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This thesis investigates the notion of shape in music from a psychological perspective. Rooted in the embodied cognition research programme, it seeks to understand what kinds of shapes listeners with varying levels of musical expertise perceive in sound and music by engaging them in overt actions. To that end, two empirical studies have been carried out. In the first experiment, a sample of musically trained and untrained participants was asked to represent visually a series of pure tones varied in pitch, loudness and tempo—as well as two short musical excerpts—by means of an electronic graphics tablet. In the second experiment, a new sample of musically trained and untrained participants was asked to represent gesturally a series of pure tones varied in pitch, loudness and tempo, as well as sixteen short musical excerpts. In one of two experimental conditions, participants’ gestures—captured with Microsoft® KinectTM and Nintendo® WiiTM Remote Controller—created a real-time visualization on a screen in front of them. In order to shed light on cross-modal mappings between drawing/gesturing features (x-, y- and z-coordinates) and sound features (pitch, loudness) correlation analyses, as well as more advanced mathematical tools such as Gaussian processes, were applied. Results revealed that musically trained participants are generally more consistent in representing sound features cross-modally (e.g., pitch–height) but also less diverse in their approaches than untrained participants. Most participants mapped pitch onto the vertical axis and time onto the horizontal axis. Loudness was mostly represented by size in drawings and by various mapping strategies in gestures such as height, size and muscular energy. Representing musical excerpts gesturally led to a wide range of strategies including, dancing, conducting, air instrument playing and tracing of musical features. Findings are discussed in light of embodied music cognition and current theoretical developments within the cognitive sciences.

This research explores the potential for the sublime experience through encounter with the immersive, site-specific sound installation, in abandoned Cold War military sites. It defines the distinctiveness of sonic nstallation as a practice, its affinities with specific kinds of installation art, the particular somatic and visceral experience it affords, and its scope for engaging memory, feeling and imagination through the use of the abandoned site. The notion of the sublime is presented as a way of reading the visceral charge in the phenomenological experience of the encounter, as a yet unexplored narrative device in site-specific installations. The text unfolds the journey from initially encountering large scale Earthworks in the landscape of the Mid-West American desert, subsequently explored through existing discourse, to the development of two original works and exhibitions that employ the outcomes of the field research. The installations created for this research offer an alternative reading on current discourse and practice within the field of site-specific installation, with particular emphasis on acousmatic readings of the sites. The thesis proposes that tactile phenomenological, sonic experiences of acousmatic sound remain largely absent within discourse of the sublime but offer the ineffable moment consummate with the sublime encounter, therefore offering a new reading on the sublime experience of the participatory performance event. The role of the audience, spectatorship of the work and spatial identity of the sites serve as the historical, critical frame of context, explored through environmentally oriented art practice of Minimalist music and sculpture, Happenings and Intermedia. The installations explored within the research require considered journey to their location, which is questioned for its shifting property to frame the work or ‘encounter’, as an inherent attribute of the event. Finally, the problematic altered perception of the site-specific installation, through remediation in curated exhibitions, is explored through the last chapter.

The primary objective of the work reported in this thesis was to quantify how the pitch or strike note of a bell is determined by the frequencies of its partials. Pitches of bells are generally virtual pitch or missing fundamental effects, generated in the ear rather than present as a frequency in the radiated sound. The exact pitch is shifted from that expected for the missing fundamental by changes in the frequency of various partials. This can cause bells whose partials are in theory tuned precisely, to sound out of tune by considerable fractions of a semitone. The pitch shifts were quantified at frequencies across the audible spectrum by a set of experiments carried out on 30 subjects. Subsidiary experiments established which partials create a bell’s pitch or pitches at different frequencies, and showed that partial amplitude does not significantly affect bell pitch. A simple model of pitch shift was devised from the test results which gave good agreement with the stretch tuning in a number of peals of bells. Stretch tuning has not previously been satisfactorily explained. The pitch shifts were also compared against Terhardt’s algorithm for virtual pitch, which did not predict the shifts seen in practice. To prepare for these experiments, a comprehensive investigation was done of the partial frequencies of over 2,000 bells with a wide range of dates, weights and founders. An unexpected and straightforward relationship was found between the frequencies of the upper partials which generate virtual pitches, which seems to apply to all bronze and steel bells of Western shape. The relative frequencies of these partials are in turn determined by the thickness of the bell’s wall near the rim. This relationship between the partials has not been previously reported, and explains previous failed attempts by bellfounders to tune these partials independently. The modified version of Chladni’s law proposed by Perrin and Rossing for these partial frequencies was found not to give as good a fit to their frequencies as the relationship discovered in this research. The work presented in this thesis is important for at least two reasons: • It provides new practical guidance for the design and tuning of bells • The shifts in virtual pitches observed as a result of upper partial changes support current research into pitch generation mechanisms in the human ear.

Modern sensor technologies facilitate the measurement and interpretation of human affective and behavioural signals, and have consequently become widely used tools in the fields of affective computing, social signal processing and psychophysiology. This thesis investigates the use and development of these tools for measuring and enhancing aff ective and behavioural interaction during collaborative music making. Drawing upon work in the aforementioned fields, an exploratory study is designed, where self-report and continuous behavioural and physiological measures are collected from pairs of improvising percussionists. The findings lead to the selection of gaze, motion, and cardiac activity as input measures in the design of a device to enhance affective and behavioural interaction between co-present musicians. The device provides musicians with real-time visual feedback on the glances or body motions of their co-performers, whilst also recording cardiac activity as a potential measure of musical decision making processes. Quantitative evidence is found for the effects of this device on the communicative behaviours of collaborating musicians during an experiment designed to test the device in a controlled environment. This study also reports findings on discrete and time series relationships between cardiac activity and musical decision-making. A further, qualitative study is designed to evaluate the appropriation and impact of the device during long-term use in naturalistic settings. The results provide insights into earlier findings and contribute towards an empirical understanding of affective and behavioural interaction during collaborative music making, as well as implications for the design and deployment of sensor-based technologies to enhance such interactions. This thesis advances the dominant single-user paradigm within human-computer interaction and affective computing research, towards multi-user scenarios, where the concern is human-human interaction. It achieves this by focusing on the emotionally rich, and under-studied context of co-present musical collaboration; contributing new methods and findings that pave the way for further research and real-world applications.

This thesis aims to show how the notion of embodiment serves to create a robust theory of musical expression. Part I describes 'The Problem' of the disembodied legacy left in the wake of Descartes, and shows that many existing theories of musical expression tend to become unstable and/or incoherent if read in light of a disembodied theory of mind. In Part n, 'The Materials', I gather together relevant and significant insights from Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and introduce the recent neuroscientific research on mirror neurons that I plan to implement in Part III, 'The Solution'.

Listening to music can arouse a variety of affective responses. The study of this phenomenon has flourished during the last two decades, particularly thanks to the contribution of the BRECVEMA theory and the Multifactorial Process Model. Nevertheless, these theoretical frameworks have adopted a psychological reductionist approach that neglects the symbolic dimension of music, and the effect of situational factors. The first aim of this thesis is to overcome these shortcomings by proposing a theory based on contemporary constructionist theories of emotion. This novel theory proposes that listening to music activates automatic perceptual mechanisms that produce fluctuations of affect, and that the activation of associative and appraisal mechanisms transform the fluctuations of affect into a variety of emotional and nonemotional responses. The second aim was to test some of the hypotheses derived from this framework. The first experiment tests the prediction that listening to music while engaging in motor rhythmic entrainment leads to fluctuations of valence and arousal. Although the results did not support the hypothesis, they suggest that the phenomena of rhythmic entrainment, musical expectancy, and motor planning arise from shared perceptual principles. The second and third experiments investigate the phenomenon of emotional contagion with music. The results suggest that embodied simulation does not contribute significantly to listeners’ affective reactions, and that semantic knowledge activated by the music, by personal associations, and by extra musical information biases the type of perceived and induced emotions experienced by the listeners. The third aim of the thesis was to explore alternative ways of measuring musically-induced emotions. Two indirect techniques are implemented and evaluated, and a novel questionnaire of subjective experiences is developed. The main conclusion of the thesis is that the constructionist theory here proposed constitutes a fruitful approach, as it provides a non-reductionist heuristic framework that produces new hypotheses for future investigation.

There is a wide range of sensory therapies using sound, music and visual stimuli. Some of these established therapies focus on soothing or distracting stimuli as an analgesic (such as natural sounds or classical music), while other approaches emphasize active performance methods of producing music as therapeutic. Instead, this thesis proposes immersive soundscape exposure therapy, inviting people suffering from anxiety disorders to react to densely detailed ambisonic composition. In this work, soundscapes are composed to include the users’ own idiosyncratic anxiety triggers to facilitate habituation, and to provoke psychological catharsis, as a non-verbal, visceral and enveloping exposure. In this research, the participants’ vital signs are recorded during exposure, to accurately pinpoint the most effective sounds that alter the participant’s resting state, which informs an optimal construction of future soundscapes. Across psychology and neuroscience literature, it is widely agreed that sound is a major trigger of anxiety, and auditory hypersensitivity is an extremely problematic symptom. In this project, it is hypothesized that these dense, anxiety-eliciting soundscapes will progress future immersive therapies for various psychological conditions. Results from this study indicate that exposure to stress-inducing sounds can free anxiety sufferers from entrenched avoidance behaviors, teaching physiological coping strategies whilst simultaneously encouraging resolution of the repressed psychological issues agitated by the sound.

This thesis concerns the importance, uses and effects of music in everyday life. The first study investigated the importance of music for 1000 Pakistani students. Results indicated that the great majority enjoyed listening to music, which was preferred to most of the other indoor and outdoor activities considered, and listening to and playing music had different perceived benefits. The second study used a variant of the experience sampling method to investigate the uses and experiences of music in the course of everyday life among 200 Pakistanis. Results indicate that the importance of several functions of music depends particularly upon with whom the participant was with and the place where the music was heard. The third study investigated the relationship between listening to music, health and happiness among 301 British and 594 Pakistani students. Results indicated that there were significant positive relationships between time spent listening to music and each of health and happiness. The fourth study investigated the effect of religious music on mental health among 175 Pakistanis hospitalized with psychotic depression. The results indicated that, relative to other types of psychosocial support materials, religious music led to the greatest decrease in depression levels. A fifth study used qualitative methods to investigate the musical peak experiences of six white British and six Pakistani participants. Several similarities were noted in the musical peak experiences of these two groups, suggesting that musical peak experiences may be a universal phenomenon. The sixth study investigated the relationship between musical peak experiences and the general health and level of happiness among 105 British and 115 Pakistani students. Results indicate that peak experiences of music were related positively to health and happiness and that these effects were not mediated by ethnicity.

This thesis examines the role of identity on the development and trajectory of music preferences across the lifespan. The focus of interest in recent empirical research has been to predict music preferences using adolescent individual differences. It is widely recognized that adolescents use music to help them deal with a number of psychosocial and emotional challenges, which often arise during this critical period of identity development. There has been little study whether adults similarly use music to deal with a variety of lifespan experiences, and the impact that these have on the trajectory of music preferences. Therefore, I present the results of two studies which explored the relationship between identity and the trajectory of music preferences. The aim of the first on-line quantitative study was to replicate and expand previous research to explore through simple regression analyses, the relationship between personality traits, age, and estimated IQ and identity dimensions as predictors of music preferences. A large sample (n=768), ages ranging from 17-66 completed the survey. Music preference ratings were assessed using STOMP-R. The BFI and the EIPQ were used for personality trait and identity dimension measurement respectively. Results largely supported previous research. Interestingly, adjusted R2 scores suggested that individual differences accounted for less than 20% of variance in music preferences. To obtain a broader perspective of the problem, a second qualitative study (n=62, 18-73 years; X=28.6), was performed using semi-structured interviews to explore through a symbolic interactionist lens the development and evolution of music preferences as symbolic representations of identity. Coding and thematic analysis of the data revealed that the trajectory, meaning and function of music preferences are indeed subject to evolution, largely mediated by identity development, lifespan experiences and changing social groups. Interestingly, an increasing number of older adults had used the internet and media websites to revisit music from their past and expand their musical taste palate. Future research may explore the use of technology by older adults, on the trajectory of music preferences.