural narrative structures of voice and body seen as infants communicate with loving caregivers are the building blocks of what become particular cultural instances of the art of music, and of dance, theatre and other temporal arts. Children enter into a musical culture where their innate communicative musicality can be encouraged and strengthened through sensitive, respectful, playful, culturally informed teaching in companionship. The central importance of our abilities for music as part of what sustains our well-being is supported by evidence that communicative musicality strengthens emotions of social resilience to aid recovery from mental stress and illness. Drawing on the experience of the first author as a counsellor, we argue that the strength of one person’s communicative musicality can support the vitality of another’s through the application of skilful techniques that encourage an intimate, supportive, therapeutic, spirited companionship. Turning to brain science, we focus on hemispheric differences and the affective neuroscience of Jaak Panksepp. We emphasise that the psychobiological purpose of our innate musicality grows from the integrated rhythms of energy in the brain for prospective, sensation-seeking affective guidance of vitality of movement. We conclude with a Coda that recalls the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, which built on the work of Heraclitus and Spinoza. This view places the shared experience of sensations of living – our communicative musicality – as inspiration for rules of logic formulated in symbols of language. (shrink)

When individuals read literary fiction, contemplate philosophical arguments, view art, or listen to music, they experience emotions that vary in both valence and intensity. Engagement with the humanities can enhance individual emotional intelligence (EI) and well-being. This narrative review proposes links between engagement with literary fiction, moral philosophy, visual art, and music with EI and well-being. The work details the mechanisms by which (i) literary fiction increases the ability to perceive emotions, (ii) moral philosophy improves the use of emotions (...) for ethical decision-making, (iii) visual art elevates the ability to understand emotion, and (iv) music enhances the ability to manage emotions. The concluding section presents theoretical implications and practical suggestions for designing interventions that promote EI and flourishing. (shrink)

The development of the mind follows the path of biological evolution towards the accumulation and transmission of information with increasing efficiency. In addition to the cognitive constants of speech (Solntsev, 1974), which greatly improved the transmission of information, people have created computing devices, from the abacus to the quantum computer. The capabilities of computers classified as artificial intelligence are developing at a rapid pace. However, at the present stage, artificial intelligence (AI) lacks an emotion module, and this makes (...) AI fundamentally different from human intelligence, since the life of the mind in humans cannot be separated from their feelings (Damasio, 2010; Panksepp, 1997). Consciousness itself is formed through the sensory and motor systems, that is, it is embodied (Foglia & Wilson, 2013), which means that our mental life is inseparable from our sensory motor experience (Wellsby & Pexman, 2014). Evolutionarily, our minds rely on ancient survival mechanisms that influence our decisions and choices. Hence, for example, the question whether the choice of Artificial Intelligence will always be favorable for humanity. (shrink)

In its forty years of existence, Artificial Intelligence has suffered both from the exaggerated claims of those who saw it as the definitive solution of an ancestral dream — that of constructing an intelligent machine-and from its detractors, who described it as the latest fad worthy of quacks. Yet AI is still alive, well and blossoming, and has left a legacy of tools and applications almost unequalled by any other field-probably because, as the heir of Renaissance thought, it represents (...) a possible bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences, philosophy and neurophysiology, psychology and integrated circuits-including systems that today are taken for granted, such as the computer interface with mouse pointer and windows. This writing describes a few results of AI that have modified the scientific world, as well as the way a layman sees computers: thetechnology of programming languages, such asLISP-witness the unique excellence of academic departments that have contributed to them-thecomputing workstations-of which our modern PC is but a vulgarised descendant-theapplications to the educational field-e.g., the realisation of some ideas of genetic epistemology-and tointerdisciplinary philosophy-such as Hofstadter's associations between the arts and mathematics-and the use ofAI techniques in music and musicology. All this has led to a generalisation of AI towards Negrotti's overallTheory of the Artificial, which encompasses further specialisation such asartificial reality, artificial life, and applications ofneural networks among others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 80-98 [Access article in PDF] Musical Spirituality:Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy Deanne Bogdan Music in/and My Life Several years ago, I attended a Pontifical High Mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. It was the feast of the Epiphany, a public holiday in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Austria. 1 A "lapsed" (...) Catholic myself, my intention as part of the congregation that day was not primarily one of worship as it was to listen to a performance of the Pauckenmesse of Joseph Haydn, complete with soloists, full choir, and orchestra (in overcoats), including, of course, timpani.As I stepped from the brilliant winter morning into the narthex of that gothic splendor, the pungency of the incense propelled me into Proustian recollections of growing up female, Catholic, and Italian-Canadian in the cathedral parish in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada's steel town. My mother and father, first generation Italian-Canadians, whose own parents had emigrated as teen-agers, had been partners in a corner grocery located in another part of the city that was largely professional and white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Eager to assimilate (they never spoke Italian to my sister or me, and we never learned the language), my parents realized early on that their most valuable legacy to their two daughters would be the advantages of a solid education, religious and secular. For them that meant enrolling us in the local co-educational Catholic elementary school. Later we attended a convent secondary school as day students, and were the only members of our extended family, male or female, to attend university.It was memories of those elementary school years that were conjured up for me that crisp January morning at St. Stephen's. (In hindsight, I am struck by the synchronicity 2 of the fact that my original surname is Di Stefano, or rather "Distefan," as it had become in its anglicized form). 3 For a [End Page 80] whole complex of reasons, I identified strongly with my parochial school and the church that sheltered/shadowed it — a soaring pseudo-gothic structure reputed to have been replicated, stone by stone, wood carving by hand wood carving, from some European cathedral. The romance of that basilica — The Cathedral of Christ the King — its "daughter" school, and the priests and nuns who were our guides and teachers became my second family for the whole of my grade school education. For me, being at school was like a recognition scene. As Italian-American literary theorist Marianna de Marco Torgovnick writes: When I was a child, school was...a light-filled, wide awake world in which fear did not erupt except on rare occasions. I saw school as a place where I was valued for my intelligence, even though I was female — and this probably had something to do with my absence of fear there. I quite naturally chose to stay in school through college and into graduate school. It's in these relatively late years that I first became fully conscious of how even within the world of school I was and always would be female. 4My identification with my church/school centered around my musical development, which began at age four when the piano I grew up on arrived like a beacon in our home. Coterminous with my eager entry into first grade, piano lessons were begun with Sister Cecile, a somewhat nervous, gentle nun predisposed to mystical experience, who shepherded me through exams and recitals until high school. Because I could sight-read fairly well, I was regularly pulled out of class to accompany soloists and dancing groups rehearsing for annual Christmas and St. Patrick's Day concerts. Something about this made me feel special; I both reveled in and felt isolated by my difference from my classmates. I had found a sense of community through my music, and enjoyed a feeling of security in the knowledge that my schoolwork was strong enough... (shrink)

This paper proposes that intuitive technologies play a vital role in cognition and cultural reception. The case of music is considered in particular. The perceived temporality of contemporary technology is shown to be an artificial barrier to the acknowledgement of longer-term dynamics. The increased role of explanatory metaphors from technology is traced across various fields of study. Processes of sense-making—conscious or otherwise—are seen as an informal, unreflected repertory of mechanisms ranging from predictive models to instrumental metaphors. It is suggested that (...) these derive by assimilation and induction from the technological milieu within which the subject develops and operates. The acquisition of these models and metaphors is itself an imaginative process, based on experience ranging from partial expertise to fantastical extrapolation. (shrink)

The 'Beethoven syndrome' is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. This was a radically new way of listening that emerged after Beethoven's death. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers--and not just Beethoven--in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven syndrome: hearing music as autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence (...) of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the paradigm of expressive objectivity gave way to one of subjectivity in the years around 1830. The framework of rhetoric thus yielded to a framework of hermeneutics: concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. In the wake of World War I, however, the aesthetics of 'new objectivity' marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but also to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would become the cornerstone of the high modernist aesthetic that dominated the century's middle decades. Masterfully citing a broad array of source material from composers, critics, theorists, and philosophers, Mark Evan Bonds's engaging study reveals how perceptions of subjective expression have endured, leading to the present era of mixed and often conflicting paradigms of listening"--Dust jacket flap. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect" Charlene Morton University of British Columbia, Canada In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer reminds us that "the starting point is always an examination of values linked to the question, 'Why and for what purpose should we educate?'"1 But because, as (...) he puts it, the nature of pluralism in multicultural societies makes consensus about the purpose of education impossible, he suggests looking for the answer within the subject itself. For this reason, he returns to the debate about the relationship between inherent and delineative meaning in music. One of his objectives is to caution music educators against constructing "artificial" lessons that define musical feeling as exclusively manifest in either inherent or delineative meaning. I believe that this caution is warranted: contrived or superficial lessons can be miseducative and disappointing. I am less inclined to go the step further to investigate Reimer's position that "it is the complex middle-where both dimensions of music's power help shape and reshape musical reception-that poses the provocative dilemmas" because, although I acknowledge that sound stimulates psycho-physiological reactions, I am more sympathetic with Tia DeNora's observation that we need to think more [End Page 55] about "an interactionist conception of musical affect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music's affect is 'immanent' or 'attributed.'"2DeNora explains an interactionist conception of musical affect as an "appropriation of aesthetic materials" by consumers to construct meaning and identity in the context of their everyday lives.3 Her observation and research affirms John Shepherd's claim that music has not simply musical and extra-musical meaning but also ideological significance, "form[ing] an integral part of the social process."4 All to say that I am not going to involve myself in a conundrum revolving around inherent and delineated meaning, appreciated best by musicologists and psychologists. Instead, I want to return to "the starting point" Reimer identifies above, to a discussion about the purpose of public schooling.Beginning with the premise that people appropriate music to construct their realities and, subsequently, music has socio-political significance in how it is produced, presented, and received, I argue that, in addition to the more familiar raisons d'etre of developing subject-specific outcomes such as musicianship, musical intelligence, and, of course, musical enjoyment, music education should be better and explicitly fashioned as a path toward the broad goals of public education. Thus, the thesis of this response advocates a philosophical understanding of what music education can offer that is less about "involving all students in the very same matters to which [many of us] are devoted"-that is, musicianship, musical intelligence, and related philosophical and pedagogical conundrums-and more about realizing the purpose of education through the musical lives of students. To explore this line of thought, I will first review familiar and exceptional mission statements about the purpose of education. I will then revisit Reimer's second story which will serve as an autobiographical episode illustrating what might be educative about an interactionist understanding of musical affect. My conclusion will emphasize that although music, like "each subject studied in schools affords the student a distinctive window or frame through which the world can be viewed,"5 music educators, like all educators, should attend to teaching outside the subject itself if public schooling is to succeed in its distinctive and important mission. The Purpose of Education When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."6As a starting point for her study of cosmopolitan citizenship and its importance in educational reform in the United States, Martha Nussbaum cites the words of Diogenes. Her concerns about the force and consequences of American [End Page 56] nationalism and ethnocentrism motivate her argument "for making world citizenship, rather than democratic/national citizenship, as education's central focus." She is clear that her position does not... (shrink)

Artificial intelligence era challenges the use and functions of emotion in college students and the students’ college life is often experienced as an emotional rollercoaster, negative and positive emotion can affect the emotional outcomes, but we know very little about how students can ride it most effectively to increase their creativity. We introduce frustration tolerance as a mediator and emotion regulation as a moderator to investigate the mechanism of creativity improvement under negative emotion. Drawing on a sample of 283 (...) students from professional music colleges or music major in normal universities, we find that negative emotion are generally associated with a lower creativity, while frustration tolerance can mediate the relationship between negative emotion and creativity, but these effects depend on the emotion regulation. Cognitive reappraisal exerts a negative effect on the relationship between negative emotion and creativity, while expressive suppression has the opposite effect. Our study contributes to the literatures on student’s emotions and creativity in music education and to the emotion regulation literature. (shrink)

The important roles of prediction and prior experience are well established in music research and fit well with Clark's concept of unified perception, cognition, and action arising from hierarchical, bidirectional predictive processing. However, in order to fully account for human musical intelligence, Clark needs to further consider the powerful and variable role of affect in relation to prediction error.

Digital systems are reshaping how we engage with music as a sounding dimension of cultural life that is capable of being transformed into a commodity. At the same time, as we increasingly engage through digital media with each other and with virtual others, attributes of music that underpin our capacity to interact communicatively are disregarded or overlooked within those media. Even before the advent of technologies of music reproduction, music was susceptible to assimilation into economic acts of exchange. What is (...) new in the digital world is the way in which modes of engagement with music are themselves being absorbed into an economy built on the datafication of virtual acts and the digital shadows of casual preferences. But music is more than just sounds that are culturally sanctioned as musical. Music is manifested as behaviours, and in interactive behaviour. Music is participatory as well as presentational, and in the participatory mode—involving collective, non-specialist, interactive real-time music-making—has significant individual and social consequences. Yet music as real-time participation is largely absent from the virtual world, with potential social costs that remain to be understood. Moreover, our everyday, face-to-face communicative—conversational—interactions are imbued with patterns between interlocutors that are musical, in that they share features with what we are happy to describe as “music”. These features are presently lacking in digital systems designed to subserve communicative functions, and this paper will consider the significant implications for our interactions with machines to which their successful incorporation into voice–user interfaces would give rise. (shrink)

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies were compared to 35 musicians with either an early or late start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians. All completed a Wechsler IQ (...) test, the Big Five Inventory, the Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy. The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened. (shrink)

Music expertise is known to be beneficial for cognitive function and development. In this study, we conducted 1-year music training for school children in China. The children were assigned to music or second-language after-class training groups. A passive control group was included. We aimed to investigate whether music training could facilitate working memory development compared to second-language training and no training. Before and after the training, auditory WM was measured via a digit span task, together with the vocabulary and block (...) tests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Child IV. The results of the DS task revealed superior development in the music group compared to the other groups. However, further analysis of DS forward and backward tasks indicated that the performance of the three training/non-training groups only differed significantly in DS backward scores, but not in the DS forward scores. We conclude that music training may benefit the central executive system of WM, as reflected by the DS backward task. (shrink)

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect" Charlene Morton University of British Columbia, Canada In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer reminds us that "the starting point is always an examination of values linked to the question, 'Why and for what purpose should we educate?'"1 But because, as (...) he puts it, the nature of pluralism in multicultural societies makes consensus about the purpose of education impossible, he suggests looking for the answer within the subject itself. For this reason, he returns to the debate about the relationship between inherent and delineative meaning in music. One of his objectives is to caution music educators against constructing "artificial" lessons that define musical feeling as exclusively manifest in either inherent or delineative meaning. I believe that this caution is warranted: contrived or superficial lessons can be miseducative and disappointing. I am less inclined to go the step further to investigate Reimer's position that "it is the complex middle-where both dimensions of music's power help shape and reshape musical reception-that poses the provocative dilemmas" because, although I acknowledge that sound stimulates psycho-physiological reactions, I am more sympathetic with Tia DeNora's observation that we need to think more [End Page 55] about "an interactionist conception of musical affect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music's affect is 'immanent' or 'attributed.'"2DeNora explains an interactionist conception of musical affect as an "appropriation of aesthetic materials" by consumers to construct meaning and identity in the context of their everyday lives.3 Her observation and research affirms John Shepherd's claim that music has not simply musical and extra-musical meaning but also ideological significance, "form[ing] an integral part of the social process."4 All to say that I am not going to involve myself in a conundrum revolving around inherent and delineated meaning, appreciated best by musicologists and psychologists. Instead, I want to return to "the starting point" Reimer identifies above, to a discussion about the purpose of public schooling.Beginning with the premise that people appropriate music to construct their realities and, subsequently, music has socio-political significance in how it is produced, presented, and received, I argue that, in addition to the more familiar raisons d'etre of developing subject-specific outcomes such as musicianship, musical intelligence, and, of course, musical enjoyment, music education should be better and explicitly fashioned as a path toward the broad goals of public education. Thus, the thesis of this response advocates a philosophical understanding of what music education can offer that is less about "involving all students in the very same matters to which [many of us] are devoted"-that is, musicianship, musical intelligence, and related philosophical and pedagogical conundrums-and more about realizing the purpose of education through the musical lives of students. To explore this line of thought, I will first review familiar and exceptional mission statements about the purpose of education. I will then revisit Reimer's second story which will serve as an autobiographical episode illustrating what might be educative about an interactionist understanding of musical affect. My conclusion will emphasize that although music, like "each subject studied in schools affords the student a distinctive window or frame through which the world can be viewed,"5 music educators, like all educators, should attend to teaching outside the subject itself if public schooling is to succeed in its distinctive and important mission. The Purpose of Education When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."6As a starting point for her study of cosmopolitan citizenship and its importance in educational reform in the United States, Martha Nussbaum cites the words of Diogenes. Her concerns about the force and consequences of American [End Page 56] nationalism and ethnocentrism motivate her argument "for making world citizenship, rather than democratic/national citizenship, as education's central focus." She is clear that her position does not... (shrink)