̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Ian Cross

Music of kindness: playing together strengthens empathy in children

bjb42 — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 05:00:06 +0000

Researchers looking at group education sessions for 8 to 11 year old children have shown that engaging in regular music-based activities with others - from ensembles to simple rhythmic exercises - can conspicuously advance empathy development, increasing a child’s capacity to recognise and consider the emotions of others.

A total of 52 children - boys and girls - were split into three groups at random. One of these groups met on a weekly basis to interact through musical games devised by the researchers, while the other two acted as control groups - one met with the same regularity but activities focused on words and drama but not music, the other received no additional activities.

Using standard and novel techniques such as answering questions designed to test compassion, and responding to emotion in facial expressions and movies, each child’s level of emotional empathy was evaluated at the start of the study and then again after a year. ̽��ֱ��researchers found that children in the music-based activity group showed a substantial increase in empathy scores and a higher average score compared to the other groups.

“These results bear out our hypothesis that certain components of musical interaction may enhance a capacity for emotional empathy, which continues outside the musical context,” says Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, from the Centre for Music and Science, who led the study.

“We feel that the program of musical activities we’ve developed could serve as a platform for a new approach to music education - one that helps advance not just musical skill but also social abilities and, in particular, the emotional understanding of others.”

̽��ֱ��activities used in the study were developed to emphasize the components of musical interaction that the researchers believed would promote empathy - fostering greater understanding of shared mental states.

These empathy-promoting musical components include imitation, where children were asked to mimic or match other players’ movements and musical motifs - such as in the ‘Mirror Match’ game - and entrainment, where the researchers used rhythm to encourage synchronised performance - so that children learnt to align and adjust themselves through attending to others.

By engaging with these musical activities, the children were regularly experiencing states of what the researchers describe as ‘shared intentionality’ - an understanding of each other’s intentions through a common aim or object of attention - creating an emotional affinity among the children.

̽��ֱ��team, which also included Professor Ian Cross, head of the Centre for Music and Science at the Faculty of Music, and Dr Pamela Burnard of the Faculty of Education, came up with increasingly complex music games to explore ‘shared intentionality’ - activities included creating music that reflected the perceived emotion of others, or composing music together with a clear theme.

According to the researchers, music and rhythm allows a sense of mutual ‘honesty’ that goes beyond the more precise expression in verbal communication. In essence, everyone can feel a rhythm and respond - sharing an experience regardless of linguistic skills.

“ ̽��ֱ��point about music is that it can make you feel as though you are sharing the same experience, when you don’t need to be doing the same thing or feeling the same way,” says Cross. “There is a strong sense in communal music that you simply do feel you are experiencing the same thing as everyone else.”

̽��ֱ��researchers believe that teaching emotional intelligence should become part of school curriculums, and that music might be a very good way to do it. “Increased ability to empathise may lead to altruistic behaviour that benefits educational environments such as patience and cooperativeness,” says Rabinowitch. “Previous studies have shown that children who score higher on an empathy scale are more likely to help others being bullied for example.”

“Working with children on social and emotional communication allows them to gain confidence in experiencing another person’s emotional state - and producing a supportive emotional response. We believe music to be one of the most welcoming and enjoyable - as well as extremely effective - mediums through which ‘empathy education’ can be achieved.”

“We hope to build on the suggestive results of this study and to replicate its findings with larger groups and in different cultural settings. One of the areas I’m keen to explore is its effectiveness on populations that are seen to have less capacity for empathy - such as those on the autistic spectrum.”

Adds Cross: “Conventional primary music education is thought of as skill or craft based, but in the context of a musical interaction program such as ours it’s not just learning to do something - it’s learning to interact with others. ̽��ֱ��findings show that music as a group medium can give rise to and sustain the development of empathy - but at the same time it is still artistic education, and there’s no reason it can’t be both.”

A year-long study on childrens' music-making indicates that playing music in groups on a regular basis greatly improves a child’s ability to empathise with others.

We believe music to be one of the most welcoming and enjoyable - as well as extremely effective - mediums through which ‘empathy education’ can be achieved.

Tal-Chen Rabinowitch

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Festival of Ideas: Musical mayhem

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Virtual violins

tdk25 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Violins crafted 300 years ago by the master violin-maker Antonio Stradivari sell for millions of pounds on the rare occasion they reach auction; what is it about their quality of sound that makes them prized above all others? Indeed, is their sound actually discernibly different? Any experienced violinist knows that some violins respond to their bow better than others: what determines which violins are difficult and which are easy to play? Questions such as these have fascinated musicians and scientists since the 19th century.

To get to the heart of the riddle there is an added complication: sound is in the ‘ear of the beholder’. In fact, although much is now known about the acoustics of the violin, and how this is influenced by the way it is made, virtually nothing is known about how human capacities for perceiving, discriminating and judging violin sounds match up to their acoustical features. This is a very significant gap, as perceptual judgements obviously define what makes a violin different from, say, a cello, just as it makes one violin different from another, for listeners, performers and violin-makers alike.

A three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that is reaching completion at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has been intent on filling this gap. ̽��ֱ��approach has involved collaboration between four departments – Professor Jim Woodhouse from the Department of Engineering, Dr Claudia Fritz and Dr Ian Cross from the Faculty of Music, Professor Brian Moore from the Department of Experimental Psychology and Dr Alan Blackwell from the Computer Laboratory.

Strings and body

̽��ֱ��tone, pitch and loudness of a violin are the product of many components: drawing a bow across tightly stretched violin strings forces them into complex harmonic vibration; a significant fraction of this acoustical energy is transmitted, via a structure called the bridge, into the violin body. Here, the sound is amplified by the vibration of the wooden box and the air inside it.

̽��ֱ��team’s approach relies on the fact that the acoustical behaviours of the strings and the violin body can be treated separately, and that it is the latter that distinguishes different violins. In fact, on its own, a string makes hardly any sound and the acoustical behaviour is much the same from one instrument to another. ̽��ֱ��main acoustical feature that ‘colours’ the sound in ways that are unique for each violin is the way in which the violin body responds to the different frequencies input from the bridge and radiated from the body. This characteristic transformation is known as the violin’s ‘frequency response characteristic’.

Virtual violins

̽��ֱ��first stage of the project was to create a ‘virtual violin’. To carry out any comparative study of musical instruments it is important to rule out variations caused by the player. Instead of achieving this by using a robotic violinist that repeats the same piece on a variety of real violins, in this project the tests themselves are virtual.

Sensors on a violin bridge record the string waveforms arising as a player performs normally. ̽��ֱ��recordings are stored as standard force functions, which can then be applied to different violins to hear how they sound without having to worry about any complications caused by variations in playing. So, by ‘playing’ these recordings through computer models of different violins’ frequency response characteristics using digital filters, a prediction of the sound of the violin can be created. This makes it possible to ‘play’ exactly the same performance on different ‘virtual violins’. ̽��ֱ��frequency response characteristics can be derived from empirical measurements made on a range of real violins.

̽��ֱ��psychoacoustics of the violin

Once the violin response is represented in digital filter form, it becomes very easy to make controlled variations of a kind that would be almost impossible to achieve by physical changes to a violin. This gave the researchers an opportunity to focus on what features of violins’ response characteristics determine how listeners discriminate between different violins. In particular, the psychoacoustical experiments looked at just-noticeable differences of alterations made to the acoustical response characteristics of two violins: an excellent violin made by David Rubio and a mass-produced student violin that was informally rated as low quality. Psychoacoustical test methods can be used to find the threshold for detection of any particular change, and also to obtain statistically significant data on quality judgements made by the listeners.

Using groups of listeners that spanned expert string players, expert non-string-playing musicians and non-musicians, it was found for both instruments that the alteration of individual low-frequency resonances needs to be fairly large in order to be perceptible. Even for the listeners who were expert players, a resonance needed to be shifted (in terms of frequency) by about a semitone to be perceptibly different. However, if several resonances are shifted simultaneously, a smaller shift becomes audible.

Testing timbre

̽��ֱ��sound of an instrument is not just about pitch and resonance but is also about a somewhat elusive quality known as timbre. It is, in effect, the richness of the sound. Similar to the manner in which a wine taster conveys the flavour and aroma of a fine wine, there are many different descriptors for the timbre of an instrument: from ‘warm’, ‘sonorous’, ‘clean’ and ‘free’, to ‘unbalanced’, ‘heavy’, ‘dull’ and ‘dead’. In fact, a data-mining exercise from ̽��ֱ��Strad, a classical music magazine covering string instruments, came up with a list of 61 words that are commonly used by players, critics, makers and listeners to describe the quality of the sound.

This list of descriptors was used as the basis for a series of experiments in which players located the words in two-dimensional spaces, the results being analysed by multidimensional scaling methods (MDS) to produce maps of families of terms. Some relevant descriptors can therefore be selected on the basis of their distribution in the MDS spaces. This is now allowing the team to test timbre in a more methodical way than has been possible before, asking questions such as: does an increase of amplitude in the frequency range between 650 Hz and 1300 Hz really make the violin sound more ‘nasal’?

Probing the mysteries of music

̽��ֱ��aim is to provide researchers, violin-makers and repairers with an evidence-based means of assessing what it is necessary to adjust on a violin to achieve improved sound. This rigorous analysis of descriptors and their relations will not only be useful to specialists in discussions with performers, but will also have pedagogical value and might lead to new ways for composers and arrangers to annotate musical scores. Perhaps one day, when describing how one violin sounds different to another, we will be able to say exactly why.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Claudia Fritz (cf291@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Music.

Why does one violin sound different to another? Investigating this question has brought together researchers from music, engineering, experimental psychology and computer science.

̽��ֱ��aim is to provide researchers, violin-makers and repairers with an evidence-based means of assessing what it is necessary to adjust on a violin to achieve improved sound.

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Violin

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