Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
Timbral blend is fundamental in various musical activities for shaping sounds and musical intentions. Previous studies on blend perception have mostly focused on sounding blends, neglecting imagined blend made possible by inner hearing where sounds are imagined in the mind. Experiment 1 investigated how imagined blend compares to the perception of heard blend and whether musical background has an effect. Two groups of participants (musicians and nonmusicians; N = 31 per group) were presented with pairs of short instrument sounds in unison from 14 different instruments in two different experimental conditions. In the first condition, paired sounds were played sequentially, and participants were instructed to imagine them being played simultaneously and to rate their degree of blend. In the second condition, pairs of instrument sounds were played simultaneously, and participants were asked to rate the perceived degree of blend. Results showed significant interaction effects among the instrument pairs, presentation conditions, and musical backgrounds. Acoustic modeling and multidimensional scaling of blend ratings showed both varying and invariant roles of different acoustic features between the two types of blend perception. Imagining blend appears to be more sensitive to differences in brightness and richness of the high partial content between the blending sounds. Experiment 2 with 48 participants was conducted on the perception of dissimilarity between instruments, using the same stimuli as the previous experiment. Results from this experiment provided evidence that evaluating imagined blends is strongly informed by judging the dissimilarity of blending instruments. In practice, how the two types of blends differ is a result of complex interactions involving the specificity of blending instruments and listeners’ musical backgrounds.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
Language and music are closely tied in singing. It has even been argued that without language there is no song. However, can music and language learning through singing also be seen as being closely tied without first highlighting the boundaries between these disciplines? This study emphasizes a nonhierarchical approach to music and language learning by intertwining musical and linguistic activities in a choir context. The study explores the extent to which singing in a language-responsive choir can encourage productive second language use and enhance the sound hearing, phonological processing, pronunciation, and spoken language skills of adult choir participants with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The research material consists of individual pre-, middle-, and post-interviews and Phonology pre- and post-tests that were conducted with volunteer choir participants during 2019–2020. The analysis encompasses both thematic and statistical approaches. The findings are reflected through a hybrid choir practice that draws on a three-way dialogue between choir participants, the choir conductor, and the second language teacher. The results suggest that active and holistic second language use in a language-aware choir context decreases phonological challenges in second language auditory processing and verbal production, including spoken language. The findings of the interviews and the Phonology tests were in line with each other.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
Repetition and structure have a significant place in music theory, but the structure hierarchy and its influences are often ignored in both music analysis and music generation. In this article, we first describe novel algorithms based on repetition to extract music structure hierarchy from a MIDI data set of popular music and show its effectiveness through evaluation. Then, we introduce new data-driven approaches to estimate and validate structural influences in music. Results show that the automatically detected hierarchical repetition structures reveal significant interactions between structure and harmony, melody, rhythm, and predictivity. Different levels of hierarchy interact differently, providing evidence that structural hierarchy plays an important role in our popular music data set beyond simple notions of repetition or similarity. We further study how musical structure has evolved over decades of popular music writing. Finally, we discuss the importance of this work in highlighting roles that structure can play in music analysis, music similarity, music generation, music evaluation, and other music information retrieval tasks.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
This article introduces a hitherto undescribed pattern of audience motion during a classical music performance, wherein audience members collectively decrease their quantity of motion in coordination with shifts toward stillness in the music. This “stilling response” was observed in the audience body sway measurements from the MusicLab Copenhagen concert experiment, a research concert event in which the Danish String Quartet and over a dozen researchers collaborated to measure, analyze, and understand the experiences, physiology, and behavior of the coupled musician–music–audience system. Analysis of the performance identified over 250 “stilling points” in the music, such as rests, rubatos, and decrescendos. Most of these points were matched with measurable local decreases in movement across the majority of participating audience members. From this exploratory study, we posit that encultured classical music audiences exhibit a stilling response to suitable concert music, wherein they use their musical understanding to anticipate moments of stillness in a performance and cooperatively suppress their own movements to match. As audience stillness is recognized and valued by performers, this behavior may constitute a joint and tacit act of communication where the audience confirm their approval of and attention to the performance.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
Segmenting continuous sensory input into coherent segments and subsegments is an important part of perception. Music is no exception. By shaping the acoustic properties of music during performance, musicians can strongly influence the perceived segmentation. Two main techniques musicians employ are the modulation of tempo and dynamics. Such variations carry important information for segmentation and lend themselves well to numerical analysis methods. In this article, based on tempo or loudness modulations alone, we propose a novel end-to-end Bayesian framework using dynamic programming to retrieve a musician's expressed segmentation. The method computes the credence of all possible segmentations of the recorded performance. The output is summarized in two forms: as a beat-by-beat profile revealing the posterior credence of plausible boundaries, and as expanded credence segment maps, a novel representation that converts readily to a segmentation lattice but retains information about the posterior uncertainty on the exact position of segments’ endpoints. To compare any two segmentation profiles, we introduce a method based on unbalanced optimal transport. Experimental results on the MazurkaBL dataset show that despite the drastic dimension reduction from the input data, the segmentation recovery is sufficient for deriving musical insights from comparative examination of recorded performances. This Bayesian segmentation method thus offers an alternative to binary boundary detection and finds multiple hypotheses fitting information from recorded music performances.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
The study presents the results of research that examines the popularity of videos representing four different musical styles among students aged 9–19 (N = 1159). The measuring instrument was a self-developed online questionnaire that explores students’ musical genre opinions based on four types of music videos: street music, rock music, classical music, and folk music. In relation to the musical pieces, we inquired about background aspects, with a specific focus on engagement in instrument presentations and the viewing of music programs. We analyze the data considering the context of learning a musical instrument and attitudes toward instrument training and family background. Findings show that the perception of genres varies significantly between students who play instruments and those who do not, as well as based on their family background. Among the seven groups of students, encompassing both instrument learners and non-learners, a distinct pattern emerges those who neither learn nor have a desire to learn an instrument exhibit notably lower fondness for musical compositions. Furthermore, significant differences are apparent among the students based on the educational level of their parents. The implication of this study lies in its revelation of how instrument training and parental education significantly shape students’ musical opinions, underscoring the need for targeted interventions to enhance music education experiences and enrich young individuals’ musical tastes.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
To what extent did early recording technology affect the creation and representation of musical performances? According to Mark Katz (from 1999 onwards), historical studio environments led to crucial shifts in 20th century violin performances due to the restrictions imposed by early recording and reproduction devices (“phonograph effects”). In particular, this may have affected sonic gestures that include expressive means such as vibrato, portamento, articulation, and timbre variation. In order to trace potential modifications, we reenacted a 1911 “Liebesleid” performance by one of the most influential violinists of the 20th century, Fritz Kreisler. We then digitally ascertained the full acoustic transfer paths (impulse responses, IRs) from the 1911 studio to 20 historical gramophone setups and applied them to the reenactment. In this way, for the first time, our study generated comparative IR findings across multiple gramophones, soundboxes, and horns built by different manufacturers between 1901 and 1933. Sonic gestures were found to induce significant level modifications of up to 20 dB due to the devices’ resonances, leading to dynamical variations that have never been part of the performance. Accordingly, Kreisler's famous “golden tone” is due, in part, to the recording technologies of his time. Therefore, early recordings should not be understood as “neutral witnesses” but rather as artifacts with substantial influence on the creation and reproduction of musical performance(s).

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
One of the possible objective and universal descriptions of most folk songs can be based on structural musical characteristics such as contour, tone set, tonality, rhythm, meter, and form. Experimental studies in the recent decade supported the universal importance of contour and tonality as the two most important characteristics determining human music cognition and memory. It follows from this statement that a mathematically adequate description of folk songs should be based on both contour and tonality information. We describe a method searching for characteristic groups of universal melody types (MTs) propagating jointly and regularly in several subsets of 59 folk music cultures in Eurasia and America, represented by a database of 59,000 folk songs. The MTs are represented by pairs of contour and degree distribution vectors. We describe the propagation of the MTs by 59-dimensional vectors containing their “moments” in the 59 cultures studied. We show that principal component analysis (PCA) of these moment vectors reveals assumable ancestor cultures, and we show a method modeling the 59 musical cultures as linear combinations of the musical contents of seven assumable ancestral cultures. The results provide a method and a hypothesis for tracking the footprints of assumable ancient musical “primary languages” in folk music traditions in Eurasia and America. The assumable musical ancestral cultures presented here show good correspondence with the distribution of certain human genetic characteristics and archaeogenetic results.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
The vitality and affective potential of the live concert experience is a result of rich, cross-sensory interactions and varied participatory practices. The complexity of such entanglements has recently led philosophers to argue for an enactive, affordance-based approach that interrogates a variety of perceptual and sensory possibilities inherent in aesthetic experiences. Further, Shaun Gallagher's recent addition of the 4As (Affect, Agency, Affordance, Autonomy) to the 4Es (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended) for clarifying mind–world relations seem to have potent explanatory power for these kinds of encounters. Building on such current philosophical approaches while examining specific (and actual) live musical engagement, this article offers an interpretation of selected audience data from the MusicLab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet research concert to discuss particular responses from the audience physically present at the venue. Responding to neuroaesthetic approaches, we clarify the audience members’ individual and collective aesthetic experience through an enactive, affordance-based approach. We suggest that what is at play in the live concert environment is a mode of attentive dynamic listening. Rather than seeking to characterize the audience as passively responding to music, a 4Es/4As approach to aesthetic experience seeks to clarify embodied-enactive audience engagement for which anticipation is a dynamic factor that enables further musical action and resonance, also for the musicians on stage.

Music &Science, Volume 7, Issue , January-December 2024.
Previous research suggests that the conductor's choice of preparatory gesture affects choral singers’ breathing behavior as well as the corresponding loudness and sound quality. As these gestures are in choral practice often combined with instructions on the desired breathing technique, the aim of this study was to explore whether congruent and incongruent combinations of preparatory gestures with breathing instructions affect the breathing behavior and resulting loudness in choral singers. In our within-subjects study design, 18 healthy choral singers were asked to sing a tone in response to 4 different video stimuli, consisting of two congruent and two incongruent gesture-instruction combinations. We recorded chest wall kinematics via three-dimensional motion capture and voice samples. The results show that the used preparatory gesture has an influence on the predetermined inhalation type. Particularly, the most common inward-upward gesture combined with an abdominal inhalation results in a significantly reduced chest wall expansion and loudness of the resulting tone. Furthermore, the moment of maximum inhalation and onset are delayed after inward-upward gestures. Consequently, in choral practice, it is essential to generally consider that the selected preparatory gesture has significant influence on the resulting sound and should therefore be chosen according to the desired type of inhalation.