Search Results (152)

This article analyzes the creative and social practices surrounding batida do gueto (ghetto beat), an emerging Afro-diasporic electronic music genre developed by Lisbon’s peripheral youth. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025—including participant observation in home studios, semi-structured interviews, and digital netnography—this study explores how young Afro-descendant DJs transform digital music production software, specifically FL Studio, into technologies of postcolonial belonging. The discussion is structured around three main dimensions: first, the emergence of the “Fox clan,” a symbolic kinship network and musical lineage built through peer-to-peer knowledge transmission; second, the analysis of home studio musicking, highlighting the emic category of descompasso (rhythmic micro-displacement) as an esthetic and identity element that encapsulates postcolonial experiences of racialization and displacement; and finally, the urban and transnational circulation of batida do gueto through parties that challenge the boundaries between peripheral neighborhoods and Lisbon’s central neighborhoods. By bringing digital musicking into dialog with contemporary debates on the Black Atlantic and the politics of belonging, this article argues that the sonic subversions embedded in the genre operate as crucial resources of contestation, allowing peripheral youth to claim spatial visibility, citizenship, and historical recognition within contemporary Portuguese society. Full article

Music foundation models are increasingly used as feature extractors in music information retrieval; yet, their treatment of Chinese tonal organization has received little controlled evaluation. We probe frozen MERT, MuQ, CultureMERT, and an 88-dimensional librosa baseline on instrument timbre, guzheng playing technique, Western key, and Chinese pentatonic mode. Probes are evaluated with task-specific splits that guard against leakage and with chance-normalized accuracy. Timbre is near ceiling (0.994–0.998), whereas source-aware guzheng-technique accuracy ranges from 0.382 to 0.787. In the unmatched external comparison, GiantSteps key scores 0.441–0.604 and CNPM mode pattern scores 0.294–0.355; this difference is descriptive because the corpora differ in genre, production, provenance, and label distribution. Same-audio CNPM controls identify an important boundary: the TongGong system reaches 0.649–0.734, and absolute tonic reaches 0.433–0.480, whereas their matched five-way mode-pattern labels reach 0.256–0.350 and 0.243–0.366, respectively. Chroma ablations show that pitch-class energy is central to the external key task but does not by itself account for CNPM mode-pattern performance. These results map which musical dimensions are readily decodable from the evaluated frozen representations while avoiding a cultural-capability interpretation of the unmatched cross-corpus comparison. Full article

This study examines how school music teachers are represented in English-language television series and considers implications for professional identity, pedagogy and recruitment. Drawing on a novel, systematically coded database of 36 on-screen music educators from 28 television series from 1952 to 2026, quantitative description maps demographic attributes (age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status), narrative role (minor, major, protagonist), genre and institutional context. Our findings show music teachers are most often supporting characters, typically mid-career, male and predominantly white, with comedy—especially ensemble school comedy—dominating portrayals. Qualitative interpretation demonstrates persistent teacher archetypes and pedagogical tropes: the failed performer turned teacher, the inspirational mentor who singles out a talented student, and blurred teacher–student boundaries. These portrayals routinely privilege spectacle and rapid transformation over sequenced curriculum, assessment and routine labour, risking the creation of distorted public expectations about what music teaching entails. This article situates these findings within contemporary concerns about teacher shortages and declining occupational status in English-language contexts, arguing that mediated images may influence career choice, teacher retention and societal attitudes. Methodological advances include expanded time and geographic contexts of studied texts and detailed coding. The paper concludes by calling for reception and experimental studies to test causal effects on aspiring teachers and to inform teacher education curricula. Full article

This data descriptor documents a two-level genre classification scheme for metal-music corpus studies derived from Encyclopaedia Metallum’s multi-label genre strings. The scheme assigns each band to one of eleven mutually exclusive primary buckets and, alternatively, to one of seventeen finer-grained sub-categories that separate closely related sub-styles. Classification is implemented by keyword priority on the lower-cased genre string and is fully deterministic given the published keyword table. The scheme was developed and tested on a corpus of 560 metal bands from Southern Chile (1988–2024), which serves as the development corpus throughout. On a stratified 60-band subset of this corpus, automatic assignments agreed with independent expert human coding at 81.7% (Cohen’s κ = 0.78, 95% bootstrap CI [0.66, 0.88]); an out-of-sample application to a 60-band Norwegian sample, with the keyword tables left unchanged, retained the scheme’s core logic at a 5.0% residual rate. The encoding rules, the keyword tables, and the mapping CSVs are released under CC-BY 4.0 to enable replication and adaptation across other metal-scene corpora. Full article

This paper reflects on what dance reveals about the notion of “human-ness” at a time when globalization could be understood as defining humanity in terms of bound, isolated bodies that generate capital, are fixed by borders, and recognized through surveillance. Rather than treating humans as a bounded interior essence of a bodied-self, I suggest it emerges at the edge, where sense of self meets otherness. I suggest dance offers conversation at the periphery of self, where perceived othernesses are met (floor, music, another dancer). In dancing, the self becomes most discernible at points of encounter with texture, rhythm, and trajectory. Human-ness, then, is not form/possession but relational. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the colonial figure of “Man,” within the notion of ‘human’, and Timothy Morton’s concepts of hyperobjects and ecological entanglement, which challenge bounded scales of human perception, I position dance as a practice that unsettles narrow categories of the human. I discuss dance as a method to unearth epistemologies of the edge, articulating humanness as intra-active and ecological, constituted through relation rather than containment. In this framing, the edge of globalization reveals an urgent fragility and the hopeful possibility of other genres of being human: relational, porous, and responding to ecological and historical entanglements. I suggest that dance as a method of moving together discloses an opportunity to reevaluate humanness and consider a definition of ‘to be human’ that is an action and an ever-emerging practice of being in relation. Full article

Rebetiko, as a musical genre, has a very limited presence in Greek school music education, potentially due to its historical association with social marginalization. This paper describes the development and implementation of the educational project “A Journey to Rebetiko,” conducted by students of the Department of Music Studies at the Ionian University in six high schools in Corfu during the 2023–2024 academic year. The project, with a duration of two academic hours, featured a short musical drama performance, an open discussion between university and high school students, and a set of collaborative group music activities. The primary objective of this research was to investigate how adolescents and university students engaged with rebetiko and how the genre facilitated discussions on issues of social justice, poverty, xenophobia, and refugeeism. Adopting a qualitative methodology, the study was framed by the principles of critical pedagogy, which guided the project’s scope, the dialogue-based activities (focusing on solidarity, democracy, and active citizenship), and the collaborative group work. Data collection was based on: (a) students’ reflective diaries, (b) the researcher’s reflective journal, and (c) an analysis of original song lyrics composed by the students. The research contributes to the ongoing dialogue on whether rebetiko can offer a transformative musical experience for today’s youth and explores how critical pedagogy can foster a more relevant, inclusive, and student-centred music education. Full article

Regular consumption of excess sugar is linked to nutrition-based diseases, including gut problems, Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. Increasing sweetness perception is a novel technique to decrease sugar consumption. This experiment compared the sweetness perception of sweetened and unsweetened almond milk in response to different virtual environments with music and visuals. Two music types, the classical song Goldberg Variations, BMV. 998-Variation 13 and a jazz song generated by AI were used. Additionally, fall and spring forest backgrounds were generated by the Blockade Labs 3D image generator. Each participant tasted sweetened and unsweetened almond milk in music-only, background-only, and combination music and background environments. Results revealed significant differences in sweetness ratings for music type (p = 0.015) and between milk types (p < 0.001). Viscosity rating differed significantly between backgrounds (p = 0.04) and by milk type (p < 0.001). Liking ratings varied significantly between backgrounds (p < 0.001) and between music genres (p = 0.011). The results suggest that altering music and background may be a strategy to change sweetness and viscosity perception in unsweetened beverages. Full article

Music genre classification is an important task in the music information retrieval community that aims to categorize music samples by genre; it can help to retrieve music more easily and efficiently from huge digital music resources. There is an extensive literature on music genre classification, and in this study, we solve the problem using multi-modal information, especially based on music audio and text. We propose a deep multi-modal kernel map network that learns discriminative features in a high-dimensional kernel Hilbert space by fusing the multi-modal features. For the music audio, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are extracted and a pre-trained ResNet is applied to extract the features. For the texts, the pre-trained RoBERTa model is applied to extract the semantic symbolic features. In the network’s input layer, we calculate four exact/approximated elementary kernel maps from the audio and text features; in the intermediate and final layer, we progressively compute the nonlinear combination of preceding kernel maps of different modalities, followed by a fully connected layer for classification. The network can be trained end-to-end to jointly learn the combination weights between modalities and classifier parameters. We apply the proposed network on the public GTZAN dataset, multi-modal piano genre dataset, and 4MuLA dataset, and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed deep multi-modal kernel map network for music genre classification. Full article

Objective: This pilot study aimed to explore how a receptive music intervention, based on musical genres reflecting maternal listening preferences during pregnancy, affects distress levels in Italian preterm infants. Specifically, it investigated the effects of soft pop/rock music, compared with classical music, on infants’ LF/HF ratio (derived from heart rate variability [HRV]) and peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO₂), which were used as physiological markers of distress. Method: This retrospective observational pilot study analyzed clinical data routinely collected between May 2014 and January 2015 from 27 preterm infants (gestational age 23–32 weeks; birth weight < 1500 g) who received receptive music therapy as part of standard family-centered care in the NICU. Maternal listening preferences during pregnancy were assessed in 30 mothers via an ad hoc questionnaire; a content analysis identified, at the group level, the three most frequently reported artists (i.e., Jovanotti, Vasco Rossi, and W. A. Mozart), which were used to create three standardized playlists. According to the internal clinical procedure, each infant underwent four sessions on consecutive days: a no-music condition on Day 1, followed by the three music conditions on Days 2–4 in randomized order. The LF/HF ratio and SpO₂ were measured at five time points per session (one pre-test, three intra-session time points, and one post-test). Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to compare conditions and time points, with effect sizes and a Benjamini–Hochberg (FDR) correction for multiple comparisons. Results: The LF/HF ratio did not differ significantly across music conditions or relative to the no-music condition. SpO₂ was higher during the Mozart condition than during the no-music condition at three of the five time points; this association remained significant after FDR correction, with medium-to-large effect sizes. No effect was observed for the soft pop/rock conditions on physiological indexes. Conclusions: Receptive music therapy based on maternal listening during pregnancy was not associated with changes in the LF/HF ratio. The Mozart condition was associated with higher SpO₂ than the no-music condition. Given the small sample, the single-center setting, and the retrospective observational design, these findings are preliminary and require confirmation in larger, adequately powered prospective trials. Future studies should also examine the specific musical features (e.g., tempo, harmonic structure, voice timbre) that may drive these physiological responses. Full article

Taylor Swift’s songwriting is frequently analyzed through the lens of confessional songwriting, blurring the boundaries between factual and fictional storytelling. This article proposes understanding her work as transmedia meta-autobiographies, a genre characterized by self-reflexivity and the questioning of autobiographical rules. Drawing on Mueller-Greene’s definition of meta-autobiography and intersectional theories, the study analyzes Swift’s lyrics, music videos, and paratextual elements, specifically focusing on selected works after her split with Big Machine Records, as this marks a different era in her creative work and is also linked to the discourse around her re-recordings. The analysis demonstrates how Swift utilizes transmedia storytelling to perform the act of remembering and writing, effectively staging her “self” across various media formats. This self-representation could according to the rules of the genre function as a counter-narrative to traditional male-centric autobiographical forms by centering girlhood. However, the article also highlights contradictions regarding authenticity and the commodification of this identity. Full article

This article examines the emergence of Jamaican Dancehall Gospel (JDG)—a genre that fuses Christian-themed lyrics with dancehall rhythms—during its formative years (1998–2006). Despite its religious content, JDG artists expressed that they were often rejected in religious spaces and their music was excluded from worship spaces, based on debates between gatekeeping religious actors and the artists about the music’s appropriateness and authenticity. Using Koskoff’s concept of musical canon as a framework, the study explores why JDG failed to embody the “philosophical and aesthetic principles” of many ecclesial institutions. Drawing on media discourse, artist interviews, and observations, the analysis addresses four contested elements: artists, music, language, and dance. Findings reveal that resistance stemmed from JDG’s association with secular dancehall culture, its use of Jamaican patois, and its incorporation of dance—practices historically stigmatized as “low class” and incompatible with sacred spaces. While proponents argued for cultural relevance and the neutrality of musical forms, critics viewed JDG as a threat to traditional worship norms and moral order. The paper situates these tensions within broader struggles over identity, authenticity, and cultural hierarchy, highlighting the persistence of colonial attitudes privileging Euro-American aesthetics over indigenous expressions. Ultimately, JDG’s gradual acceptance—facilitated by international recognition and generational shifts—underscores the dynamic interplay between religion, popular culture, and identity politics in Jamaica. This study contributes to scholarship on Caribbean sacred music by documenting the sociocultural negotiations surrounding JDG’s emergence and its implications for redefining worship practices in postcolonial contexts. Full article

As Hong Kong approaches 1 July 2027—the 30th anniversary of its return to the People’s Republic of China—questions of cultural belonging and political identity remain salient. This study examined how local, national, and global identities have been constructed and hierarchically organized through post-handover school music education. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of policy documents and government-approved junior secondary music textbooks, the analysis examined how these orientations are articulated and mediated in the curriculum. The findings showed that local identity is sustained through heritage canonization, Cantonese repertoire, and affective attachment. Additionally, national identity is reinforced more programmatically through Putonghua repertoire, patriotic theming, civilizational narratives, and the legally codified status of the national anthem. Finally, global identity is cultivated through structured multicultural exposure, including Western art music and international popular genres. Together, these orientations form calibrated layering, through which music education functions as cultural governance by stabilizing multiscalar belonging. Full article

This article presents the design and development of an interactive architecture oriented toward the management of traditional vallenato, a musical genre recognized as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Architecture combines the principles of contextual awareness and the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to face the current challenges of preservation, dissemination, and teaching of this cultural expression, threatened by commercialization and the loss of its traditional roots. Through a modular structure, adaptive technological tools are integrated to capture, process, and use contextual information, personalizing learning experiences and strengthening the link between communities and their cultural heritage. The proposal consists of several functional layers, including context management, user profiles, educational resources, and a persistence unit, each designed to ensure the interoperability and sustainability of cultural data. In addition, the capacity of architecture to be used in other cultural contexts is highlighted, expanding its impact on different artistic manifestations and heritages worldwide. This article includes a comparative analysis with other existing models, highlighting the advantages of this solution in terms of customization and adaptability. Finally, opportunities for improvement and expansion are explored, as well as the pending challenges in the implementation of this technological tool in educational and cultural environments. Full article

Analyzing music similarity in large catalogs is challenging because people perceive music differently and important details are found in audio, text, and metadata. This article introduces a multimodal framework that uses an ontology to make music similarity and recommendation more explainable. The framework brings together learned features from audio, lyrics, and other text with structured metadata in a shared similarity space, and then improves ranking with a music ontology that captures relationships between songs, artists, genres, and moods. The design works with any encoder that creates fixed-size features. This study uses strong neural audio and text encoders, mainly based on transformers. This approach allows the system to handle different input types while staying reliable across datasets. This study tests the framework on several open music and audio datasets using content-based retrieval tasks and standard ranking measures. In addition to Configurations C1–C4, this study includes an external content-based reference baseline based on conventional MIR audio descriptors. This baseline represents a signal-level retrieval approach that models complementary aspects of the audio signal, such as timbre, harmony, and spectral characteristics, and is evaluated under the same retrieval protocol as the main framework. It is included to provide an external comparison point outside the proposed C1–C4 design. Compared to audio-only and non-ontological variants within the same framework, the proposed multimodal and ontology-guided configurations achieve better precision, recall, and mean average precision, and also cover more rare content. Visualizations and case studies show that combining different data types and using ontology-based reranking can improve performance and make results easier to interpret. This work lays the groundwork for explainable, cognitively informed music recommendation systems and points to future work in modeling user behavior over time and adapting to different cultures. Full article

Contemporary Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are increasingly applied to diverse musical traditions, yet they are largely grounded in Western musical and linguistic assumptions. This study examines whether commonly used MIR features and multilingual NLP models adequately represent the acoustic, linguistic, and cultural structures of Maskandi music in comparison to Western music and identifies where representational gaps and biases arise. A multidimensional framework was employed, comprising acoustic and structural MIR analysis, linguistic and semantic lyrical analysis, and bias analysis. A curated dataset of 60 recordings and corresponding lyrics was analysed using rhythm and beat features, pitch contour measures, structural self-similarity, timbre embeddings, semantic similarity, lexical diversity, metaphor density, topic modelling, multilingual embeddings, and dataset-level audits. The results reveal systematic representational failures: beat tracking showed lower median IOI coefficient of variation for Maskandi (0.028) versus Western music (0.040, p = 0.0199) yet exhibited greater algorithmic instability, tempo averaged 131.16 BPM versus 111.69 BPM (p = 0.000262), pitch glide proportions were significantly higher in Maskandi (0.34 vs. 0.16), on-beat energy ratios differed substantially (2.26 vs. 1.19, p < 0.0000007), semantic similarity revealed high intra-genre coherence for Maskandi (0.73) versus Western (0.25), metaphor density approached zero in Maskandi versus up to 7 per 100 words in Western lyrics, topic modeling produced two compact clusters for Maskandi versus 6 dispersed clusters for Western, timbre embeddings achieved a 0.405 silhouette score, dataset audits revealed 0% Maskandi representation across seven major MIR corpora with African traditions comprising <3%. The study concludes that statistical separability does not imply representational adequacy and highlights the need for culturally grounded MIR and NLP representations to support diverse musical traditions. Full article