Carnival of Music's sweet 16

After a brief intermission, the Carnival of Music is back. No Harry Potter this time, instead I'm going for some poetry.

Play to the children, they love to dance
or listen carefully as you sing about cats.

Listen to Billings, his choral music filled with gusto
or Malcolm Arnold's last symphony before he went nutso.

Do Faerie write music like Tolkein?
Search Live365.com and you may learn.

But beware that downloading may leave you listless.
Instead, visit LaMonte and the other minimalists.

What is a salon? Not a metaphore of composers as food.
Perhaps where pre-job musicians wait, when they don't stop performing for good.

Reviews are always nice, whether of Leatherface or Mozart's Hoffner.
Likewise observed differences between "Ben Bag Bag" and "Oz V'hadar."

Ballet should not use recorded music as is,
herding notes in Lubbock can irk Jeremy Denk,
Courses on chamber music are quite different from English,
and judges piss you off when they say "phone my agent."

Thanks to John for letting me host, and to Don, Tim, and Fred for submitting entries. Apologies for horrible meter, and a plea for more carnival hosts. It is a fun way to learn about new blogs, and a good way of boosting your hits. I got a big bump from my last Carnival, and a valuable link from John.

Academic Blog Survey, or is it another damn meme?

Overview:
The following survey is for bloggers who are actual or aspiring academics (thus including students). It takes the form of a go-meme to provide bloggers a strong incentive to join in: the 'Link List' means that you will receive links from all those who pick up the survey 'downstream' from you. The aim is to create open-source data about academic blogs that is publicly available for further analysis. Analysts can find the data by searching for the tracking identifier-code: "acb109m3m3". Further details, and eventual updates with results, can be found on the original posting:
http://pixnaps.blogspot.com/2005/09/academic-blog-survey.html

Instructions:
Simply copy and paste this post to your own blog, replacing my survey answers with your own, as appropriate, and adding your blog to the Link List.

Important (1) Your post must include the four sections: Overview, Instructions, Link List, and Survey. (2) Remember to link to every blog in the Link List. (3) For tracking purposes, your post must include the following code: acb109m3m3

Link List (or 'extended hat-tip'):
1. Philosophy, et cetera
2. Pharyngula
3. Musical Perceptions
4. Your blog here.

Survey:

Demographics
Age - 35
Gender - Male
Location - Avon, Indiana, USA
Religion - Deist, attend Episcopal church regularly
Began blogging - May 2004
Academic field - Music Theory
Academic position [tenured?] - Assistant Professor [no]

Approximate blog stats
Rate of posting - once a day
Average no. hits - about 70/day
Average no. comments - 1/day
Blog content - Music, academics, politics, psychology.

Other Questions
1) Do you blog under your real name? Why / why not?
- Yes. I am not ashamed of my blog posts, and refrain from injecting academic politics into the blog. The latter subject is the only thing I regard as being detrimental to my career.

2) Do colleagues or others in your department know that you blog? If so, has anyone reacted positively or negatively?
- Yes. Positively, though they don't regard it as significant professional development.

3) Are you on the job market?
- Not actively.

4) Do you mention your blog on your CV or other job application material?
- Yes.

5) Has your blog been mentioned at all in interviews, tenure reviews, etc.? If so, provide details.
- I included my blog in my materials provided for my interim review last year.

6) Why do you blog?
- To advance conversations about music.
To yell into the silence my thoughts about politics.
To work on my writing skills.
To maintain my nerd status.
As a means of working out ideas that are rattling about in my head, and to get feedback from the interested public.

Lurkers, Unite!

I have been informed by Sean and PZ that today is Lurker Day, when any readers who never comment are welcomed to ... um ... comment. I think this is some kind of amnesty thing, that the lurkers are assured of retaining their lurker status despite the unlurking activity of commenting.

I encourage anyone who hasn't left comments at my blog to say whatever they want here. Heck, since I don't have any real regular commenters, anyone can leave a comment. It can be corrections, requests, rants, poetry, advice, or observations. Have at ye! (I missed talk like a pirate day on Monday, so I'm combining them.)

Musical Geniuses?

The MacArthur Foundation announced its genius grants Monday. The list of 25 awardees includes Marin Alsop, new conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Joseph Curtin, master violin maker; and Aaron Dworkin, founder of the Sphinx Organization, a group that exposes inner city children to music at early ages and provides instruments and educational opportunities.

This is a very good showing for music, though it is not too surprising. The foudnation has given grants to other musicians, including Osvaldo Golijov, Ken Vandermark, Susan McClary, Meredith Monk, Stanley Crouch, John Harbison and Gunther Schuller.

Speaking of Schuller, I just found out today that he arranged some of the rags used in The Sting, though you have to look at the liner notes of the soundtrack very carefully to find this out. Marvin Hamlisch seems to have hogged the limelight rather thoroughly for this film.

Here's your toaster!

I received my 20,000th visitor today, looking for dominant seventh blogspot. This visitor appears to be staying at a Hilton in Los Angeles, so seems to be doing well. I'm not sure if s/he was looking for a specific blog or a specific definition of dominant sevenths, but I hope s/he was edified nonetheless.

In other news, I'm hosting next week's Carnival of Music, so get those links to me.

Music and Emotion

Dave Munger has a good post up about a study on the effect of tempo and mode (major or minor) on the perception of emotion. I offer some criticism, however. Emotion was limited to happy and sad, which is far simpler than the most-used models of emotion in psychology. This will skew the results when multidimensional responses are forced into a two-choice response.

This study reminds me of a paper given at the Leipzig conference last spring. Emmanuel Bigand and his team decided to investigate how quickly people identify the emotion of a musical work. They made 27 musical excerpts one second in duration, and asked participants to group the works by their emotional similarity. There was a high degree of agreement between subjects and within subjects, even with this very short time period. In fact, the results even agreed with a similar experiment using 25-second excerpts, suggesting that 1 second is enough to convey emotional content. Emboldened by these results, Bigand's team had participants evaluate how emotionally moving a variety of excerpts were on a 10 point subjective scale. These excerpts started as only 250 milliseconds. Next, the participants judged the same excerpts, but they were extended to 500 ms, and then 1, 2, 5, and 20 seconds. Incredibly, some judgements were consistent from the 250 ms duration through the 20 second duration, meaning that the listeners made the judgments of emotional affect in very short time periods.

As a tangent, Emmanuel Bigand has an interesting Shockwave animation of Chopin's Prelude in E major. While it is a serious explication of the cognitive significances of Fred Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space, it's also plain old fun to watch. Zoom out to get the big picture, or zoom in to watch the movement among the "moons".

E. Bigand, "The Time course of emotional responses to music," paper presented at The Neurosciences and Music - II conference in Leipzig, Germany on May 7, 2005.

Swing it, Schultze!

Speaking of film music, last night we watched Schultze Gets the Blues, a very quiet movie in more ways than one. The action progresses very slowly through the whole movie, though I found it interesting. But what also makes this movie so quiet is the decision by director Michael Schorr to use only source music. That is, the only time the viewer hears music is when the movie characters hear music. That music is a primary focus of the film, contrasting traditional German folk music with Zydeco, with poor Schultze caught between these two worlds. The lack of background music emphasizes how often music is part of Schultze's life, from the sparse quiet of his time as a salt miner to the ubiquitous sounds during his travels in the United States.

Do any of you know of other modern movies that use only source music? This almost felt like a documentary, though most modern documentaries use background music as much as commercial films.