It may seem ironic or even slightly absurd to discuss silence in a context where the sound is art. Perhaps even more absurd is the fact that we are engaging in a kind of dialectical exchange about silence which inevitably materialises in sound. Paradoxes and contradictions aside, for a musician to ask, ‘what is silence?’ is for a painter to ask, ‘what is a canvas?’ or an actor to ask, ‘what is an empty stage?’ Silence has a necessary interrelationship with sound be it music, speech or noise. It also has potential to be translated to space, body and existence – our physical being in the world. Silence has often been construed as nothing, a void or completely disregarded. Instead of speculating the is-ness of silence, by objectifying it as a thing in the world that has positive or negative ontology and dismissing it as merely no-thing, the attempt here is to investigate the experience of silence in music and music performance, as it is as much an expressive gesture as music and sound and it gives light to the experience of listening and performing. An awareness of silence will hopefully be an invitation to a different perspective, regard and respect for its place and space in music and our own minds.

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience and meaning of adolescent girls music listening experiences as related to romantic experience. Previous research identified mood management as a key use of music listening, and teenage girls were identified as listening to music when they were sad. Popular musics romantic themes suggested that perhaps adolescent girls use music to explore and reflect upon romantic experiences. Hermeneutic-phenomenology was used to investigate music listening as experienced in everyday life. Data were generated through multiple, in-depth interviews with five adolescent girls aged 17 and 18 years old. Interviews were audio-taped, transcribed and analyzed in keeping with van Manens (1990) method of applied hermeneutic-phenomenology. Analysis of the interviews involved hermeneutic phenomenological reflection on the experiences described by the participants and subsequently representing the findings through diary entries of a fictional teenage girl, Sophie, a composite character who embodied the thoughts and experiences of each participant, and who gave voice to the lived experiences that the actual participants related to the interviewer. <p>Findings confirmed that adolescent girls music listening is a deeply meaningful activity, which in the context of romantic experiences, was associated with celebration, connection, coping, and comfort. The participants used music with intention and in technologically sophisticated ways. Music listening provided participants with a voice to celebrate happy and mourn sad romantic experiences, to normalize experiences of romantic rejection and sadness, to offer comfort that they were not alone in their romantic experiences, and to assist them in coping with romantic break-ups. Implications for further research as well as counseling practice are noted.

Listening comprehension plays a vital role in Chinese students’ acquisitionof English; however, the current situation of students’ listening comprehension learning is notsatisfactory. As one category of learning strategies, metacognitive strategies are essential forsuccessful learning. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the students’ frequency ofmetacognitive strategy use, and the relationship between their use of metacognitive strategiesand their performance in a listening comprehension test from the TEM-4 test. 100sophomores of English major were chosen to participate in the test and then divided into threelevels based on their scores. Afterwards, 10 students from each level were randomly selected,which means there was a total of 30 students and they were asked to participate in thequestionnaire. Through the data collected from the listening comprehension test and thequestionnaire, the investigation finds that on the whole, the 30 students use metacognitivestrategies in the medium level. By comparison, the students in the three groups utilizemetacognitive strategies in different levels. Moreover, there is a positive relationship between30 students’ frequency of metacognitive strategy use and their performance in the listeningcomprehension test. However, there are 4 students whose frequency of metacognitive strategyuse and scores in the listening comprehension test show a negative relationship. Thus, aninterview was conducted among them to find the reasons. These include that they havedifferent difficulties in using metacognitive strategies or dealing with the listeningcomprehension tasks, and then some suggestions are put forward to help teachers improvetheir teaching quality, and students enhance their listening comprehension abilities.

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience and meaning of adolescent girls music listening experiences as related to romantic experience. Previous research identified mood management as a key use of music listening, and teenage girls were identified as listening to music when they were sad. Popular musics romantic themes suggested that perhaps adolescent girls use music to explore and reflect upon romantic experiences. Hermeneutic-phenomenology was used to investigate music listening as experienced in everyday life. Data were generated through multiple, in-depth interviews with five adolescent girls aged 17 and 18 years old. Interviews were audio-taped, transcribed and analyzed in keeping with van Manens (1990) method of applied hermeneutic-phenomenology. Analysis of the interviews involved hermeneutic phenomenological reflection on the experiences described by the participants and subsequently representing the findings through diary entries of a fictional teenage girl, Sophie, a composite character who embodied the thoughts and experiences of each participant, and who gave voice to the lived experiences that the actual participants related to the interviewer. <p>Findings confirmed that adolescent girls music listening is a deeply meaningful activity, which in the context of romantic experiences, was associated with celebration, connection, coping, and comfort. The participants used music with intention and in technologically sophisticated ways. Music listening provided participants with a voice to celebrate happy and mourn sad romantic experiences, to normalize experiences of romantic rejection and sadness, to offer comfort that they were not alone in their romantic experiences, and to assist them in coping with romantic break-ups. Implications for further research as well as counseling practice are noted.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 38 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 18-21).

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Wolverhampton, 1999. / BLDSC reference no.: DX212110.

The purpose of this report is to explore whether listening comprehension difficulties are due to receptive language impairment or attention deficits in school-age children. This evidence-based practice brief analyzes research within this population and gives suggestions on clinical implications for practicing speech-language pathologists related to intervention. Results show that listening comprehension is impaired in children whether or not they have co-occurring language impairment. However, ADHD does not further impair a child with a language disorder. Intervention for this population should focus on increasing the child’s understanding of causal connections, making inferences, and effective ways to study. / text

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Dichotic listening of auditory stimuli is used to assess brain lateralisation by simultaneously presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears to determine which syllable was perceived as being the clearest. There is a limited, albeit dated number of studies that have examined dichotic listening performance in adults who stutter (AWS) and the results remain inconclusive. The aim of this research was to investigate whether AWS show a difference in the magnitude of the right ear advantage (REA) in both undirected and directed attentional tasks when compared with adults who do not stutter (AWNS). There were 14 right-handed participants, consisting of seven AWS and seven age and sex matched AWNS controls. All participants were screened for normal hearing. They completed a dichotic listening task, which included undirected and directed attentional listening tasks. Participants were to select the consonant-vowel (CV) pair they heard the clearest. The interaural intensity difference (IID) was modulated randomly during the undirected attention task. The results for the undirected task revealed: (1) a significant REA for AWS for the IID conditions of 0 to +21 dB and significant left ear advantages (LEA) for IIDs of -15 to -21 dB; (2) a significant REA for AWNS for the IID conditions of -9 to +21 dB and significant LEAs for IIDs of -18 to -21 dB; (3) laterality index scores with a significant IID effect but no significant group or group-by-ear interaction effects using parametric statistics. Further analysis of laterality using non-parametric statistics found significant differences between the fluency groups. In general, the findings in this study were revealing of differences between AWS and AWNS when performing dichotic listening tasks with speech stimuli. The primary difference observed between groups was in regards to the IID point at which a previous REA became a LEA. This “crossing-over” point occurred later for AWNS, indicating a strong left hemisphere advantage for the processing of speech. The earlier “crossing-over” for AWS would indicate that the right hemisphere was activated sooner for the processing of speech compared to AWNS. This activation of the right hemisphere is assumed to reflect more diffuse cerebral lateralisation for speech processing for the AWS and confirms past brain imaging studies. In the directed attention task, there was no significant difference between AWS and AWNS indicating that instances of stuttering may occur due to more automatic (bottom-up) speech processing. These findings have implications for theories of laterality and hemispheric asymmetry for phonological processing for AWS, which has been suggested to reflect a subgroup of AWS for whom cerebral dominance is related to their disfluency.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request