Music & Science provides an open-access platform for engaged debate and insight into music research from a wide range of scientific perspectives. Three recent articles illustrate the highly interdisciplinary scope and focus of the journal.
Yannick Wey and Cornelia Metzig's 'Machine Learning Classification of Regional Swiss Yodel Styles Based on their Melodic Attributes' is the first computational analysis of alpine yodelling. Through a classification of yodel styles based on their melodic features, the authors demonstrate significant regional differences between yodel tunes in Switzerland, and reveal the most salient musical features that contribute to different yodel styles. The study provides empirical evidence to support anecdotal claims from folklore studies that yodelling, often assumed to have a 'national' style, is in fact rooted in distinct geographic regions. Moreover, the work offers an innovative methodology with potential applications for analysis of other developing or ambiguous genres of music.
Presenting a similarly critical examination of culturally-constructed ideas about music using empirical methods, 'Discrepancies and Disagreements in Classical Chamber Musicians' Characterisations of a Performance' by Neta Spiro and Michael Schober investigates perceptions of live duo performances from the perspectives of both musicians and audiences. Employing a mixed-methods approach including a novel time-based interactive visualisation for multi-modal data, the study demonstrates the ways in which performers' characterisations of just-played performances diverge from one another, in contrast to dominant narratives that emphasise musicians' shared understandings in ensemble playing––indeed, in some cases in this study, performers' conceptions of their playing had less in common with one another than with those of the audience. As well as extending findings from previous research on jazz performance and offering wider applications for performance pedagogy, the study provides a novel method for the effective collection of immediate responses to music as it unfolds.
Moving from the close analysis of interactions between individuals and music to broader issues at the intersection of music, science, and social value, Kat Agres and colleagues' 'Music, Computing, and Health: A Roadmap for the Current and Future Roles of Music Technology for Health Care and Well-Being' presents a systematic overview of the latest best practices for music computing and technology being employed in healthcare and wellbeing settings. Bringing together expertise from music psychology and neuroscience, music therapy, music information retrieval (MIR), music technology, medical technology, and robotics, this highly interdisciplinary article assesses the current range of uses and functions of technology across different domains, as well as proposing future directions for interdisciplinary collaborations to create novel practices and applications.
Together, these three articles provide a snapshot of the diverse and original research presented in the journal, whilst also demonstrating the value of creating a forum for dialogue between music and the sciences.
Find out more about the journal here: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/music-science/journal202491.
Ian Cross (Editor-in-Chief), Adam Ockelford, Graham Welch, Emily Payne
Dr Emily Payne
Lecturer in Music
Assistant Editor, Music & Science
School of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/music/staff/396/dr-emily-payne
Payne, E. & Thomas, P. (2020). Getting exercised: Ensemble relations in Christian Wolff's Exercises. In R. Adlington & E. Buch (Eds.), Finding Democracy in Music (pp. 101–124). Routledge. Available at: https://www.routledge.com/Finding-Democracy-in-Music/Adlington-Buch/p/book/9780367486921
Thomas, P. & Payne, E. (2020). 'We also like to be surprised': Disruption, provocation and surprise in the music of Christian Wolff. CIRCUIT, 30(2), 27–45. Available at: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1071119ar
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