Search Results (15)

This article examines training itineraries for early childhood education professionals in Portugal, focusing on promoting social and human development through music and the arts for infants. The training models discussed are categorized as short-term and long-term, encompassing both theory and practice through a transdisciplinary approach. Based on initiatives promoted by the Companhia de Música Teatral (CMT) and the Education and Human Development Group of the Centre for the Study of Sociology and Musical Aesthetics (CESEM) at NOVA University Lisbon, the article highlights projects such as: (i) Opus Tutti and GermInArte, developed between 2011 and 2018; (ii) the Postgraduate Course Music in Childhood: Intervention and Research, offered at the University since 2020/21, which integrates art, health, and education, promoting collaborative work between professionals; and (iii) Mil Pássaros (Thousand Birds), developed since 2020, which exemplifies the integration of environmental education and artistic practices. The theoretical basis of these training programs combines neuroscientific and educational evidence, emphasizing the importance of the first years of life for integral development. Studies, such as those by Heckman, reinforce the impact of early investment in children’s development. Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory and Malloch and Trevarthen’s concept of ‘communicative musicality’ structure the design of these courses, recognizing music as a catalyst for cognitive, emotional, and social skills. The transformative role of music and the arts in educational and social contexts is emphasized, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda, by proposing approaches that articulate creation, intervention, and research to promote human development from childhood onwards. Full article

Background/Objectives: Endurance triathlons impose substantial physiological stress, yet the effects of short-course formats remain relatively unexplored. This preliminary study presents novel findings on proteinuria and hydration levels in well-trained triathletes. Methods: 27 participants (41.9 ± 7.4 years) who completed a sprint triathlon consisting of a 1500 m swim, 26 km cycle, and 8 km run. Urine samples were collected before and after the race. Results: Our results revealed a significant increase in post-race proteinuria cases from four to nine (p = 0.03) and the first reported case of post-race urobilinuria and ketoacidosis in this context. Additionally, pre-race glucosuria, present in nine cases, decreased to three post-race. Hematuria cases decreased from six to two (p = 0.13) and pre-race leukocyturia resolved post-race. There was a significant increase in urine specific gravity (from 1.018 to 1.023, p = 0.03), indicating dehydration. Conclusions: Short-course triathlons significantly induced post-race proteinuria, urobilinuria, and dehydration, highlighting the substantial physiological stress on kidney function and hydration status despite the shorter distances. These findings underscore the importance of monitoring urinary biomarkers and hydration levels in athletes before and after competition. Full article

The length of time it takes to experimentally make one-sided choppers, as found in the fossil record, bears a linear relationship to the knapping process of fabricating them. In addition, this temporal frame appears to be related to human heart rates measured as beats per minute, which act as a physiological metronome. We achieved these observations, assuming that any paleolithic one-sided chopper has the information needed to estimate, quantitatively, the number of strikes on it. The experimental data allow us to establish the total timing needed for the standard fabricating of any one-sided chopper. We discuss issues derived from these experimental results, showing the evolution of human neurological abilities from 2.4 million years ago to the Modern period via the duration of time needed for making one chopper to that needed to play a 19th-century music score on a piano. Given that the neuronal and physiological distance between both actions differs by a factor of 6, we propose the concept of “technome” to measure human evolution by using methodological homogeneous metrics applied to these two human technologic objects: the chopper and the piano. Full article

Biomechanical methods are frequently used to provide information about the kinematics and kinetics of posture and movement during musical performance. The aim of this review was to identify and analyze the biomechanical methods performed on woodwind musicians to understand their musculoskeletal demands. A systemic review was carried out following the guidelines of the document Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). It was registered in PROSPERO (code 430304).The databases PubMed, Cochrane, CINAHL, Scopus, and Web of Science were consulted between January 2000 and March 2022. The search in the databases identified 1625 articles, and 16 different studies were finally included in the review, with a sample size of 390 participants. Pressure sensors, surface electromyography, infrared thermography, goniometry in two dimensions, and ultrasound topometry in three dimensions were biomechanical methods useful to broaden the knowledge of musculoskeletal demands during musical practice. Piezoresistive pressure sensors were the most widely used method. The great heterogeneity of the studies limited the comparability of the results. The findings raised the need to increase both the quantity and the quality of studies in future research. Full article

The use of telehealth within music therapy practice has increased through necessity in recent years. To contribute to the evolving evidence base, this current study on Telehealth Music Therapy (TMT) was undertaken to investigate the telehealth provision experiences of music therapists internationally. Participants completed an anonymous online cross-sectional survey covering demographics, clinical practice, telehealth provision, and telehealth perceptions. Descriptive and inferential statistics, in combination with thematic analysis, were used to analyze the data. A total of 572 music therapists from 29 countries experienced in providing TMT took part in this study. The results showed that the overall number of clinical hours (TMT and in-person hours combined) declined due to the pandemic. Participants also reported reduced perceived success rates in utilizing both live and pre-recorded music in TMT sessions when compared to in-person sessions. Although many music therapists rose to the challenges posed by the pandemic by incorporating TMT delivery modes, there was no clear agreement on whether TMT has more benefits than drawbacks; however, reported benefits included increased client access and caregiver involvement. Furthermore, a correlation analysis revealed moderate-to-strong positive associations between respondents who perceived TMT to have more benefits than drawbacks, proficiency at administering assessments over telehealth, and perceived likelihood of using telehealth in the future. Regarding the influence of primary theoretical orientation and work setting, respondents who selected music psychotherapy as a primary theoretical orientation had more experience providing TMT prior to the pandemic while those primarily working in private practice were most inclined to continue TMT services post-pandemic. Benefits and drawbacks are discussed and future recommendations for TMT are provided. Full article

This article explores the place of music in the classical liberal arts curriculum, which consists of the trivium (the arts of language) and the quadrivium (the arts of number). Music is part of the quadrivial disciplines and studied as applied arithmetic. However, as argued in this article, it is also a bridge to the discipline of rhetoric, which is part of the trivium. The article begins with a brief review of St. Augustine’s De Musica, the first in a planned (but unrealized) series of dialogs on the value of the classical liberal arts to the emerging Christian culture of Antiquity. It proceeds to a discussion of music and its relation to the contemporary American liberal arts curriculum. Two case studies follow that address the ontological reality of music as a time-bound medium, and attempts to mute this reality in the service of creating a sense of timelessness. Thus subsuming the temporal into the Divine–what Augustine called “a poem of the universe”. The first case study is Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, which is a journey through the heavens with each planet representing one of the seven liberal arts as preparatory to the Beatific Vision. The second case study focuses on J.S. Bach’s attempts to create a sense of timelessness in the St. Matthew Passion by the use of musical forms and musical rhetorical devices that tend to abolish time. The article concludes with suggestions on how teachers can use 20th and 21st-century movements in Western art music as pathways to appreciate music’s pivotal role in the Catholic liberal arts tradition. Full article

(1) Background: Throughout their career, music therapists make decisions regarding the clinical population they choose to work with. Though such decisions can have broad implications on the professional development of the music therapist, not much is known about the reasons for making these decisions and whether they are affected by demographic or professional factors. (2) Methods: In this pilot study, we surveyed 439 music therapists from six countries (i.e., Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Spain, and Switzerland) using an online questionnaire. We asked the respondents to explain why they chose to work with their main clienteles, and we examined whether their reasons were connected to demographic factors such as country of origin, gender, and seniority, and professional factors such as experience as a music therapist and population one works with. (3) Results: The category analysis of these responses pointed at nine distinct reasons that could be grouped into “practical reasons”, “reasons of connection”, and “innovation”. There were differences in reasoning between music therapists from different countries, and with different degrees of seniority, but not between male and female music therapists. (4) Discussion: The implications on training programs and on policy makers are discussed as well as the importance of this subject to the development of music therapists’ professional identity. Full article

This article introduce and expose the language of Soundpainting (SP), its background, and how this artistic tool is being used as a language of communication and creation. It also presents the real-time composition and its peculiarities and the power of collective creation as a creative tool and interaction between artistic disciplines. As there are several cases of sensitive and creative languages, such as Soundpainting, that are used to communicate with artificial intelligence, finally, it expose two of them, which are both still in their embryonic state. Both are collaborations and research between SP sign language and Tactileology. Both can lead to creative results that contribute to new ways of perceiving living art, in a sensitive, social and inclusive way. Full article

The present work aims to demonstrate the hypothesis that atonal music modifies the topological structure of electroencephalographic (EEG) connectivity networks in relation to tonal music. To this, EEG monopolar records were taken in musicians and non-musicians while listening to tonal, atonal, and pink noise sound excerpts. EEG functional connectivities (FC) among channels assessed by a phase synchronization index previously thresholded using surrogate data test were computed. Sound effects, on the topological structure of graph-based networks assembled with the EEG-FCs at different frequency-bands, were analyzed throughout graph metric and network-based statistic (NBS). Local and global efficiency normalized (vs. random-network) measurements (NLE|NGE) assessing network information exchanges were able to discriminate both music styles irrespective of groups and frequency-bands. During tonal audition, NLE and NGE values in the beta-band network get close to that of a small-world network, while during atonal and even more during noise its structure moved away from small-world. These effects were attributed to the different timbre characteristics (sounds spectral centroid and entropy) and different musical structure. Results from networks topographic maps for strength and NLE of the nodes, and for FC subnets obtained from the NBS, allowed discriminating the musical styles and verifying the different strength, NLE, and FC of musicians compared to non-musicians. Full article

The detection of emotions is fundamental in many areas related to health and well-being. This paper presents the identification of the level of arousal in older people by monitoring their electrodermal activity (EDA) through a commercial device. The objective was to recognize arousal changes to create future therapies that help them to improve their mood, contributing to reduce possible situations of depression and anxiety. To this end, some elderly people in the region of Murcia were exposed to listening to various musical genres (flamenco, Spanish folklore, Cuban genre and rock/jazz) that they heard in their youth. Using methods based on the process of deconvolution of the EDA signal, two different studies were carried out. The first, of a purely statistical nature, was based on the search for statistically significant differences for a series of temporal, morphological, statistical and frequency features of the processed signals. It was found that Flamenco and Spanish Folklore presented the highest number of statistically significant parameters. In the second study, a wide range of classifiers was used to analyze the possible correlations between the detection of the EDA-based arousal level compared to the participants’ responses to the level of arousal subjectively felt. In this case, it was obtained that the best classifiers are support vector machines, with 87% accuracy for flamenco and 83.1% for Spanish Folklore, followed by K-nearest neighbors with 81.4% and 81.5% for Flamenco and Spanish Folklore again. These results reinforce the notion of familiarity with a musical genre on emotional induction. Full article

There has been an increasing relevance of the cultural sector in the economic and social development of different countries. However, this sector continues without much input from multi-criteria decision-making (MDCM) techniques and sustainability analysis, which are widely used in other sectors. This paper proposes an MCDM model to assess the sustainability of a musical institution’s program. To define the parameters of the proposed model, qualitative interviews with relevant representatives of Catalan cultural institutions and highly recognized professionals in the sector were performed. The content of the 2015–2016 season of the ‘Palau de la Música Catalana’, a relevant Catalan musical institution located in Barcelona, was used as a case study to empirically test the method. The method allows the calculation of a season value index (SVI), which serves to make more sustainable decisions on musical season programs according to the established criteria. The sensitivity analysis carried out for different scenarios shows the robustness of the method. The research suggests that more complex decision settings, such as MCDM methods that are widely used in other sectors, can be easily applied to the sustainable management of any type of cultural institution. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this method was never applied to a cultural institution and with real data. Full article

This paper studies the relationship between exposure to traditional musical styles and memories retrieved by Spanish ageing adults living close to the region of Murcia. The objective is to discover alterations in brain activity when memories are generated from listening to rhythms that the participants heard during their youth. Brain region activation is observed after the acquisition, processing and analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) signals. For this, an experiment is designed, where first each participant responds to the positive and negative affect scales (PANAS) questionnaire to determine his/her affective state. Then, he/she listens to eight ad-hoc composed music pieces of varied styles (twist, swing, fandango, petenera, bolero, habanera, pasodoble and jota murciana). After listening to each composition, the participant is asked if memories have been recalled during the performance, which enables the interaction person–music style into classes “MEMORY-EVOKED” and “NO-MEMORY-EVOKED”. Lastly, after the eight music pieces, the PANAS questionnaire is given again to determine the new emotional state after being exposed to the musical styles. From this experiment, three different studies are introduced. A first within-subject study looks for significant differences in the activation of brain regions between “MEMORY-EVOKED” and “NO-MEMORY-EVOKED” classes by analyzing the EEG recordings corresponding to each complete musical piece lasting 60 s. The second within-subject study decomposes the EEG records of each musical piece into four 15 s segments, and repeats the approach. Finally, a between-subjects study determines if there are significant differences between all “MEMORY-EVOKED” and “NO-MEMORY-EVOKED” segments. The promising results, although preliminary, show that there are significant differences in terms of “MEMORY-EVOKED”/“NO-MEMORY-EVOKED” classes in the prefrontal cortex for alpha, beta, theta and gamma frequency bands by using the spectral power method. Full article

The paper discusses the connection between rhythm and meaning based on Augustine’s De musica. This central topic is illuminated by the analysis of other particular aesthetic concepts that one can find in Augustine (such as sentience and desire, in its many Latin variations), as well as in reference to modern aesthetics. The result is the emergence of a relationship between aesthetics and the making of meaning in a co-creative operation between the divine and the human based upon an understanding of rhythm. Full article

This paper presents a method for automatic music transcription applied to audio recordings of a cappella performances with multiple singers. We propose a system for multi-pitch detection and voice assignment that integrates an acoustic and a music language model. The acoustic model performs spectrogram decomposition, extending probabilistic latent component analysis (PLCA) using a six-dimensional dictionary with pre-extracted log-spectral templates. The music language model performs voice separation and assignment using hidden Markov models that apply musicological assumptions. By integrating the two models, the system is able to detect multiple concurrent pitches in polyphonic vocal music and assign each detected pitch to a specific voice type such as soprano, alto, tenor or bass (SATB). We compare our system against multiple baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results for both multi-pitch detection and voice assignment on a dataset of Bach chorales and another of barbershop quartets. We also present an additional evaluation of our system using varied pitch tolerance levels to investigate its performance at 20-cent pitch resolution. Full article

Augustine’s De musica is all that remains of his ambitious plan to write a cycle of works describing each of the liberal arts in terms of Christian faith and is actually unfinished; whereas the six books extant today primarily examine rhythm, Augustine intended to write about melody also. The sixth book of De musica was better known in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than the first five, and it takes up philosophical questions of aesthetics related to the proportionate ordering discernable throughout creation. After a brief introduction summarizing De musica’s content and its importance in subsequent Christian writings, my presentation outlines and explains how I have used this document in my own music classes. For example, my students learn that a vital notion in Augustine’s writings, and in Neoplatonism more broadly, is the spiritual benefit of academic study. That is, through study of music, one gains insight into the created order, but, more importantly, one’s soul is strengthened and trained to perceive higher realities of the cosmos such as the ordering of the planetary spheres and the progression of celestial hierarchies, which span the spiritual distance from God to humanity. Full article