Reviews research related to children's musical development. Reports on a study of 125 kindergarten and first-grade students on the impact of modification of timbre and register of musical stimuli. Finds that timbre modification helped children recognize chord changes with first graders identifying more changes than did kindergartners. (CFR)

Discusses a inquiry into the effects of timbre upon college woodwind players' intonational performance and perception. Reports little connection between students' ability to play in tune and to detect intonation problems. Concludes that timbre was significantly related to ability to detect intonation problems but not to the ability to play in…

Investigates the effects of timbre, as a cue, on gender-instrument associations by third-grade students. Indicates that gender-timbre associations were strong for this age group: males were associated with brass instruments and cello; females were associated with flute and violin. Discusses implications of gender-instrument associations for music…

Focuses on the concepts of pitch and timbre of sounds. (PVD)

The present study investigated the influence of acoustical characteristics on the implicit learning of statistical regularities (transition probabilities) in sequences of musical timbres. The sequences were constructed in such a way that the acoustical dissimilarities between timbres potentially created segmentations that either supported (S1) or…

Studies whether young children make consistent gender associations with instrumental timbres when not linked to individual instruments. Finds that the children sampled made consistent masculine/feminine associations for tones presented with some gender-based differences in particular responses. Notes possible interactions between timbre and…

The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesized model of aurally perceived performer-controlled musical factors that influence assessments of performance quality. Previous research studies on musical performance constructs, musical achievement, musical expression, and scale construction were examined to identify the factors that influence…

In this article, the author writes that in online education, students and professors can lose important connections to each other. Obviously distance learning has merits. People who might not other-wise have access to education can take online courses. That is particularly true for women, who must often balance mothering with paid work and find it…

We show that infants' long-term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo- and timbre-specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants…

For this study, five hypotheses were formulated stating that ability to identify melodic intervals during music dictation is not affected by (1) the differences in timbre, (2) the use of familiar or unfamiliar timbres (MAJOR), (3) formal ear training experience (FETE), or (4) playing/performing experience on an instrument (PPEM), and (5) that…

Reports on a study of 60 undergraduate and graduate preservice music teachers and their ability to detect performance errors. Finds that subjects identified errors of rhythm and timbre more correctly than errors of voice placement. Recommends that music education programs move from a piano-centered ear-training experience to the heterogeneous…

"Musical imagery" is the experience of imagining music in the "mind's ear". A study was conducted to explore the prevalence and nature of musical imagery for music students in everyday life, using experience-sampling methods (ESM). As a group, music students reported that imagining music was a very frequent form of musical…

The consistent, but often wrong, impressions people form of the size of unseen speakers are not random but rather point to a consistent misattribution bias, one that the advertising, broadcasting, and entertainment industries also routinely exploit. The authors report 3 experiments examining the perceptual basis of this bias. The results indicate…

This study examines the essential role of texture in French spectral music and its contribution to musical evolution and form in specific works by Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Philippe Hurel, and Kaija Saariaho. The use of texture in French spectral music is placed in a historical context by exploring the new ways that texture is employed in…

It was hypothesized that individuals who can easily detect differences in the timbre of tone would be more likely to appreciate musical instruments with more complex sound waves, and that the degree of this tendency would be directly proportional to the length of time one has played the instrument. (Authors)