Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of…

Commodore Perry and his "Black Ships" opened Japanese harbors for foreign shipping in 1853 and 1854. Music was important for this Japan Expedition that obtained a treaty between the United States and Japan. Bands and singers performed music for parades, impressive ceremonies, religious services, and entertainment for the sailors and…

This article relies on events interpreted within an ethnographic study of school parties in Aracaju, Brazilian Northeast, in which students embody drag-queens inspired by videoclips of international pop singers. Conceptual resonances from queer black esthetics and neomaterial feminist perspectives will be irregularly mixed with "divas'"…

Building physical models is a natural activity for children and provides a context for lessons on two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) shapes. However, children do not think of their models as prisms, cylinders, and pyramids. Their creations are spaceships, tunnels, castles, and nets on the floor. Creating these types of shapes with…

Accommodation centres for those seeking asylum present particular contexts in which to facilitate music making. Contextual and systemic difficulties abound. An exploration of a music project within six asylum seeker centres in Ireland is presented with a focus on the experiences of the four facilitators involved. Data are presented from…

The purpose of this case study was to evaluate the elementary general music education majors' perceptions of preparedness, interest, and comfort with the choral skills presented in a choral methods course. Thirty elementary general music education majors (N = 30) enrolled in a choral methods course responded to a pre- and post-course survey.…

Under controlled conditions, we assessed acoustically (long-term average spectra) and perceptually (singer survey, listener survey) six performances of an soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (SATB) choir ("N" = 27) as it sang the same musical excerpt on two portable riser units (standard riser step height, taller riser step height) with…

Pandemic teaching during COVID-19 has further magnified the unsustainable and fraught nature of teaching across schools and universities worldwide (Singer 2020). The remote turn to emergency remote teaching (ERT)--so-called "Zoom University" (Martin et al. 2020)--brings with it immense challenges of access, equity, outreach, and mental…

This paper argues that applied ethics can itself be morally problematic. As illustrated by the case of Peter Singer's criticism of social practice, morally loaded communication by applied ethicists can lead to protests, backlashes, and aggression. By reviewing the psychological literature on self-image, collective identity, and motivated reasoning…

One-to-one lessons based on the master-apprentice model are recognised in research and practice as an indispensable foundation for the training of professional musicians including singers. Given its primary importance to musician training, it is essential that researchers of this pedagogical model adopt methodologies and methods well-suited to…

This article examines the recontextualization of traditional Mongolian verbal art "khuuriin ülger" ('fiddle story') by Mongolian folk singers in the context of the spread of COVID-19 in Inner Mongolia, China. Drawing on the concept of intertextuality, I analyze the verbal and visual signs in 94 videos of Mongolian fiddle stories. The…

The delicate question of teaching ethics in compulsory school regained urgency in Sweden in 2013 when national tests were introduced in religious education, of which ethics is a part. In this article, a variety of ethical competences that teachers want their students to develop are presented, based on group interviews with 46 teachers. Grounded…

Zadok Adolu-Otojoka (b. 1932) is one of the prominent music educators and professional performers in the recent history of arts education in East Africa. A Ugandan by nationality, Adolu-Otojoka has served in different professional capacities as music educator, opera singer, folk musician, dancer, composer, and education/culture administrator, at…

A spectrogram of a singer's vibrato presents a striking way to introduce students to frequency, Fourier spectra, and modulation. Vibrato is discussed from the perspectives of the physicist and the musician. A dramatic spectrogram is included where coauthor soprano Michel suppresses her vibrato so that acoustical characteristics can be compared to…

This article reports analysis of interviews with 85 boys from England, Greece, Ireland and Spain about the voice change, school singing and choral music instruction. Consistent, former and self-described non-singers were included. Data suggest consistency with much of the existing narrative literature about the experience of voice change. Unique…