Abstract
Music psychologists have long been concerned with phenomena such as repetition and tonality – both the internal representations formed by exposure to these phenomena, and how these representations vary with expertise. A question arises of whether less expert listeners can gain proficiency in perceiving a particular phenomenon by being exposed to representations that are known to be employed by more expert listeners. The current paper addresses this question within the domain of music appraisal. Participants with varying levels of musical expertise interacted with visualizations of two excerpts from Beethoven’s symphonies. One visualization (ScoreViewer) showed the staff notation of the music, synchronized to an orchestral recording. The other (PatternViewer) also depicted the notes synchronized to the recording, as well as representations of the music’s repetitive and tonal structure. Participants’ appraisal skills were assessed via multiple-choice questions on instrumentation, dynamics, repetition, and tonality. Results indicated that interacting with the PatternViewer visualization led to a significant improvement in listeners’ appraisal of repetitive and tonal structure, compared to interacting with the ScoreViewer. The size of this effect was well predicted by amount of formal musical training, such that less expert listeners exhibited larger improvements than more expert listeners. While further work is required to determine whether the observed effects transfer beyond the pieces studied or into long-term learning, these findings for appraisal skills indicate that carefully chosen representations from models of expert behavior can, in turn, help less expert individuals to improve their understanding of musical phenomena.
M. Grachten and H. Frostel—Independent Machine Learning Consultant.
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Notes
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Both were from recordings of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The first was conducted by David Zinman and the second by Iván Fischer.
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Only one participant was at ceiling for repetitive/tonal questions in the ScoreViewer, and two other participants were at ceiling for repetitive/tonal questions in the PatternViewer, so these comparisons are not being confounded by ceiling effects.
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Acknowledgments
Gerhard Widmer’s work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 101019375 (“Whither Music?”).
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Nikrang, A., Grachten, M., Gasser, M., Frostel, H., Widmer, G., Collins, T. (2023). Music Visualisation and Its Short-Term Effect on Appraisal Skills. In: Mori, H., Asahi, Y., Coman, A., Vasilache, S., Rauterberg, M. (eds) HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14056. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48044-7_9
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