Singer-Songwriter Survey

Are you a passionate singer-songwriter who feels called to this career? This 15-minute anonymous online survey will pose open and closed questions about your early influences, musical memories, education, geographic location and your music career to date. It is ethically approved and upon completion you will have the option to be entered into a draw for a $50 gift card to Long & McQuade. One gift card will be drawn for every 25 participants entered.    LINK

AIRS Recent Publications

• A special issue of Musicae Scientiae, September, 2015 19 (3) features the AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills.  Guest edited by Helga Gudmundsdottir and Annabel J. Cohen, the issue contains studies representing participants from Brazil, Canada, China, Estonia, and the USA.  Across the various studies the issue reports on different age groups (from pre-school to senior years) and on six of the musical components of the Test Battery.  For the table of contents and abstracts, click here
  

• June Countryman has published the following article which reports on the exploration of how children's natural singing in play is on a speech-singing continuum.
  

  Start-up games on school playgrounds: instances of ceremonial rituals, Countryman, J. (2015), *Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education; Fall, 2014, 202,*7-27.
  

This study emerged from naturalistic observations of children's self-initiated musical play on the playgrounds of 14 Canadian schools, part of a three-year project anchored by the broad research question: What is the nature of children's spontaneous musical expressions during selfdirected play? Seven of the dozens of play start-up procedures documented during these observations are analyzed, using ritual theories from a variety of scholarly orientations to establish that these start-up games are genuine ritual acts. While some theorists identify ritual in every aspect of quotidian life, the author proposes that children's start-up procedures are ceremonial rituals, examples of what Dissanayake termed as artifying. They are characterized by an extended and reverent focus on the performance of a series of formalized rhythmic, kinesthetic actions, sustained by a shared belief that the process is meaningful. Some of the possible benefits that these startup rituals provide are considered, recognizing that, as with all play scenarios, there are issues of inclusion and exclusion. The author suggests that respectful examinations of children's musical play culture contribute to the project of revisioning music education practice by offering insights into the richness and sophistication of children's musicking proclivities and abilities. The author proposes specific pedagogical applications.  LINK 

• AIRS co-investigator Lauren Stewart has co-authored an article in a Frontiers special issue dedicated to research at the intersection of music neuroscience and music therapy. The article presents a rationale for using family-centred music therapy (singing; vocalizing) with medically fragile newborns.
  

  Constructing optimal experience for the hospitalized newborn through neuro-based music therapy, Helen Shoemark, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Australia, Deanna Hanson-Abromeit, University of Kansa, Lauren Stewart, Goldsmiths, University of London, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00487
  

  Music-based intervention for hospitalized newborn infants has traditionally been based in a biomedical model, with physiological stability as the prime objective. More recent applications are grounded in other theories, including attachment, trauma and neurological models in which infant, parent and the dyadic interaction may be viewed as a dynamic system bound by the common context of the NICU. The immature state of the preterm infant’s neurological system and particularly auditory system means that no assumptions can be made about auditory processing and stimulation should proceed with caution. The infant’s experience of an unpredictable auditory environment is further compromised by a potential lack of meaningful auditory stimulation. Parents often feel disconnected from their own capacities to nurture their infant. The implications for the infant’s neurobehavioral and psychological well-being are life-long. This perspectives paper will outline the likely neurological considerations for auditory processing in the premature infant as well as establishing a premise for music-based interventions. A hypothetical clinical case will illustrate the application of music by a music therapist with an infant and family in NICU.  LINK

AIRS News

AIRS 6th Annual Meeting, held in Nashville Tennesee July 30 - August 1, was a resonding sucess. See the full program and proceedings here. Following the Annual Meeting, AIRS members made the following presentations at SMPC 2015, also in Nashville:

• The Influence of music training on vocal melodic completions, Bing-Yi Pan, Annabel J. Cohen, UPEI, Charlottetown

  The top-down system of the implication realization (IR) theory (Narmour, 1990; 2014) suggests that music experience influences melody expectancy. Listener rating studies have provided evidence for this (Krumhansl et al., 1999; Krumhansl et al., 2000; Vos & Pasveer, 2002). However, few have tested the theory by studying spontaneous melody production. The present study used data acquired through the AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills (Cohen et al., 2009; Pan et al., 2012) to explore how western music training affects improvisational singing following a prior melodic context. Young adults (20 musicians; 20 nonmusicians) were presented with an 8-note melody and were asked to first repeat it and then continue singing and finish it. 34 participants (19 musicians) completed the task. The singing recordings were notated by two musicians together (including the first author). To start the improvisation, musicians tended to choose the dominant (G, 42.1%) and subdominant (E, 21.1%), while non-musicians tent to begin with tonic (C, 33.3%) and subdominant (E, 26.7%). All of the musicians (100%) ended the song at tonic (C), while less than half of non-musicians (46.7%) did so.  Furthermore, the range of the composition covered by musicians (M = 8.11 semitones, SD = 2.49) was significantly larger than the range of non-musicians (M = 5.33 semitones, SD = 2.69), F (1, 32) = 9.67, p < .005. The number of diatonic scale notes used by musician (M = 4.73, SD =1.04) exceeded that used by non-musicians (M = 3.53, SD =1.25), F (1, 32) = 9.38, p = .004. The study provides direct evidence that: (a) music training shapes melodic expectancy when improvising; (b) music training expands materials one can comfortably use in on-the-spot melody creation. The role of music training – whether cognitive and/or vocal motor flexibility and vocal range – remains to be investigated. 
  

• Is playing a musical instrument better for you than singing? A review, Annabel J. Cohen, UPEI, Charlottetown

  Singing accurately, musically, and emotionally requires sensory, cognitive, motor and affective control. Yet the mental processes underlying performing on a musical instrument (rather than the human voice) more often attract the attention in both psychological work and the popular press. Does practice on the “flashy” instrument create that much more of a sensorycognitive-emotional workout than does practice on the hidden musical instrument of the human voice? Is  ractice and performance on a musical instrument qualitatively better for you than practice and performance in singing? Are choristers necessarily less happy than instrumentalists? The present paper directs attention to the following: (1) articles in the press that extol the benefits of music, referring only to examples of playing a musical instrument; could their statements apply equally to serious vocal music study? (2) programs such as El Sistema provide music training primarily on musical instruments; could these programs work equally well if focused on the human voice? (3) obviously for the same cost more students can be engaged in music through singing than through playing a musical instrument (4) comparisons of test performance of singers vs instrumentalists are rare in the music-psychological or cognitive literature and warrant more studies to address the gap in knowledge about the relative benefits of singing. If it is shown that the so-called benefits of instrumental music training are equal to the benefits of voice training, then public efforts to provide musical training should consider the relative cost of instrumental teachers and musical instruments versus the cost of choral leaders and no instruments. In a world where resources are insufficient to provide music training for everyone, decisions to fund instrumental as opposed to choral programs deserve social scientific justification. The relevant literature will be reviewed. (supported by SSHRC AIRS).
  

• Singing and multi-cultural group cohesion, Arla Good, Frank Russo,  Ryerson University, Toronto