Little academic attention has been given to two closely-related styles of traditional wrestling in Great Britain: Scottish Backhold (‘Backhold’) and Cumberland & Westmorland (‘C/W’) Wrestling. Both sports are represented by the Scottish Wrestling Bond and the Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling Association, and while each organisation maintains its own traditions and practices, they are able to participate in each other’s competitions as well as in international tournaments. Many areas of mutual satisfaction and respect exist between the two organizations and especially amongst the wrestlers themselves. There have, however, been areas of tension between the two groups. This article will explore several such issues that arose between 1998 and 2002, including regulations concerning dress, number of falls to a bout, and alleged non-recognition of certain techniques. We shall then discuss developments in Scottish Backhold between 2014 and 2019; and lastly, we shall examine the recent rise in female participation in what has historically been a male-dominated sport. This analysis raises questions of tradition, as well as potential breaks from tradition, in the development of both types of traditional wrestling. It also attempts to partially redress the lack of academic scrutiny, particularly with regard to Scottish Backhold.
Based on the material of the first and only professional music periodical
published after World War II - Zvuk: Jugoslovenska muzička revija, in its
“Belgrade” phase, when the position of editor-in-chief was held by the
musicologist Stana Đurić Klajn (1955-1966) - this study isolates and
analytically examines the interplay of themes and narratives articulated by
Serbian authors, as well as by contributors from other republics of the
former Yugoslav federation. The status of Serbian music within the Yugoslav
platform - the absence or the blurring of its immediate national
identification, on the one hand, and the transparent national orientation of
the articles dealing with other national musical traditions, on the other -
is presented in connection with numerous figures and events that have shaped
the Yugoslav musical sphere. The thesis concerning the porous character of
the Yugoslav platform - advocated primarily from Serbia - and, conversely,
its distinctly national interpretation, often marked by an explicit
animosity toward the “Serbian” element in the contributions of authors from
the rest of the country, is likewise documented. The self-denying spirit
evident in the attitudes and actions of the majority of Serbian musical
workers is further demonstrated through examples drawn from the field of
church music - both Serbian and Byzantine - as well as from sacred musical
traditions and practices of Western provenance.
Stephen James Krol, Maria Teresa Llano, Jon McCormack
This paper investigates the importance of personal ownership in musical AI design, examining how practising musicians can maintain creative control over the compositional process. Through a four-week ecological evaluation, we examined how a music variation tool, reliant on the skill of musicians, functioned within a composition setting. Our findings demonstrate that the dependence of the tool on the musician's ability, to provide a strong initial musical input and to turn moments into complete musical ideas, promoted ownership of both the process and artefact. Qualitative interviews further revealed the importance of this personal ownership, highlighting tensions between technological capability and artistic identity. These findings provide insight into how musical AI can support rather than replace human creativity, highlighting the importance of designing tools that preserve the humanness of musical expression.
I reflect on my experience creating two music albums centered on state-of-the-art prompt-based AI music generation platforms. The first album explicitly poses the question: What happens when I collide my junk mail with these platforms? The second album is a direct response to the first, and toys with the inability of state-of-the-art prompt-based AI music generation platforms to generate music that is not ``practiced'', ``polished'', and ``produced''. I seed a large language model (LLM) with information about these albums and have it interview me, which results in the exploration of several deeper questions: To what extent am I the author? Where am I in the resulting music? How is my musical identity changing as I am faced with machines that are in some ways far more talented than I? What new musical spaces does my work open, for me or anyone/thing else? I conclude by reflecting on my reflections, as well as LLM-mediated self-reflection as method.
Ahmet Solak, Florian Grötschla, Luca A. Lanzendörfer
et al.
While recent years have seen remarkable progress in music generation models, research on their biases across countries, languages, cultures, and musical genres remains underexplored. This gap is compounded by the lack of datasets and benchmarks that capture the global diversity of music. To address these challenges, we introduce GlobalDISCO, a large-scale dataset consisting of 73k music tracks generated by state-of-the-art commercial generative music models, along with paired links to 93k reference tracks in LAION-DISCO-12M. The dataset spans 147 languages and includes musical style prompts extracted from MusicBrainz and Wikipedia. The dataset is globally balanced, representing musical styles from artists across 79 countries and five continents. Our evaluation reveals large disparities in music quality and alignment with reference music between high-resource and low-resource regions. Furthermore, we find marked differences in model performance between mainstream and geographically niche genres, including cases where models generate music for regional genres that more closely align with the distribution of mainstream styles.
Understanding complete musical scores entails integrated reasoning over pitch, rhythm, harmony, and large-scale structure, yet the ability of Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models to interpret full musical notation remains insufficiently examined. We introduce the Musical Score Understanding Benchmark (MSU-Bench), the first large-scale, human-curated benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual (ABC notation) and visual (PDF) modalities. MSU-Bench contains 1,800 generative Question-Answering pairs from works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others, organised into four levels of increasing difficulty, ranging from onset information to texture and form. Evaluations of more than fifteen state-of-the-art models, in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, reveal pronounced modality gaps, unstable level-wise performance, and challenges in maintaining multilevel correctness. Fine-tuning substantially improves results across modalities while preserving general knowledge, positioning MSU-Bench as a robust foundation for future research in multimodal reasoning. To facilitate further research, we publicly release MSU-Bench and all associated resources.
Music scores are used to precisely store music pieces for transmission and preservation. To represent and manipulate these complex objects, various formats have been tailored for different use cases. While music notation follows specific rules, digital formats usually enforce them leniently. Hence, digital music scores widely vary in quality, due to software and format specificity, conversion issues, and dubious user inputs. Problems range from minor engraving discrepancies to major notation mistakes. Yet, data quality is a major issue when dealing with musical information extraction and retrieval. We present an automated approach to detect notational errors, aiming at precisely localizing defects in scores. We identify two types of errors: i) rhythm/time inconsistencies in the encoding of individual musical elements, and ii) contextual errors, i.e. notation mistakes that break commonly accepted musical rules. We implement the latter using a modular state machine that can be easily extended to include rules representing the usual conventions from the common Western music notation. Finally, we apply this error-detection method to the piano score dataset ASAP. We highlight that around 40% of the scores contain at least one notational error, and manually fix multiple of them to enhance the dataset's quality.
This paper investigates the emerging text-to-audio paradigm in artificial intelligence (AI), examining its transformative implications for musical creation, interpretation, and cognition. I explore the complex semantic and semiotic interplays that occur when descriptive natural language prompts are translated into nuanced sound objects across the text-to-audio modality. Drawing from structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives, as well as cognitive theories of schema dynamics and metacognition, the paper explores how these AI systems reconfigure musical signification processes and navigate established cognitive frameworks. The research analyzes some of the cognitive dynamics at play in AI-mediated musicking, including processes of schema assimilation and accommodation, metacognitive reflection, and constructive perception. The paper argues that text-to-audio AI models function as quasi-objects of musical signification, simultaneously stabilizing and destabilizing conventional forms while fostering new modes of listening and aesthetic reflexivity.Using Udio as a primary case study, this study explores how these models navigate the liminal spaces between linguistic prompts and sonic outputs. This process not only generates novel musical expressions but also prompts listeners to engage in forms of critical and "structurally-aware listening.", encouraging a deeper understanding of music's structures, semiotic nuances, and the socio-cultural contexts that shape our musical cognition. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of text-to-audio AI models to serve as epistemic tools and quasi-objects, facilitating a significant shift in musical interactions and inviting users to develop a more nuanced comprehension of the cognitive and cultural foundations of music.
Cristina Moura Emboaba da Costa Julião de Camargo, Fernando Emboaba de Camargo
A pandemia da Covid-19 remodelou a dinâmica da atuação musical de regentes durante o período da suspensão de atividades musicais presenciais. Esta mudança, comentada aqui através de relatos de experiência, apontou para o uso de ferramentas tecnológicas que viabilizaram a realização das práticas musicais coletivas no modelo remoto - coros virtuais ou vídeo mosaico, ensaio por videoconferência. Foram analisados trabalhos científicos nacionais durante o período de 2020 a 2022 na temática da prática coral. Notamos que foi requisitado ao regente um conhecimento específico da área de tecnologia musical e que se manteve mesmo após o retorno das atividades presenciais. Para o desenvolvimento dessas novas competências, buscamos materiais que possam, de maneira teórica e prática, contemplar um treinamento técnico auditivo para produção de áudio (solfejo tímbrico), a saber: o aplicativo e livro Produção de Áudio e escuta crítica - treinamento técnico auditivo de Jason Corey publicado em 2010.
El presente trabajo busca trazar paralelismos entre el cine y la música, desde una perspectiva fronteriza y decolonial. Para ello, se eligieron y analizaron algunas películas, con sus bandas sonoras, así como canciones que resuenan con los temas abordados. Construyendo una mirada transversal del cine a través de la música, se buscó cuestionar o desmantelar categorías cruciales para el cine Occidente-centrado, que aún reflejan una nostalgia colonial y persisten en divisiones ideológicas, como entre el «cine-arte» o cine «moderno» y el «resto». Así, el texto se divide en tres secciones centrales y dos conclusivas: Cine visto por la música inserta epistemológicamente el tema, analizando rizomáticamente las fuerzas horizontales y verticales del cine y de la música; Cine-música modal aborda algunas películas-músicas desde una perspectiva transcultural de la música modal, centrándose en sus ciclos de repetición, transformación, así como de muerte y renacimiento simbólicos; Modal, tonal, atonal aborda los cambios que la música y el cine han enfrentado y engendrado, desde las transformaciones de la música modal en tonal y «atonal»; Pequeña coda resume brevemente el camino trazado a lo largo de la obra y Da capo al fine lo concluye. Se espera que el artículo, de carácter ensayístico, pueda contribuir a enriquecer las reflexiones cinematográficas y de otras artes, sobre todo porque parte de una mirada-escucha no especializada, construida a partir de un arte distinto, la música, lo que considero una poderosa y fecunda forma de encuentro, precisamente porque permite el tránsito transcultural y rizomático entre diferentes artes y saberes.
Music and books on Music, Musical instruction and study
Emmanouil Karystinaios, Francesco Foscarin, Gerhard Widmer
We propose a new graph convolutional block, called MusGConv, specifically designed for the efficient processing of musical score data and motivated by general perceptual principles. It focuses on two fundamental dimensions of music, pitch and rhythm, and considers both relative and absolute representations of these components. We evaluate our approach on four different musical understanding problems: monophonic voice separation, harmonic analysis, cadence detection, and composer identification which, in abstract terms, translate to different graph learning problems, namely, node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Our experiments demonstrate that MusGConv improves the performance on three of the aforementioned tasks while being conceptually very simple and efficient. We interpret this as evidence that it is beneficial to include perception-informed processing of fundamental musical concepts when developing graph network applications on musical score data.
Optical Music Recognition (OMR) automates the transcription of musical notation from images into machine-readable formats like MusicXML, MEI, or MIDI, significantly reducing the costs and time of manual transcription. This study explores knowledge discovery in OMR by applying instance segmentation using Mask R-CNN to enhance the detection and delineation of musical symbols in sheet music. Unlike Optical Character Recognition (OCR), OMR must handle the intricate semantics of Common Western Music Notation (CWMN), where symbol meanings depend on shape, position, and context. Our approach leverages instance segmentation to manage the density and overlap of musical symbols, facilitating more precise information retrieval from music scores. Evaluations on the DoReMi and MUSCIMA++ datasets demonstrate substantial improvements, with our method achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of up to 59.70\% in dense symbol environments, achieving comparable results to object detection. Furthermore, using traditional computer vision techniques, we add a parallel step for staff detection to infer the pitch for the recognised symbols. This study emphasises the role of pixel-wise segmentation in advancing accurate music symbol recognition, contributing to knowledge discovery in OMR. Our findings indicate that instance segmentation provides more precise representations of musical symbols, particularly in densely populated scores, advancing OMR technology. We make our implementation, pre-processing scripts, trained models, and evaluation results publicly available to support further research and development.
Este estudio examina la conexión entre la interpretación de música experimental y el contexto que la enmarca. Si bien una realización supone un proceso creativo que depende del músico que la lleva a cabo, la elaboración se da más en función de las referencias que el mismo contexto produce. Se da entonces a entender que este tipo de repertorio posee una epistemología estabilizada de la práctica, un sistema de signos circunscrito a las demandas de un estilo referenciado por la discografía que sustenta un modo de producción problemática para este tipo de obras: el acto reflejo (Alvear, 2021). Para abordarlo, tomaré como ejemplos una de las páginas de singularidad #1 (2016), obra del compositor chileno Santiago Astaburuaga, la cual es examinada a través de un aparato que entrevera la teoría semiótica de Charles Peirce y tres tipos signos, íconos, índices y símbolos; la teoría de la reproducción de técnica de Walter Benjamin; y la noción de técnica elaborada por Ben Spatz (2015). El objetivo es mostrar que la comprensión de la epistemología de la interpretación comporta sentar las bases para un proceso de exploración, en concordancia con el concepto de indeterminación, de las posibilidades de una obra experimental.
Music and books on Music, Musical instruction and study
Entrevista publicada originalmente no Jornal Coral da União, órgão de divulgação das atividades do Coral da União Cultural Brasil-Estados Unidos, Ano I, números 6 e 7, 1994, com edição de João Luís Rosa. A entrevista foi realizada por Marcos Câmara de Castro e Moira Labbate, no Teatro Municipal de São Paulo. Sempre rodeado de gente, e dando sonoras gargalhadas, o maestro Kerr oferece um cafezinho, em sua sala, antes de a entrevista começar.
Affective responses to music are highly personal. Despite consensus that idiosyncratic factors play a key role in regulating how listeners emotionally respond to music, precisely measuring the marginal effects of these variables has proved challenging. To address this gap, we develop computational methods to measure affective responses to music from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. Building on studies from music psychology in systematic and quasi-causal analyses, we test for musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses. Finally, motivated by the social phenomenon known as wǎng-yì-yún, we identify influencing factors of platform user self-disclosures, the social support they receive, and notable differences in discloser user activity.
We present the results of a 12-week longitudinal user study wherein the participants, 110 subjects from Southern Europe, received on a daily basis Electronic Music (EM) diversified recommendations. By analyzing their explicit and implicit feedback, we show that exposure to specific levels of music recommendation diversity may be responsible for long-term impacts on listeners' attitudes. In particular, we highlight the function of diversity in increasing the openness in listening to EM, a music genre not particularly known or liked by the participants previous to their participation in the study. Moreover, we demonstrate that recommendations may help listeners in removing positive and negative attachments towards EM, deconstructing pre-existing implicit associations but also stereotypes associated with this music. In addition, our results show the significant clout that recommendation diversity has in generating curiosity in listeners.
Gustavo Amaral Costa dos Santos, Augusto Baffa, Jean-Pierre Briot
et al.
This paper presents an architecture for generating music for video games based on the Transformer deep learning model. Our motivation is to be able to customize the generation according to the taste of the player, who can select a corpus of training examples, corresponding to his preferred musical style. The system generates various musical layers, following the standard layering strategy currently used by composers designing video game music. To adapt the music generated to the game play and to the player(s) situation, we are using an arousal-valence model of emotions, in order to control the selection of musical layers. We discuss current limitations and prospects for the future, such as collaborative and interactive control of the musical components.
O texto em questão tem como objetivo demonstrar em que medida a música, enquanto área de conhecimento, pode contribuir na formação e no desenvolvimento integral dos indivíduos e quais as zonas do corpo físico e psíquico que podem ser acionadas no contato com a música. A fundamentação teórica está embasada nos textos de Maria Cândida Moraes (2003), A. Storr (2002), S Viellard e E. Bigan (2005), entre outros, na maioria, pesquisadores focados na cognição musical.
Sripanggung adalah sebutan untuk pemeran utama wanita dalam pertunjukan seni. Sebutan ini terinspirasi dari rasa kecintaan si pemilik itiak terhadap itiknya, dan selalu dianggap seperti primadona dalam setiap perlombaan pacu itiak. Karya ini menggunakan pendekatan deduktif dengan dengan prinsip “ekstramusikal”. Metode yang dipakai pada karya ini adalah observasi dan data lapangan yang bertujuan untuk mengetahui apa saja nilai atau suasana yang ada dalam perlombaan pacu itiak. Hasil dari pengamatan pengkarya, dalam perlombaan pacu itiak tersebut terdapat suasana persaingan/kompetisi dan euforia, dan damai. Suasana inilah yang akan diinterpretasikan kembali menjadi sebuah komposisi musik.