Music and dreams have been recurring and meaningful themes throughout human history. Empirical research on the topic of music in dreams is limited, particularly when it comes to studies involving participants with professional musical training. In this study, 37 music professionals participated, reporting a total of 151 dreams in a 14-day dream diary and completing questionnaires to assess their retrospectively estimated music dream frequency, daily musical activities, and music-related stress. We found high percentages of music-related dreams (around 50%), reflecting musicians’ daily engagement with music. As expected, the frequency of music dreams in the musician group was significantly higher than that of non-musician control samples, supporting the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. However, contrary to our expectations, no direct relationship was found between the extent of daily musical activities and the frequency of music-related dreams. In addition, negative emotions in music dreams may have reflected music-related stress in waking life. Future research could investigate the effects of music-related stress on dream content and examine whether stress-reduction interventions can influence the frequency and nature of negative dream experiences in musicians.
Subject and Purpose. Th is paper addresses the challenge of measuring the angular coordinates of over-sea low-altitude targets and strives to improve the measurement accuracy of radar systems that employ high-resolution algorithms implemented through active phased array antennas (APAAs). The primary purpose is to substantiate the eff ectiveness of off-axis target illumination in the context of sea clutter and multipath. Off-axis target illumination reduces the depth of the probing signal interference fading over the radar-to-target path. The investigated illumination method focuses on mitigating errors in target angle measurements by multi-channel methods based on high-resolution algorithms, such as root-MUSIC. One of the main spoilers of measurement accuracy when using those algorithms is the noise in the radar receiving channels. Off-axis target illumination helps avoid a deep fade of the signal, thereby enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the receiving channels of APAA-equipped radar systems, which contributes to target tracking stability despite destructive multipath interference.
Methods and Methodology. The study employs computer simulations within a multipath radio-wave propagation model for a rough sea surface, allowing for both specular and diffuse reflections. The power distribution of diffuse reflections and their mapping along the propagation path are evaluated using the empirical glistening-surface model, the most advanced to date.
Results. Quantitative assessments of the effectiveness of off-axis target illumination have been obtained in the context of fading conditions produced by multipath radio wave propagation over the sea surface. The optimal illumination angles have been identified. They help avoid deep fades over a wide range of sea states. These optimal angles are confined within 0.6 to 0.75 of the beamwidth of the radiation pattern. The lower end of the indicated range refers to the diffuse sea clutter, and the upper end corresponds to the specular reflection of the probing signal. In the most adverse cases, a gain in the SNR reaches 6—8 dB.
Conclusions. It has been confirmed that off-axis illumination allows decreasing the depth of the illumination signal fades, which ensures more stable target tracking by angular coordinates. Recommendations for selecting off-axis illumination angles have been formulated.
A novel hierarchical sectorized neural network module for a fast direction of arrival (DoA) estimation (HSNN-DoA) of the signal received by a textile wearable antenna array (TWAA) under strong noise conditions is presented. The developed DoA module accounts for variations in antenna element gain, inter-element spacing, and resonant frequencies under the conditions of textile crumpling caused by the motion of the TWAA wearer. The proposed model consists of a sector identification phase, which aims to determine the spatial sector in which the radio gateway (RG) is currently located based on the elements of the spatial correlation matrix of the signal sampled by the TWAA, and a DoA estimation phase, which aims to accurately determine the angular position of the RG in the azimuthal plane. The architecture of the HSNN-DoA module, with different time window lengths in which angular position of RG is recorded, is investigated and compared with the DoA module based on a stand-alone MLP network and the corresponding Root-MUSIC DoA module in terms of accuracy and speed of DoA estimation under variable noise conditions.
Sascha Ketelhut, Ralf Brand, Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken
et al.
Abstract The cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) stands as a fundamental assessment in sports and health science as it is crucial for evaluating physical fitness, tailoring training regimens, and diagnosing health conditions. An essential aspect of this test is that participants exert maximal effort, as insufficient effort can compromise the validity of the results. While reliable results are seen in physically active individuals, reliability may not be guaranteed in exercise-naïve, less fit, and clinical populations lacking experience to exhaust themselves. This can result in inaccurate assessments, misdiagnoses, misinterpretation of intervention results, and unsuitable exercise recommendations. Various strategies, including verbal, audio, and video stimuli, are used to elicit maximal effort in exercise. While music and verbal encouragement are well-studied, non-musical sound, video, virtual reality, and augmented reality remain underexplored, with inconsistent or absent CPET-specific guidelines. Surprisingly, innovative approaches combining multisensory digital methods are notably lacking. Future research should systematically evaluate these strategies to create more immersive and engaging experiences, increasing effort and standardizing encouragement. Adaptive audio-visual methods could improve test reliability, validity, and workflows while enhancing participant enjoyment. Realizing this potential requires interdisciplinary collaboration among sound, graphic, and video designers, exercise physiologists, and psychologists. By moving beyond conventional approaches, CPET could be transformed into a more engaging and effective tool for diverse populations.
Commented article: FENG, Y. N.; JING, P. Transformation of educational introspection: evaluation of the current situation and development of basic music education in China. Trans/Form/Ação: Unesp journal of philosophy, Marília, SP, v. 47, n. 5, p. e02400169, 2024. Available at: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/transformacao/article/view/15091.
Submission: 7/10/2025 – Decision: 12/10/2025 - Revision: 21/10/2025 – Publication: 3/11/2025
Octavia Leahy, Emily Kontaris, Natalie Gunasekara
et al.
IntroductionEnvironmental factors play a critical role in shaping social interactions, and emerging evidence suggests they may also influence inter-brain coupling (IBC). The main purpose of this paper is to systematically review how environmental variables influence IBC during hyperscanning studies of social interactions. Additionally, this article provides an overview of the experimental protocols employed and identifies both opportunities and challenges within this evolving field.MethodsFollowing PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic literature search in the PubMed and Scopus databases to identify relevant articles. Of the 106 articles initially identified, 7 met the inclusion criteria for this review. The selected articles are original research published up to February 2025, each employing hyperscanning techniques to observe IBC in response to manipulated environmental factors. Articles were excluded based on factors such as the absence of environmental manipulation or not measuring IBC as an outcome.ResultsThe findings reveal that IBC is significantly influenced by environmental factors such as interpersonal distance, background noise, virtual reality, and music. These factors modulate neural synchrony in brain regions critical for social cognition.ConclusionThe limited number of studies in this area reflects both the emerging nature of this research field and the challenges associated with experimental protocols and funding. Despite these limitations, this review underscores the crucial role of environmental factors in shaping IBC during social interactions. This growing field holds great potential for guiding the design of supportive social settings and targeted interventions that promote social cohesion and mental wellbeing.
Temporal dynamics are among the cues to expres siveness in music performance in different cultures. In the case of Hindustani music, it is well known that expert vocalists often take liberties with the beat, intentionally not aligning their singing precisely with the relatively steady beat provided by the accompanying tabla. This becomes evident when comparing performances of the same composition such as a bandish. We present a methodology for the quantitative study of differences across performed pieces using computational techniques. This is applied to small study of two performances of a popular bandish in raga Yaman, to demonstrate how we can effectively capture the nuances of timing variations that bring out stylistic constraints along with the individual signature of a performer. This work articulates an important step towards the broader goals of music analysis and generative modelling for Indian classical music performance.
We propose a system to adapt a user's music to their exercise by aligning high-energy music segments with intense intervals of the workout. Listening to music during exercise can boost motivation and performance. However, the structure of the music may be different from the user's natural phases of rest and work, causing users to rest longer than needed while waiting for a motivational section, or lose motivation mid-work if the section ends too soon. To address this, our system, called RISE, automatically estimates the intense segments in music and uses component-based music rearrangement techniques to dynamically extend and shorten different segments of the user's song to fit the ongoing exercise routine. Our system takes as input the rest and work durations to guide adaptation. Currently, this is determined either via a pre-defined plan or manual input during the workout. We evaluated RISE with 12 participants and compared our system to a non-adaptive music baseline while exercising in our lab. Participants found our rearrangements keeps intensity estimation accurate, and many recalled moments when intensity alignment helped them push through their workout.
In recent years, remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have been achieved in the fields of image synthesis and text generation, generating content comparable to that produced by humans. However, the quality of AI-generated music has not yet reached this standard, primarily due to the challenge of effectively controlling musical emotions and ensuring high-quality outputs. This paper presents a generalized symbolic music generation framework, XMusic, which supports flexible prompts (i.e., images, videos, texts, tags, and humming) to generate emotionally controllable and high-quality symbolic music. XMusic consists of two core components, XProjector and XComposer. XProjector parses the prompts of various modalities into symbolic music elements (i.e., emotions, genres, rhythms and notes) within the projection space to generate matching music. XComposer contains a Generator and a Selector. The Generator generates emotionally controllable and melodious music based on our innovative symbolic music representation, whereas the Selector identifies high-quality symbolic music by constructing a multi-task learning scheme involving quality assessment, emotion recognition, and genre recognition tasks. In addition, we build XMIDI, a large-scale symbolic music dataset that contains 108,023 MIDI files annotated with precise emotion and genre labels. Objective and subjective evaluations show that XMusic significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods with impressive music quality. Our XMusic has been awarded as one of the nine Highlights of Collectibles at WAIC 2023. The project homepage of XMusic is https://xmusic-project.github.io.
Swetha Kambham, Hubert Jhonson, Sai Prathap Reddy Kambham
As artificial intelligence becomes more and more ingrained in daily life, we present a novel system that uses deep learning for music recommendation and emotion-based detection. Through the use of facial recognition and the DeepFace framework, our method analyses human emotions in real-time and then plays music that reflects the mood it has discovered. The system uses a webcam to take pictures, analyses the most common facial expression, and then pulls a playlist from local storage that corresponds to the mood it has detected. An engaging and customised experience is ensured by allowing users to manually change the song selection via a dropdown menu or navigation buttons. By continuously looping over the playlist, the technology guarantees continuity. The objective of our system is to improve emotional well-being through music therapy by offering a responsive and automated music-selection experience.
John Arvin V. De Roxas, Daisy O. Casipit, Mercedita M. Reyes
et al.
Objectives: The study aimed to investigate the efficacy of incorporating popular English songs as motivational tools in English grammar instruction among 44 Grade 7 Junior High School students. It focused on students' performance in modals, prepositions, and WH-questions, assessing changes in their motivation for language learning based on the Affective Filter Hypothesis Theory and John Eric Adair’s seven key dimensions of motivation. Method: A quantitative research approach was employed, utilizing a quasi-experimental single-group pretest-posttest design. Participants included 44 Grade 7 students. The study, grounded in the Affective Filter Hypothesis Theory, used Adair’s seven key dimensions of motivation as a framework. Students were tested on modals, prepositions, and WH-questions before and after integrating popular English songs into instruction. Statistical analysis of pretest and posttest results focused on t-values and significance levels (2-tailed, p<0.05) to evaluate the intervention's effectiveness. Results: The study found statistically significant improvements in students' motivation and performance following the use of popular English songs in grammar instruction, with a t-value of -14.766 (2-tailed, p<0.05). The intervention enhanced student engagement and motivation across all seven key dimensions: energy, commitment, perseverance, skill, focus, enjoyment, and responsibility. Students' test performance on modals, WH-questions, and prepositions significantly improved post-intervention. Conclusion: In conclusion, incorporating popular English songs into grammar instruction significantly boosts student motivation and performance in English language learning. This approach not only enhances the understanding of specific grammatical concepts but also creates a more engaging and motivating classroom environment. The findings suggest that using music as a pedagogical tool can effectively advance English language education, particularly in similar educational contexts.
A song's backbone is its chord progressions, a series of chords that improve the harmony and add to the overall composition. For individuals ranging from beginners to creative artists, comprehending and implementing music theory grammar for their own compositions can stifle the music creation process and cause song-writer's block. The existing Chord Progression approaches in the marketplace are limited on producing only pre-selected progressions and often fail to conform to music theory guidelines or provide APIs for other musicians to build on. Because four-chord and eight-chord progressions are yet to be enumerated, Machine learning use-cases that train on chord progressions are limited, and mobile applications don't provide users with unique or unexplored progressions. To address these limitations, a novel Java Algorithm and automated music theory chord progression and variations generator App has been developed. This App offers a piano user interface, that applies music theory to generate all possible four-chord and eight-chord progressions and produces three alternate variations of the generated progressions selected by the user. The Algorithm elucidates 3,297 Total 4-Chord Progressions and 405,216 Total 8-Chord Progressions. Within the 4-Chord Progression pool, there are 1,533 Major 4-chord Progressions and 1,764 Minor 4-Chord Progressions. Within the 8-chord Progression pool, there are 182,094 Major Progressions and 223,122 Minor Progressions. This innovative approach provides musicians with a comprehensive and customizable tool for their music creation, allowing them to develop their signature sounds.
محمد اسحق قطب, سامح محمد السيد حريت, محمود محمد صالح
et al.
The research aims to reveal the intellectual and scientific variables that led to the emergence of interactive sculpture. The study provided an overview of the intellectual variables that affected the emergence of interactive sculpture, theories, scientific discoveries, and technological development in the manufacture of raw materials and tools, which contributed to the availability of raw materials and techniques that helped the sculptor achieve his unconventional artistic ideas in expression and formation. This research follows the descriptive analytical approach, and the study addressed the artistic schools and modern trends. The schools of modern art are part of a series that tracks the potential of sculptural work and its ability to embrace new aesthetic and formation concepts, because the emergence of schools of modern art was part of an attempt to reconcile Western society with urban industrial society. Industrial revolution, openness and development of electronic media, and sculptors used it as a modern material in addition to traditional materials, and it is considered a new state that society has not reached before what is called modernity, and the arts of modernity relied on the idea in general and focused on addressing the mind and made the recipient the focus and goal of it at the same time as he is the bearer of the idea in the first place and its recipient and participant in it, and the study recommends the necessity of paying attention to applying modern theories and artistic schools that care about technological progress within the Department of Art Education as one of the fertile fields that have not yet had their share of application and benefit from it to enrich this field
يهدف البحث الى الكشف عن المتغيرات الفكرية والعلمية التي ادت لظهور النحت التفاعلى حيث قدمت الدارسة نبذة عن المتغيرات الفكرية اثرت على ظهور النحت التفاعلى والنظريات الاكتشافات العلمية والتطور التكنولوجي لصناعة الخامات والأدوات مما ساهم فى توفر الخامات والتقنيات التي ساعدت النحات على تحقيق أفكاره الفنية الغير تقليدية تعبيرياً وتشكيلياً، يتبع هذا البحث المنهج الوصفي التحليلي، وقد تطرقت الدارسة الى المدراس الفنية والاتجاهات الحديثة، تعد مدارس الفن الحديث جزءًا من سلسلة تتتبع إمكانات العمل النحت وقدرته على احتضان مفاهيم جمالية وتشكيلية جديدة، لأن ظهور مدارس الفن الحديث كان جزءًا من محاولة للتوفيق بين المجتمع الغربي والمجتمع الصناعي الحضري. ثورة صناعية، حدث انفتاح وتطور للوسائط الإلكترونية، واستخدمها النحاتون كمادة حديثة بالإضافة إلى المواد التقليدية، وتعتبر حالة جديدة لم يصل إليها المجتمع من قبل ما تسمى الحداثة، واعتمدت فنون الحداثة على الفكرة بشكل عام وركزت على مخاطبة العقل وجعلت من المتلقي محور وهدف لها في ذات الوقت بكونه حاملاً للفكرة بالاساس ومستقبلاً لها ومشاركاً بها، وتوصي الدراسة بضرورة الاهتمام بتطبيق النظريات الحديثة والمدارس الفنية التى تهتم بالتقدم التكنولوجى داخل قسم التربية الفنية كأحد المجالات الخصبة التى لم تنل حظها حتى الان من التطبيق و الاستفادة منها لاثراء هذا المجال
In light of the enduring success of music streaming services, it is noteworthy that an increasing number of users are positively gravitating toward YouTube as their preferred platform for listening to music. YouTube differs from typical music streaming services in that they provide a diverse range of music-related videos as well as soundtracks. However, despite the increasing popularity of using YouTube as a platform for music consumption, there is still a lack of comprehensive research on this phenomenon. As independent researchers unaffiliated with YouTube, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 users who listen to music through YouTube more than three times a week to investigate its usability and interface satisfaction. Our qualitative analysis found that YouTube has five main meanings for users as a music streaming service: 1) exploring musical diversity, 2) sharing unique playlists, 3) providing visual satisfaction, 4) facilitating user interaction, and 5) allowing free and easy access. We also propose wireframes of a video streaming service for better audio-visual music listening in two stages: search and listening. By these wireframes, we offer practical solutions to enhance user satisfaction with YouTube for music listening. These findings have wider implications beyond YouTube and could inform enhancements in other music streaming services as well.
Music generation has attracted growing interest with the advancement of deep generative models. However, generating music conditioned on textual descriptions, known as text-to-music, remains challenging due to the complexity of musical structures and high sampling rate requirements. Despite the task's significance, prevailing generative models exhibit limitations in music quality, computational efficiency, and generalization. This paper introduces JEN-1, a universal high-fidelity model for text-to-music generation. JEN-1 is a diffusion model incorporating both autoregressive and non-autoregressive training. Through in-context learning, JEN-1 performs various generation tasks including text-guided music generation, music inpainting, and continuation. Evaluations demonstrate JEN-1's superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in text-music alignment and music quality while maintaining computational efficiency. Our demos are available at https://jenmusic.ai/audio-demos
Nicolas Lazzari, Andrea Poltronieri, Valentina Presutti
Structure perception is a fundamental aspect of music cognition in humans. Historically, the hierarchical organization of music into structures served as a narrative device for conveying meaning, creating expectancy, and evoking emotions in the listener. Thereby, musical structures play an essential role in music composition, as they shape the musical discourse through which the composer organises his ideas. In this paper, we present a novel music segmentation method, pitchclass2vec, based on symbolic chord annotations, which are embedded into continuous vector representations using both natural language processing techniques and custom-made encodings. Our algorithm is based on long-short term memory (LSTM) neural network and outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques based on symbolic chord annotations in the field.
Nikolaos M. Papadakis, Andreas Zantzas, Konstantinos Lafazanis
et al.
Previous studies have investigated the effect of color on the assessment of loudness in various cases, such as cars, trains, and concert halls. This study sets out to explore the influence of color on the loudness perception of household appliances, in particular in the case of coffee makers. To this end, images of a coffee maker colored in black, red, dark green, light blue, light green, and white were displayed to participants during a magnitude estimation task. In a repeated measures design, the sound of a coffee maker was used synchronously as a stimulus presented in different sound levels (74, 78, 82, and 86 dB LAeq). The sample of participants was selected to be gender balanced and unfamiliar with similar experiments. Statistical analysis suggested that the color of the visual stimulus had no influence on loudness judgments. However, a gender-based statistically significant influence regarding the color of the coffee maker on loudness evaluation was found for females. An interpretation of the results is attempted in the discussion. The results of this study suggest that since there is the possibility of gender differences in the assessment of loudness for household appliances, special care should be taken in similar studies to account for these effects. Finally, these gender differences could possibly be utilized for product sound design and product marketing where the appropriate use of color has been found to be effective.
Мета дослідження – дослідити співвідношення колективно-індивідуальної творчості, що є каталізатором довговікових традицій людської памʼяті, та індивідуально- колективної, спрямованої на екстенсивне новотворення, – інверсії першої з тенденцією до утвердження «акцентуйованого» Я, до новотворення з позитивними і негативними наслідками. Методологія дослідження. Стаття базується на мистецтвознавчих працях, соціологічних дослідженнях сучасних учених та соціологічних експедиційних даних автора статті. Наукова новизна дослідження. Людині було суджено дати поштовх пасивній матерії й дедалі активніше впливати на долю світу. У пошуках протидії стандарту сьогоднішньої урбанізації не випадкове активне звернення до фольклору народів світу, до поетичного, музичного багатства обрядів, звичаїв. У самій колективно-індивідуальній творчості виникають суперечності з моменту втягнення її у вторинні форми репрезентації. Висновки. Механізми фіксації, застосовані до народної творчості, порушують її генетичні автентичні основи. Там, де спонтанні форми фольклору повністю витісняються фіксованими, він по суті припиняє своє існування як автентичний з властивими йому структурними нюансами генетичного відтворення, що позначаються насамперед на його варіативно-модальній природі. Процес редукції цих нюансів прискорюється, якщо надмірно його експлуатувати в системі засобів інформації – по радіо, телебаченню, в гала-концертах. Оптимістичне «галасування» обернеться непоправними втратами – витоптанням і знищенням «фольклорного гумусу», змішанням локальних особливостей фольклору народів світу, систематично втягуваних у «гала-бадьорості», а «допінгування» його розвитку, що схоже на засмічення землі «добривами», призведе до необернених втрат джерельних генетичних властивостей фольклору, всього того, що є найціннішим здобутком народно-національних традицій. Ситуацію віддзеркалює сучасна дійсність, екологічні проблеми й парадокси культури, ідея збереження всього досягнутого століттями, перегляду екстремальних викликів, яким мусить протистояти раціональна ідея і дія проти ірраціональних збочень, що ведуть до втрати елементарних законів етики, моралі, міжконфесійних і міжнаціональних війн, а врешті – до повного хаосу в життєдіяльності й культурі.