This study examines attitudes regarding general violence, violence against women, gender roles, and rape myth and how they relate to music preference. Surveys were completed by 321 students from two large introductory sociology classes at a midsize Midwestern university. Data were analyzed using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. The results indicate that those who listen to predominantly rap and r&b music are more accepting of general violence and violence against women. Also, findings support the idea that amount of music videos viewed affects views on gender roles. Results show no support for a relationship between attitudes about rape myth and listening to rap and r&b music. / Department of Sociology

This thesis is concerned with the cross-modal and synaesthetic perception of musical and visual stimuli. Each of these types of perception has been researched separately, and a hypothesis is presented here that accounts for both cross-modal matching and the development of synaesthesia. This hypothesis claims that sensory information can be evaluated in another modality by using a scale of comparison in that modality. The first set of experiments examines normal subjects performing cross-modal matching with coloured circles and auditory stimuli that vary in complexity. It is shown that subjects use a variety of scales of comparison from both visual and auditory modalities to form matches. As the stimuli increase in complexity, the individual variation in cross-modal matching also increases. The second set of experiments examines matching performance using higher order stimuli, by having subjects evaluate fragments of melodies and complete melodies on affective and descriptive adjective scales. Melodies were also matched with landscape scenes to examine if subjects could form matches between two highly complex sets of stimuli. The final experiments examine synaesthetic associations with colour, evoked from music, letters, numbers, and other categorical information. Common features of synaesthesia from a population of synaesthetes are identified, and experiments performed to test the interference of the synaesthetic associations. Additional experiments are presented that explore the superior short-term memory of one synaesthete, and the role of his associations as a mnemonic device.

Music is used to distract, energize, and entertain during exercise by producing positive psychological and physiological responses. Specifically, listening to music during exercise enhances performance, increases motivation, improves affect, and optimizes arousal. Researchers have identified several elements of music that may moderate this relationship, including lyrics. However, few studies to date have examined the influence of motivational lyrics on psychological and physiological states during exercise. Thus, the primary purpose was to investigate the effects of lyrics in music on motivation, affect, arousal, and perceived exertion during moderate intensity cycling. Thirty (Mage = 21.0 ± 2.9 years old) college-aged individuals performed three, 8-min acute bouts of moderate-intensity exercise on a cycle ergometer during music with lyrics (ML), music without lyrics (MNL), and no music control (MC) conditions. Measures of motivation, affect, arousal, and perceived exertion were taken before and after a 6-min warm-up, every 2-min during the exercise bout, and following a 2-min cool-down. For ML and MNL conditions, participants reported higher motivation, affect, and arousal during exercise relative to the MC condition. As expected, RPE increased throughout the exercise period, with no condition differences observed. Additionally, there were no differences in responses between the ML and MNL conditions. Collectively, these results suggest that music, regardless of lyrical content, can enhance psychological responses during exercise. The current findings may help address common exercise barriers and inform exercise practitioners on music selection to improve exercise adherence.

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This dissertation is comprised of a paper on Tristan Murail’s Mémoire/Érosion (1976) and a pair of my compositions—R[o/u]LE(s) for string quartet with percussion instruments (2016) and Projectile Motion (2018) for string quartet. The paper endeavors to draw attention to the rich, individualized voices within the French spectralist movement during its emerging phase, exemplifying various paths of en/decoding spectral thinking with Murail’s Mémoire/Érosion. In view of the interdisciplinary essence of spectralism, my analytical approach extensively adapts theories, research findings, and a posteriori knowledge from fields such as psychology, computer technology, and marketing so as to diversely reason how spectral thinking may be en/decoded by maneuvering information harnessed from the (pseudo-)spectral sources while interpreting the resultant perceptions. In comparison to the theme of the paper, which is heavily centered on pitch manipulation, the two compositions downplay such a musical dimension in varying degrees for different purposes. First, passive in nature and magnified by the incorporations of the percussion as well as the strings’ scratch tones, the reduced presence of pitch in R[o/u]LE(s) signals an attempt to navigate and investigate the topic of (Taiwanese) identity. Second, actively suppressed, pitch in Projectile Motion virtually becomes residual traces left by the heightened impulses of gesture, which, apart from being where the music largely gains its momentum, can be viewed as an expression of reflecting on issues of intimacy, accessibility, and cultural implications that contemporary music elicits in relation to a valued sector of my personal sphere.

This study examined the musical background characteristics, self-efficacy beliefs, and practice behaviors of string students auditioning for an all-region orchestra in one large South-Central district. Purposes of the study were: (1) to describe the musical backgrounds and self-efficacy beliefs of high school string students, (2) to measure the relationship between self-efficacy scores and performance achievement, and (3) to describe the practice behaviors and thoughts of high and low self-efficacy string students. Questionnaires were given to 101 high school string students; 65 competed in all-region orchestra. Descriptive data from the questionnaire revealed information such as how many took private lessons and that those who did tended to have a higher sense of perceived self-efficacy in relation to playing their string instruments. Other descriptive items asked questions such as whether or not students started in public school and how much they practiced outside of orchestra. The relationship of summed self-efficacy scores to a competition ranking was found to be statistically significant and inverse. For all string participants (n=65) Spearman's rho was, rs= -.37, (p=.001) with 14% of the variance explained (r2 =.14). This inverse relationship documents the linear trend for students with better rankings (lower ranking numbers) to also tend to have higher self-efficacy scores. Observation and interview data of 8 higher and 8 lower self-efficacy sub-group students were also analyzed. The higher self-efficacy sub-group students tended to use more cognitive practice strategies, while the lower self-efficacy sub-group tended to use dissimilar and less advanced strategies. Understanding string students' musical background experiences and characteristics and the possible relationship self-efficacy may have with practice and achievement could benefit certain students. Helping these students gain a higher sense of perceived self-efficacy in their musical endeavors, or obtain certain characteristics that successful students share, could possibly enable them to develop and understand more complex practice strategies and compete more confidently.

The purpose of this work is not to justify the teaching of music in the public schools; that has been done by the authorities to the extent that music in some form is in the curriculum of the majority of American public schools today. The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of certain music activities on the total adjustment of a group of third grade children and to show possible advantages of the teaching of music as a part of the regular teacher's load.

The sensation and perception of musical qualities, properties, and phenomena have long posed challenges for musical analysis. Unconventional musical materials adopted by recent composers and creators of contemporary music, in particular, raise specific questions about the temporal segmentation and musical classification of spectromorphological form-building units. Recent musical scholarship has demonstrated a growing interest in answering such essential questions from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. This study considers the music of Pierluigi Billone and Georges Aperghis, two composers who have forged artistic practices unlike any of their contemporaries, but who share a common interest in developing the emergence of certain musical qualities of intense fascination within their works. Determining how these phenomena emerge, and under what musical contexts and boundary conditions, is a topic of major concern. A psychoanalytic approach to Billone’s ITI. KE. MI (1995) for solo viola was found to yield a descriptive interpretation of the piece’s musical discourse given its raw materials, while a data-driven audio analysis, relating certain features of a recorded performance to compositional methods encoded in synthesis and notated score, were found to best describe the musical necessities of Aperghis’ 2004 opera Avis de tempête. While each composer retains a unique approach to building formal schemes out of their chosen emergent properties, the inclusive pages show that both qualitative and quantitative analytical frameworks can be utilized to describe musical statements created through differing means towards similar ends.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of tempo, pattern length, and grade level on student ability to recognize rhythm patterns. It was intended that the study would also determine if age and experience are factors which affect rhythm recognition and memory. A 48 item Rhythm Pattern Identification (RPI) test was administered to 2146 band students and 114 nonmusic students in grades 6 through 12. The RPI consisted of 48 pairs of rhythm patterns varied in time length (seconds), number of note values (sound events), and tempo. Students indicated if the pairs of rhythm patterns were the same or different. Statistical analysis indicated the reliability estimate (KR-20) of the RPI to range from .445 to .792 with the median being .553. Criterion related validity was established through a correlation of student scores on the Iowa Tests of Music Literacy (Gordon, 1970) and the RPI, r = .39. A multiple regression analysis of the data indicated that .36 of the variance in the RPI scores was attributable to the linear combination of tempo, length in seconds, number of sound events, and grade level. As expected, the independent variables of length in seconds and length in sound events were significantly correlated R = .63; however, there were no significant correlations between the other independent variables. Inverse relationships were found between tempo and score and length and score. Beta weights indicated that the number of sound events was the most significant influence on student scores. Data indicated a slight increase in score from one grade level to the next with significant differences occurring between grades six and eleven and twelve and between grades seven and eleven and twelve. The results of the study indicate that length of pattern in seconds, number of sound events, tempo, and grade level all affect memory of rhythm patterns. These findings corroborate with those of Dowling (1973), Sink (1983), and Fraisse (1982). The implications for music education are: (1) tempo may be a factor that influences how students learn rhythm and (2) student perception of rhythm may be more affected by the length of the rhythm pattern in the number of sound events rather than the length of a pattern in seconds. Future research should include further investigation of young students ability to comprehend rhythm patterns. It is evident that young students can perceive and recognize as complex patterns as older students. / Ed. D.