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Background The use of mobile devices such as tablets and laptops by students to support their learning is now ubiquitous. The clinical setting is an environment, which lends itself to the use of mobile devices as students are exposed to novel clinical scenarios that may require rapid location of information to address knowledge gaps. It is unknown what preferences students have for these devices and how they are used in the clinical environment. Methods In this study we explored medical students’ choices and their use of different devices in their first year of clinical attachments. We sought to evaluate learners’ experiences with these devices using a mixed methods approach. All students newly entered into the clinical years were given the option of a MacBook Air or iPad. We surveyed these students using an online survey tool followed by individual semi-structured interviews to explore survey findings in more depth. Results Students owned a multitude of devices however their preferences were for the 11 in. MacBook Air Laptop over the iPad mini. Students made constant use of online information to support their clinical learning, however three major themes emerged from the interview data: connection and devices (diverse personal ownership of technology by students and how this is applied to source educational materials), influence and interaction with patients (use of any device in a clinical setting) and influence and interaction with staff. In general students preferred to use their device in the absence of patients however context had a significant influence. Conclusions These mobile devices were useful in the clinical setting by allowing access to online educational material. However, the presence of patients, and the behaviour of senior teaching staff significantly influenced their utilisation by students. Understanding the preferences of students for devices and how they use their preferred devices can help inform educational policy and maximise the learning from online educational content.

This paper, followed by two responses, discusses the application of ecological theory to an understanding of a number of issues in the aesthetics of music. It argues for an understanding of music as based in event perception, with an expanded conception of the sources that are specified by those events. Building on the theory of affordances, it considers the limitations of an information theoretic conception of musical complexity, discusses the importance of perceptual learning (understood as shaping by a structured environment) in understanding the affordances of music for different listeners, and raises the challenging problem of the terms in which musical materials might be appropriately described. The apparent tension between ecological and aesthetic positions—in which adaptation and accommodation seem to be at odds with a modernist aesthetic perspective which prioritizes the unsettling and defamiliarizing function of art—is confronted, before the paper concludes with some observations about different disciplinary perspectives on aesthetics, and matters of specificity and generality.

Over the last few decades, a growing amount of research has suggested that dyslexics have particular difficulties with skills involving accurate or rapid timing, including musical timing skills. It has been hypothesised that music training may be able to remediate such timing difficulties, and have a positive effect on fundamental perceptual skills that are important in the development of language and literacy skills (Overy, 2000). In order to explore this hypothesis further, the nature and extent of dyslexics' musical difficulties need to be examined in more detail. In the present study, a collection of musical aptitude tests (MATs) were designed specifically for dyslexic children, in order to distinguish between a variety of musical skills and sub-skills. 15 dyslexic children (age 7-11, mean age 9.0) and 11 control children (age 7-10, mean age 8.9) were tested on the MATs, and their scores were compared. Results showed that the dyslexic group scored higher than the control group on 3 tests of pitch skills (possibly attributable to slightly greater musical experience), but lower than the control group on 7 out of 9 tests of timing skills. Particular difficulties were noted on one of the tests involving rapid temporal processing, in which a subgroup of 5 of the dyslexic children (33%) (mean age 8.4) was found to account for all the significant error. Also, an interesting correlation was found between spelling ability and the skill of tapping out the rhythm of a song, which both involve the skill of syllable segmentation. These results support suggestions that timing is a difficulty area for dyslexic children, and suggest that rhythm skills and rapid skills may need particular attention in any form of musical training with dyslexics.

The development of recording is arguably the most significant change to have affected music in the twentieth century. Never before have people had access to so much music and in so many different ways and with so many different patterns of use. This paper examines some of the effects of recording on listening, starting with a brief outline of an ecological theory of listening and focusing on three specific characteristics of recordings: the interpenetration of music and the wider environment; recordings as medium and as object; and the relationship between social and solitary listening practices. Recording has attracted both utopian and dystopian commentaries on its effects on musical culture, and the paper concludes by considering both the opportunities and the drawbacks of recordings as a means of access to music.

Recently, Vuoskoski, Thompson, Clarke, and Spence (2014) demonstrated that visual kinematic performance cues may be more important than auditory performance cues in terms of observers’ ratings of expressivity perceived in audiovisual excerpts of piano playing, and that visual kinematic performance cues had crossmodal effects on the perception of auditory expressivity. The present study was designed to extend these findings, and to provide additional information about the roles of sight and sound in the perception and experience of musical performance. Experiment 1 investigated the relative contributions of auditory and visual kinematic performance features to participants’ subjective emotional reactions evoked by piano performances, while Experiment 2 was designed to explore the effect of visual kinematic cues on the perception of loudness and tempo variability. Experiment 1 revealed that visual performance cues seem to be just as important as auditory performance cues in terms of the subjective emotional reaction of the observer, thus highlighting the importance of non-auditory cues for music-induced emotions. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that visual kinematic cues only affected ratings of loudness variability, but not ratings of tempo variability.

Background Interviewing is one of the main methods used for data collection in qualitative research. This paper explores the use of semi-structured interviews that were conducted by students with other students in a research study looking at cultural diversity in an international medical school. Specifically this paper documents and gives ‘voice’ to the opinions and experiences of interviewees and interviewers (the peers and the communities) on the value of peer interviewing in the study and outlines (1) the preparation made to address some of the foreseen challenges, (2) the challenges still faced, and (3) the benefits of using peer interviews with respect to the research study, the individual and the institution. Methods Peer interviewing was used as part of a two-year phased-study, 2012–2013, which explored and then measured the impact of cultural diversity on undergraduate students in a medical higher education institution in Ireland. In phase one 16 peer interviewers were recruited to conduct 29 semi-structured interviews with fellow students. In order to evaluate the peer interviewing process two focus group discussions were he ld and an online survey conducted. Results Key findings were that substantial preparations in relation to training, informed consent processes and addressing positionality are needed if peer-interviewing is to be used. Challenges still faced included were related to power, familiarity, trust and practical problems. However many benefits accrued to the research, the individual interviewer and to the university. Conclusions A more nuanced approach to peer interviewing, that recognises commonalities and differences across a range of attributes, is needed. While peer interviewing has many benefits and can help reduce power differentials it does not eliminate all challenges. As part of a larger research project and as a way in which to get ‘buy-in’ from the student body and improve a collaborative research partnership peer interviewing was extremely useful.

Moving to music is an essential human pleasure particularly related to musical groove. Structurally, music associated with groove is often characterised by rhythmic complexity in the form of syncopation, frequently observed in musical styles such as funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music. Structural complexity has been related to positive affect in music more broadly, but the function of syncopation in eliciting pleasure and body-movement in groove is unknown. Here we report results from a web-based survey which investigated the relationship between syncopation and ratings of wanting to move and experienced pleasure. Participants heard funk drum-breaks with varying degrees of syncopation and audio entropy, and rated the extent to which the drum-breaks made them want to move and how much pleasure they experienced. While entropy was found to be a poor predictor of wanting to move and pleasure, the results showed that medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure, particularly for participants who enjoy dancing to music. Hence, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between syncopation, body-movement and pleasure, and syncopation seems to be an important structural factor in embodied and affective responses to groove.

Moving to music is an essential human pleasure particularly related to musical groove. Structurally, music associated with groove is often characterised by rhythmic complexity in the form of syncopation, frequently observed in musical styles such as funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music. Structural complexity has been related to positive affect in music more broadly, but the function of syncopation in eliciting pleasure and body-movement in groove is unknown. Here we report results from a web-based survey which investigated the relationship between syncopation and ratings of wanting to move and experienced pleasure. Participants heard funk drum-breaks with varying degrees of syncopation and audio entropy, and rated the extent to which the drum-breaks made them want to move and how much pleasure they experienced. While entropy was found to be a poor predictor of wanting to move and pleasure, the results showed that medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure, particularly for participants who enjoy dancing to music. Hence, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between syncopation, body-movement and pleasure, and syncopation seems to be an important structural factor in embodied and affective responses to groove.

In musical performance, bodily gestures play an important role in communicating expressive intentions to audiences. Although previous studies have demonstrated that visual information can have an effect on the perceived expressivity of musical performances, the investigation of audiovisual interactions has been held back by the technical difficulties associated with the generation of controlled, mismatching stimuli.With the present study, we aimed to address this issue by utilizing a novel method in order to generate controlled, balanced stimuli that comprised both matching and mismatching bimodal combinations of different expressive intentions. The aim of Experiment 1 was to investigate the relative contributions of auditory and visual kinematic cues in the perceived expressivity of piano performances, and in Experiment 2 we explored possible crossmodal interactions in the perception of auditory and visual expressivity. The results revealed that although both auditory and visual kinematic cues contribute significantly to the perception of overall expressivity, the effect of visual kinematic cues appears to be somewhat stronger. These results also provide preliminary evidence of crossmodal interactions in the perception of auditory and visual expressivity. In certain performance conditions, visual cues had an effect on the ratings of auditory expressivity, and auditory cues had a small effect on the ratings of visual expressivity.

This essay addresses distributed creative processes in the preparation and performance of a new musical work-Tongue of the Invisible by Liza Lim, commissioned by the Cologne-based Ensemble musikFabrik. Situating the research within a broadly ecological perspective, and in the specific context of the interface between composition, improvisation, and performance, the study offers a social and distributed understanding of creative production. From the sizeable body of audio and video data recorded during the preparatory workshops, rehearsals, and performances of the new work, as well as interviews and discussions with the players, conductor, and composer, three discrete episodes from the piece are analysed in some detail. These three examples demonstrate the complex interweaving of musical role, institutional structure, spontaneity and intervention, and designed underdetermination in the creation of a performance, and are couched within an explanatory framework anchored in principles of ownership, signification, and the interanimation of social materials, understood as the components of a dynamic musical ecosystem. © 2013 The Author.

In many musical cultures, people synchronise their bodies to the rhythmic patterns of the music, and such embodied engagements are one of the most overtly enjoyable forms of musical appreciation. However, the ways in which rhythmic structure, body-movement and pleasure are related remains unclear. The present thesis directs a broadly psychological, yet multi-methodological and interdisciplinary, approach towards this relationship, centring on the rhythmic structure of syncopation in groove-based funk music. Through perceptual experiments, computational modelling, rating surveys, neuroimaging and motion-capture recording, syncopation was found to relate, in primarily negatively linear and inverted U-shaped ways, to finger-tapping performance, perceptions of stability, subjective desire to move and feelings of pleasure, neural activity in motor and reward areas, and force, synchrony and periodicity in body-movements. These relationships also depended on individuals’ musical training, dancing experience and groove familiarity. Ecological and embodied theories of perception and a phenomenology of groove provide a backdrop to the empirical findings, on the basis of which it is suggested that the different relationships between syncopation in groove and perceptual, subjective, neural and corporeal attributes interact in reciprocal ways. It is proposed that syncopation invites the body to physically enact the musical structure and directly participate in the rhythms of groove, due to the perceptual tension and ‘open spaces’ afforded by the perception of metric events in syncopation. In groove, body, mind and music extend into each other and this distributed musical process has affective significance. Since the physical pleasures of dancing to music are such a historically and culturally ubiquitous phenomenon, the empirical findings and theoretical proposals of this thesis make significant contributions towards a much-needed coupling of affective and embodied theories of music.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a growing industry in the healthcare system. It has been reported that medical students across the globe have an interest in learning about CAM in addition to conventional medicine. In Ireland, to date there has not been a study that evaluates the knowledge of, interest in and attitude of Irish medical students towards CAM. This research can serve as a pilot study to inform Irish medical schools on the need to introduce CAM into the medical curriculum.