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Funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant, this national study examines arts-based adult education organizations involved in dance, music, drama, and visual arts with a philosophical perspective aligned with a multiliteracies theoretical framework. Multiliteracies considers how cultural and linguistic diversity must be fostered to encourage adults to thrive in all learning environments and recognizes that multimodality provides an expanded way to engage in literacy practices. Utilizing Carey Jewitt's four theoretical tenets to characterize multimodality serves to structure the analytical framework for the findings and discussion of this paper. Multiple case studies and constructivist grounded theory were used for the methodology. Some of the sites discussed in this paper include an art gallery; an immigration museum; and a chamber music organization that offers interactive performances. Participants included adult educators and learners who had options around face-to-face interviews; observations; document analysis of lesson plans or exemplars; or secondary data analysis of original ¿lm footage shot in these spaces. This research has found that arts-based approaches can infuse the work of adult educators to engage adult learners in inclusive pedagogy and active citizenship.

. Musicians have engaged in visual self-representation at least since the Renaissance and have continued the tradition to modern times with contemporary practices including selfies and generative technology and AI art. The practitioners include so-called classical composers (Schoenberg is a well-known case) and performers (Caruso, for instance), but also pop singers and musicians (Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith, among others). The media used varies from oil on canvas to drawings on paper, from traditional photography to digital media. In some instances, there are grave, pompous self-representations, but caricatures also abound (e.g., Donizetti). There are also some miscategorized self-portraits (i.e., portraits misattributed to their subject) and many more purposely fake or mocking self-portraits including contemporary Roman musician and comic Federico Maria Sardelli, which would indicate that the category of “self-portrait” adds value and prestige to any visual artifact. Furthermore, many visual artists, especially during the Renaissance, present themselves as faux musicians, possibly as a sign of nobility or education. Slowly but surely, women have also claimed a space in the realm of musicians’ self-portraits since many of them, belonging to the higher echelons of society, were both visual artists and active musicians (Maria Antonio of Bavaria, Ducreaux and Schröter, among others). In some instances, the musician is truly obsessed with his or her own image to the point that, in addition to visual self-representation, he or she also provides written autobiographies and even musical self-portraits in sound (Spohr and Schoenberg, for instance). In the end, any attempt to create a taxonomy of “musicians’ self-portraits” amounts to a serious interrogation of the usual categories of “self-portrait,” “musician,” and “artist” and to the staging of a vulnerable, doubtful self that wants to be reasserted. Keywords. Self-portraits, Oil on canvas, Drafts on paper, Photography, Selfies, Digital and AI art.

Concurrency is a complex to learn topic that is becoming more and more relevant, such that many undergraduate Computer Science curricula are introducing it in introductory programming courses. This paper investigates the combined use of Sonic Pi and Team-Based Learning to mitigate the difficulties in early exposure to concurrency. Sonic Pi, a domain-specific music language, provides great support for "playing" with concurrency, and "hearing" common problems such as data races and lack of synchronization among different concurrent threads. More specifically, the paper focuses on students' misconceptions regarding concurrency in Sonic Pi and compares them to those arising in traditional concurrent programming languages. In addition, it preliminarily explores knowledge transfer from Sonic Pi to C/C++. The approach has been applied in two teaching experiments with undergraduate students in our University involving 184 participants. Our investigations bring out the need to address misconceptions through targeted interventions for a clear understanding of concurrent programming concepts. Sonic Pi's simplified abstraction and domain-specific flavor has demonstrated to be effective, especially for first-year students.

The Library of Congress announces the acquisition of a collection of major cultural significance, the music manuscripts and papers of renowned contemporary American composer, conductor, and writer John Adams. Recognized [...]

The not-so-bygone worlds of music and colonialism in the twentieth century have yielded a wealth of scholarly 'paper knowledge' in the twenty-first of which to build off new archival-musicological work. This article takes a particular archiving direction by turning to paper itself – and pivots the postcolonial pen around the texts and textures of re-engaging colonial history in postcolonial music scholarship. I explore these writing stakes through my adopted narrative of 'the post/colonial music archive', as shaped by paper and paper's sounding elements of tone and voice. Crisscrossing between the colonial moment and the postcolonial pen, I straddle this developing narrative of the archive, and the registers and inflections of extant source narration for what they can jointly vocalize about the music making of the Municipal Brass Band in 1930s treaty port Shanghai, and the Sino-British Club in postwar colonial Hong Kong – two ostensible musical worlds of 'Britain in China' in the twentieth century, here thrown into disarray by the post/colonial archive's own inchoate, counter-tales. Ultimately, in this process, postcolonial music scholarship gains further traction and meaning as a multi-articulating inquiry – and a turn of mind that does not let colonial history and its persistent challenges for writing go askew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Music Division of the Library of Congress has acquired the papers of renowned composer Charles Wuorinen (1938-2020). Collection materials acquired from the composer's estate are remarkably complete; they span [...]

A standalone literature review was conducted to ascertain the extent and status of research on the practical inclusion of Chinese music in Western educational contexts. The study identified a body of journal articles and postgraduate theses on the topic. The papers were analysed to discern what might constitute best practice classroom approaches to teaching and learning Chinese music. Based on the review's criteria for inclusion -- papers were in English, praxis-oriented, peer-reviewed and published over the past three decades -- the study found that the number of publications was limited (19) and that in terms of established pedagogical approaches they engaged, some gaps existed, certain pedagogies were minimally represented and some were perhaps too recent to have been trialled. Even so, the study concluded that while best practice is an elusive notion, Chinese music forms and styles appear to be compatible with a range of educational settings and Western-oriented music teaching and learning approaches.

The present study examined the cross-modal cueing effect of musical rhythmic beats on non-native speech rhythm production. Two groups of Chinese learners of French were cued respectively with rhythmic beats that either matched (matching group) or mismatched (mismatching group) the rhythm patterns of the target French sentences. The participants were asked to produce the target sentences after cueing and their speech production was compared with their baseline condition in which no cueing was used. The results showed that the matching group produced the target French rhythm significantly better after cueing with musical rhythmic beats that matched the French rhythm, in contrast to the mismatching group where no significant improvement was found. Individual differences in auditory short-term memory and rhythmic skills were not related to improvement in producing French rhythm after cueing. The results suggest that musical rhythmic cueing can be used to improve non-native speech rhythm production, further indicating a close link between speech and music in the temporal domain., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Globally, the number of drug users and the proportion of the drug using population has increased from 210 million in 2009 to 269 million in 2019. Several studies suggest that music festival attendees are more likely to abuse illicit substances and have a high-risk profile. Consequently, it is crucial to develop robust field drug analysis methods that facilitate harm reduction and drug monitoring. The work presented in this report aimed at developing and validating qualitative analytical methods for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, 4-bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine (2C-B), ketamine and N-ethylpentylone on two portable gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) systems: Griffin G510 (Teledyne FLIR, West Lafayette, IN) and Torion T-9 (PerkinElmer, Shelton, CT). The diagnostic ability of the mobile GC-MS units was assessed on 200 samples in total, seized at two large summer music festivals in the United Kingdom. The method validation process included selectivity/specificity, limit of identification, carry-over, ruggedness/robustness, and inter- and intra-day precision (repeatability and reproducibility). The Griffin G510 demonstrated a limit of identification from 1 mg/mL for 2C-B to 0.063 mg/mL for ketamine and good ruggedness and precision results. The precision for 2C-B using the Torion T-9 was poorer than for the Griffin G510, but equivalent for the other compounds tested. Correct identifications (versus benchtop GC-MS) for the two festivals were 85%-86% and 74%-83% for the Griffin G510 and the Torion T-9, respectively. The two portable instruments were able to adequately cover current on-site drug-testing analytical gaps and proved to be a powerful addition to the on-site drug analysis techniques., (© 2024 The Authors. Drug Testing and Analysis published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Issue Addressed: While social determinants frameworks are still popular in research about First Nations health in Australia, a growing body of research prefers cultural determinants of health models. Cultural determinants models provide a holistic, strength-based framework to explain connections between health and contextual factors, including the potential role of music and its impact on social and emotional well-being. Given the growing international recognition of links between music, health, and wellbeing through bodies such as the World Health Organisation, this article examines whether and how music practices are acknowledged in First Nations determinants of health literature., Methods: We conducted a scoping narrative review of literature from five databases: Scopus, PsycInfo, CINAHL, PubMed and ProQuest Central. The search returned 60 articles published since 2017, which we analysed in NVivo for common themes., Results: Music was only explicitly identified as a determinant of health in two studies. Yet, participants in five studies identified music and song as directly impacting their social and emotional well-being. When we broadened our frame of analysis to include other forms of expressive cultural practice, one quarter of included studies empirically acknowledged the role of expressive cultural practice for social and emotional well-being., Conclusion: While many recent studies identify the impact of First Nations' expressive practices broadly, they miss important features of First Nations music as a potentially unique cultural, social, political and ecological determinant of health. SO WHAT?: There is an opportunity for future research and health determinant modelling to explicitly examine the role of First Nations music and other creative practices for social and emotional well-being., (© 2024 The Authors. Health Promotion Journal of Australia published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Australian Health Promotion Association.)

English language education nowadays is not merely about the instruction and acquisition of linguistic knowledge and skills. Instead, it has progressed to the real-life applications of the target language, which further requires a mastery of cultural knowledge and skills. In terms of culture, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, compared to native speakers of English, own their unique native culture. Yet, since language teachers tend to focus on the delivery of English cultural knowledge, EFL learners' native culture is sometimes shadowed in the mainstream English classrooms worldwide. To this end, this exploratory paper aims to advocate attention to the importance of EFL learners' native culture awareness and share some practical teaching and learning experiences in an English course called "Multimedia and Foreign Language Learning." The paper outlines the pedagogical design of the course in China, providing classroom examples and practical suggestions to course designers, educators and instructors. We expect to give insights into integrating native culture into foreign language education in university settings.

This paper explores the fundamental tenets of Plato's philosophy of education, particularly his views on a practice of great educational potential: communal musical participation. According to Plato, music can attune the individual and the community to cosmic harmony and this, in turn, is the only way to form and maintain a community. The paper explores how the concepts of "ethos" and "nomos" are utilized to explain music's role in community cohesion. It argues that Plato's understanding of the power of immediate and pre-reflective participation in music can provide valuable insight for contemporary philosophy of music education. The concept of "nomos," in particular, allows music educators to take this frame of thought to better understand the role of music in creating communities.

The composer, author, and teacher, John Cage, was exercised by our 'inability' to truly listen when approaching sound. In exploring the influences on Cage's avant-garde style, specifically the spiritual discipline found in both Zen Buddhism and Chance operations, this paper attempts to distinguish his philosophy (and use) of "silence" and "chance" as an aesthetic pedagogy. In accordance with Dewey's aesthetic theory and Shusterman's Somaesthetics, resolving the inability to listen is aesthetically conceived as somatic 'attuning' to the occurrence of chance sounds in the ambience of the world. By maintaining Cage's spiritually informed approach as a compositional framework, this paper highlights how his philosophy of silence is pedagogically illustrative of the "active" engagement we can have with the world. This approach is most apparent in Cage's "4'33"," where the 'musicalizing' of everyday sounds erodes the boundaries between art and life, creating a continuity with the world. Somewhat problematically, Cage attempted to make this possible by channelling experience into a state of immersion, unifying art and life by 'letting go' of subjectivity. But as is shown by the Fluxus artists who were inspired by Cage's teachings, the possibility for negotiating Cage's terms brings with it an opportunity to theoretically reflect on the educational processes that underpin Cage's approach to sound.

This paper explores the use of testimonio methodology, born from Chicana/Latina feminist thought and epistemologies as a way of exploring the languaging and knowledge production practices of minoritized communities as a platform to share their/our wisdom/voices in applied linguistics. As such, testimonio is a methodology that allows racialized scholars and accomplices to foreground their/our languaging and knowledges and thus disrupt deficit framings. This paper explores the benefits of using testimonios in applied linguistics as one way of disrupting epistemological racism. Drawing on examples from three different youth who took part in a multiyear culturally sustaining systemic functional linguistics oriented program we show the power of using various types of testimonios to examine/understand the languaging and literacies practices of racialized youth. Implications indicate that the co-creation of knowledge/understanding is what makes testimonios a powerful and insightful methodology.

Categorizing music pieces by composer is a challenging task in digital music processing due to their highly flexible structures, introducing subjective interpretation by individuals. This research utilized musical data from the MIDI and audio edited for synchronous tracks and organization dataset of virtuosic piano pieces. In this work, pitch and duration were the musical features of interest. The goal was to innovate an approach to representing a musical piece using SentencePiece and Word2vec, which are natural language processing-based techniques. We attempted to find correlated melodies that are likely to be formed by single interpretable units of music via co-occurring notes, and represented them as a musical word/subword vector. Composer classification was performed in order to ensure the efficiency of this musical data representation scheme. Among classification machine learning algorithms, k-nearest neighbors, random forest classifier, logistic regression, support vector machines, and multilayer perceptron were employed to compare performances. In the experiment, the feature extraction methods, classification algorithms, and music window sizes were varied. The results were that classification performance was sensitive to feature extraction methods. Musical word/subword vector standard deviation was the most effective feature, resulting in classification with a high F1-score, attaining 1.00. No significant difference was observed among model classification performances., (© 2023. Springer Nature Limited.)

Objective: Music is a very crucial art form that can evoke emotions, and the harmonious presence of the human voice in music is an impactful part of this process. As a result, vocals have had some significant effects on contemporary music. The mechanism behind the cochlear implant (CI) recipients perceiving different aspects of music is clear; however, how well they perceive vocal tuning within music it is not well known. Hence, this study evaluated the mistuning perception of CI recipients and compared their performance with normal-hearing (NH) listeners., Study Design, Setting, and Patients: A total of 16 CI users (7 cisgender men, 9 cisgender women) and 16 sex-matched NH controls with an average age of 30.2 (±10.9; range, 19-53) years and 23.5 (±6.1; range, 20-37) years, respectively, were enrolled in this study. We evaluated the mistuning ability using the mistuning perception test (MPT) and assessed self-perceived music perception and engagement using the music-related quality-of-life questionnaire. Test performance was measured and reported on the item-response theory metric with a z score ranging from -4 to +4., Results: A significant difference in the MPT scores was found between NH and CI recipients, whereas a significant correlation was noted between the music-related quality-of-life questionnaire-frequency subscale and MPT scores. No significant correlations were found between age, CI age, and CI usage duration and MPT performance., Conclusions: This study revealed that musical mistuning perception is a limitation for CI recipients, similar to previously evaluated aspects of music perception. Hence, it is important to consider this aspect in the assessment of music perception, enjoyment, and music-based auditory interventions in CI recipients, as vocals are paramount in music perception and recreation. The MPT is a convenient and accessible tool for mistuning assessment in CI and hearing-aid users., Competing Interests: The authors disclose no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2023, Otology & Neurotology, Inc.)