Some new online resources

I've added a few new online resources to the sidebar.

Classical Archives "offers more than 620,000 tracks, 7,800 composers, and 27,000 artists representing more than 110 record labels. "

voiceXchange is the new online journal from the Graduate Music Students of the University of Chicago. Volume 3, issue 1 ("Official Musics") has just come out with articles on music during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Detroit's Orchestra Hall, and reviews of four books.

Do you see what I hear?

Michael Schutz and Scott Lipscomb have published a study that shows how percussionists use visual cues to make audiences think notes are of different lengths, when the actual notes are the same duration. A world-class percussionist was video-taped performing long and short notes. The video was split into visual and audio components, which were then cross-matched so Long note visuals were sometimes matched with Short note audio and vice-versa. Listeners were told that some of the videos had mismatched visual and audio cues, and were instructed to judge duration solely by the sound. However, the duration ratings varied according to visual cues rather than audio cues.

This is another reason why live music creates a much different experience than an audio recording. The visual cues actively change our perception of the musical sounds, even when they are acoustically exactly the same as a recording (which is rarely the case).

Schutz, M. and S. Lipscomb. "Hearing gestures, seeing music: vision influences perceived tone duration." Perception (2007), 36/6, 888-897.

Harmonic tension as meaning

A study published in Cerebral Cortex may be of interest to those who followed the recent harmonic theory bruha. The junior research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences measured the electric response potentials of listeners' brains when harmonic expectation was violated, combined with another factor of syntactic or semantic language violation. They found that both types of language violation affected different locations of brain waves, a strong argument that harmonic tension-resolution is a grammar, but also has associated meanings. The study does not reveal whether these meanings are universal, merely that individuals do interpret harmonies beyond a syntactic level. The authors presented preliminary research of this at the Neurosciences and Music conference I attended in 2005. And Dave Munger has written about this line of research.

Steinbeis, N. and S. Koelsch. "Shared neural resources between music and language indicate semantic processing of musical tension-resolution patterns." Cerebral Cortex 2007 (eprint).

Stuff Online

First, a new online music journal, Radical Musicology. Unlike many other journals, RM provides a blog for discussion of the articles, an update on the email list that talks about Music Theory Online articles. The first volume of RM looks interesting, if beyond my area of expertise. The closest would be Gustavo Azenha's article on the affects of e-commerce on the music industry, something I've blogged about several times.

Second, Dan Brown (no, not that Dan Brown) has written an online book about Bach, entitled, Why Bach? He sent me a password, essentially an Advanced Review Copy of the book, and I've been slowly reading it. Brown uses the online format well, with links to MIDI-produced excerpts and scores peppered throughout the text, and color-coded text describing these examples. As an example, he talks about an embedded appoggiatura within an appoggiatura. In the text, the smaller figure is in red, matching the red bracket of the example, while the larger figure is mentioned in green to match the green bracket of the example. The MIDI examples are sometimes annoying, particularly the faux voice sound for the chorales. But they still help get the point across, with an engaging text intended for "the lay music lover [...] though I'd like to think there are things in it that will interest the expert as well." (from the Foreword) Dan Brown is selling this e-book for $7.95, which can be paid via PayPal. Pop scholarship of music has reached Azenha's internet age.

A new online journal

There is a new online academic journal about jazz, called Jazz Perspectives. The first issue is being released for free access, so check out the articles on Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny, and free jazz in the classroom. This journal is edited by Lewis Porter and John Howland of Rutgers University.

Music and Politics

There is a new online music journal, which I have just added to the list on the left. Music and Politics has its first issue out, with article on teaching a class on music and politics, music in WW2 concentration camps, a comparison of William Byrd and Shostakovich in dealing with authoritarian criticsm, and the relationship between Gideon Klein's string trio and the photographs of D.J. Ruzicka mingled with Bohemian politics.