Abstract: The current study investigates the influence of pitch and register (ordered vs. randomized) on listeners’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension) using excerpts from multi-part musical compositions that feature complex rhythmic and pitch structures. In addition to listeners’ ratings, computational measures derived from nine rhythm and pitch features were used to assess the influence of specific structural elements on listeners’ perceived emotions. The results show a large main effect of pitch presentation on all five emotional dimensions. Participants tended to rate ordered excerpts as more positive in mood, higher in energy, and with a greater impulse to move along the music, while randomized excerpts were perceived as more dissonant and more tense. Several rhythmic and pitch features were also reliable predictors of listener’s ratings, providing support for the use of naturalistic stimuli accompanied by more fine-grain measures of structural elements in experimental studies of listeners’ experience of music.
Authors: Poudrier, Ève, Bell, B. J., Lee, J. Y. H., Sapp, C.S.
Publication details: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Music and Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR 2023), 13–15 November 2023, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 599–610. CMMR 2023 & Laboratory PRISM, Marseille, France.
Abstract: Research on listeners’ perceived emotions in music draws on human and synthetic stimuli. Although research has shown that realistic synthetic audio can convey emotions, studies that compare listeners’ experience of synthetic audio and human performances are limited. Using short musical excerpts, we investigate the effect of performance (human vs. synthetic) and instrumentation (piano vs. string quartet) as well as the influence of twelve musical features on participants’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension). Findings show a small main effect of performance and a large main effect of instrumentation. Synthetic audio was perceived as more positive in mood and less tense than human performances. Piano excerpts were also perceived as more positive and as conveying less tension and energy than synthetic excerpts. Several rhythmic and pitch measures were reliably predictive of participants’ perceived emotions, supporting the need for considering finer-grain structural features when using naturalistic stimuli.
CREDITS
Producer/Réalisateur: Jennifer Butler
Recording engineers, digital editing, mastering/Ingénieur de son, montage et transfert numériques: Will Howie and Paul Luchkow
Recorded at/Enregistré à: Pyatt Hall, Vancouver, March 22, 2021 and Philip T. Young, Victoria, November 27, 2021
VSO School of Music: Sydney Trotter; UVIC School of Music: Kristy Farkas
Graphic design/Conception graphique: André Cormier
Photos Programme notes/Notes d’explication: Jennifer Butler
This recording was made possible through the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts. / Cet en- registrement a bénéficié de l’appui financier du Conseil des arts du Canada.
Artists: Tyler Duncan (BMus’98) and Erika Switzer (BMus’97, MMus’00)
Recording details:
A Left Coast is a heartfelt song collection for the place baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer call home- British Columbia.
The distinguished artists write that: “Our particular connections to Vancouver’s communities, geography, and spirit, continue to nourish us as artists. Its lands and waters, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory cared for since time immemorial by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Selilwitulh and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, provided us with an extraordinary upbringing. With these songs, (by composers Iman Habibi, Jean Coulthard, Jocelyn Morlock, Stephen Chatman, Leslie Uyeda, Melissa Hui, and Jeffrey Ryan) we wish to say thank you.”
Duncan and Switzer have been inspired by the vibrant Canadian new music scene, and offer an adventurous, deeply felt homage to Canada’s beautiful ‘left coast.’
This volume provides an innovative vision for Chinese music studies in the twenty-first century. Each chapter advances research insights into a genre or context in Chinese music and develops a theoretical model applicable beyond the case studies. The volume includes contributions from researchers based in anglophone Europe and North America and also in sinophone settings including China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Hong Kong SAR, and in Chinese diasporas around the world. In Part I, chapters explore the polyvocal legacies of Chinese music, including archaeological findings, the writing of music history, the interpretation of historical practices, and the close study of new cultural expressions. Specific topics include archaeology of Chinese music, ancient Chinese music theory, “barbarian” dances in Chinese antiquity, kunqu opera qupai, Shijing songs, disputes over Hong Kong’s music history, and turning points in Chinese musical modernity. Part II focuses on evolving practices across instrumental and vocal traditions; each chapter ties a musical transformation to its social dimensions. Following an account of heterophony in traditional instrumental ensembles and revised repertory, chapters consider changes in the field of ethnic-minority folk song, guqin zither performance, musical theater in Taiwan, the Chinese orchestra, and the pipa lute in the Chinese diaspora. In Part III, authors address intersectional issues in Chinese music studies. Several chapters discuss popular-music cultures, exploring race, sexuality, humanism, political aspiration, and the professional/amateur spectrum. Other chapters address liveness and mediation in contemporary music for Western instruments and consider the roles of music for ethnic-minority identities within China and among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. A final chapter systematizes the contemporary discipline of Chinese music studies.
Composer: Dean Burry Featured UBC Faculty Artist: Krisztina Szabó,
Recording details:
Alfred Noyes’ narrative poem The Highwayman made an early impact on me when I discovered it in a faded book in my elementary school library. I remember committing it to memory for a school concert, delivering the sumptuous descriptive language with all the drama a 10-year-old imagination could muster. The poem stayed with me since that time.
Despite its slightly “old-fashioned” nature, it has endured as one of the most popular poems of the twentieth century. The story tells of a dashing robber riding through a stormy night to reach an English country inn for a tryst with his true love, Bess. The robber is betrayed to the British Army and Bess is forced to make a choice between her lover’s safety and her own brutal death.
The musical ensemble is inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 (1912). Both works are narrated, divided into a number of short sections, and employ the moon as their central image. While the music of The Highwayman is often influenced by the atonality of that earlier work, it also veers at times into other referential styles as the drama of the narrative dictates.
Publication details: 2nd International Conference Música Analítica, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Music Time, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, 12-14 October 2023, p. 48.
Abstract: This paper proposes a definition of polyrhythm that affords classification of a wider variety of polyphonic textures along a set of characteristics derived from”composite rhythms,” i.e., the sequential presentation of event onsets reduced to a single strand. Examples of notated rhythmic polyphony from the Suter 1980 Corpus (https://polyrhythm.humdrum.org/) that have been encoded in kern for computational analysis using the composite tool (https://doc.verovio.humdrum.org/filter/composite/) are provided as case study. One of the advantages of this approach is that it allows for comparison across different types of ensembles, regardless of the number of instrumental parts. By dividing the polyphonic texture into contrasting rhythmic strands, aspects of metric orientation, rhythmic patterning, event density, coincidence, and salience can be assessed. It is argued that measures derived from composite rhythms not only afford more fine-grain characterization of rhythmic structures, but also provide an opportunity to address issues of perceived complexity using realistic musical stimuli.
Featured UBC Alumni: Sherryl Sewepagaham (composer of Okâwîmâw Askiy (Mother Earth) & Picikîsksîs (Chickadee) Chant)
Label: Leaf Music
Recording/mix engineer: Paul Chirka and Zana Warner
Recording details:
Ispiciwin, meaning “Journey,” embarks on an unprecedented musical exploration, bridging cultures and perspectives. Winnipeg and Cree composer Andrew Balfour describes it as a dream collaboration, one that deepens the understanding of truth and storytelling from an Indigenous standpoint. With the powerful voices of Luminous Voices, alongside artists Jessica McMann and Walter MacDonald White Bear, Ispiciwin is an evocative testament to the transformative power of music and a small, but important step toward reconciliation.
Luminous Voices, Calgary’s professional chamber choir, was founded in 2012 by conductor and Artistic Director Timothy Shantz. Uniting local, national, and international artists and organizations to illuminate choral music of the past and present, spanning cultures and traditions, we engage audiences in Calgary and beyond through exceptional sonic experiences encompassing live and virtual performances, recordings, workshops, new commissions by contemporary composers, and community education and development. Luminous Voices comprises some of the best ensemble singers in the Calgary area, collaborating with singers and musicians from across North America.
Description: This essay explores the author’s process of trying to understand how to responsibly forge a relationship with traditional song heritage given conditions of ethnocultural rupture. Weaving together Slovácko folk songs transcribed by the author’s great-grandfather, an archival recording of the author’s grandfather, audio/video documents of her own embodied performance, dreams, folk tales, and analysis, the piece meditates on the many facets of “living song” (živá píseň). The author explores her process of learning how to approach the life of song, and how songs might be cared for. The performance of practice-based research is posited as a means to confront and dismantle patriarchal white supremacy within one’s body and spirit, thereby making possible the recovery of exiled strands of self and the forging of ancestral connections.
