Yearbook-Archive: Vol 7 (1990)
Vol 7 (1990): Musikpsychologie – Empirische Forschungen - Ästhetische Experimente / Music psychology - Empirical Research - Aesthetic Experiments [*]
Volume 7 was edited by Klaus-Ernst Behne, Günter Kleinen und Helga de la Motte-Haber.
The printed volume was published by Hogrefe in 1990. The rights of use were reacquired by DGM and the contributions were republished here in 2020 as an OpenAccess publication for free, unrestricted use under the CC-BY 4.0 licence.
All contributions are available as searchable PDF files, have a DOI and are searchable in the PubPsych/PSYNDEX database. Contribution titles and abstracts are consistently given in German and English.
Titles and abstracts marked with [*] have been automatically translated from the original language with www.deepl.com.
Research Reports
Bewußtseinswirkungen und Heilsbotschaften der Musik. Eine Bilderauswertung unter kommunikationskritischen Gesichtspunkten Consciousness effects and healing messages of music. An evaluation of the pictures under communication-critical aspects [*]
The content analysis of pictures, painted by children aged between 6 and 16 about the theme "music communicates" opens a deep insight into their musical life worlds. The pictures are partly commented by the pupils. This enables the author to give authentic interpretations. Texts and pictures give a subjective sight of things. The music market dominates the musical preferences of the pupils. The most common situation is a pop group on stage. Playing musical instruments occurs more often than listening to music by headphones or other technical media. And attending a live concert furthermore has a very high attractiveness. But music, especially music transmitted by technical media is experienced as means to escape from the grey everyday life and to give a warm human feeling. With a sample of 1075 pictures out of a larger corpus it becomes possible to compute the connection between sociographic variables like age and sex and the depicted situations of communication. With age the typical situations change from different forms of musical performance to dreams and reflections created by the modern music media. From a theoretical background this change can be labeled as "cultural mutation" (Kurt Blaukopf), brought up by technical media and leading to a reduced sense of reality. To be alone with technical media nevertheless means a social situation, and music consuming may be characterized as a form of communication. Music is the dream of love and of a better life. Even if produced and presented by technical equipment music is perceived as a symbol of nature, which may give the experience of a safe and sound world. Aspects of a reduced communication, the ideology of nature and the illusion of making the world more humane are criticized.
Was ist prototypische Rockmusik? Zum Zusammenhang zwischen Prototypikalität, Komplexität und ästhetischem Urteil What is prototypical rock music? On the connection between prototypicity, complexity and aesthetic judgement [*]
This investigation deals with the influence of complexity and prototypicality of music on the aesthetic-evaluative judgment. 37 pieces of music were played to 74 college-aged subjects in a balanced incomplete block design . The pieces varied on a Jazz-Rock continuum. The results did not show any connections between the estimations of prototypicality with regard to Jazz and Rock Music and the evaluative judgments, whereas a negative relation was found between complexity, resp. unfamiliarity and the evaluative judgments. A further study investigated , what features are prototypical for Rock Music . In a Q-sort, 38 subjects sorted 100 attributes. The results hint at a prevailing use of attributes describing positively experienced activation. A concluding discussion suggests considering prototypicality and complexity as determinants of a two-stage process of evaluation. This research project was partly funded by the University of Bielefeld.
Einige Aspekte der Wirkung von Gongs. Lautstärkeänderung und Gefühlswahrnehmung Some aspects of the effect of gongs. Volume change and emotional perception [*]
In recent years therapists have begun to explore the possibilities offered by the many different gongs and tam-tams developed by the various cultures of Asia. States of trance can be produced as well as various emotional responses. However, as yet no empirical work has been carried out in this field. An initial study has therefore been carried out with a tarn-tarn to measure the emotional effects of loudness. A questionnaire was used with nine scales: joy, sadness aggression, balance, lethargy, stimulation, drama, anxiety, transcendence. However, responses did not simply increase linearly with loudness. Louder playing led to a polarisation of responses among the group of listeners, especially for the scales anxiety and aggression. To explain this, the hypothesis of personal disposition is proposed. Further work will be done to prove that.
Situationsbezogene Präferenzen und erwünschte Wirkungen von Musik Situation-related preferences and desired effects of music [*]
The study reported in this paper is part of a greater project dealing with the following questions: 1. How do musical preferences differ in situations of different mood? 2. What functions does music have in emotionally different situations and what musical effects are desired by the listener? 3. Are there correlations between musical preferences and functions in certain situations on the one hand and personality variables on the other hand? In this pilot study a description of four emotionally different situations was presented to 46 subjects. Preferences and personality variables were measured by paper and pencil tests. The results indicate: 1 . preferences are not stable, but vary depending on the kind of situation; 2. there are different patterns of preferences within a certain situation connected with different functions of music; 3. apparently there are complex patterns of correlations between personality variables and musical preferences in different situations.
Zur kommunikativen Wirkung von Singstimmen The communicative effect of singing voices [*]
Central thesis of this empirical investigation is the assumption that the process of receiving vocal singing can be described by theories Thun 1985). Adapted from Schulz von Thun we describe the. four communicational aspects: - selfdisclosure of the singing person (qualities of his person, voice and sound) - formal content and information (text and formal musical elements) - relationship (attidudes of the recipient towards the singer) - appealing effects (the aim and intention of the song). We tried to measure these communicational aspects by the method of seman tic differential. We include 5 singers, each singer with two songs from different styles of music. These 10 items were rated by three groups differing in age and sociological background. The result confirmed our thesis: different singers and songs can well be discriminated just as the judgements by the different sociological groups. One of our major results consists of creating an operational index for assessing the communicational competence of the singer. We defined two aspects of this competence: - pregnancy of performing - interpretative competence.
Neurophysiologische Verlaufsuntersuchungen zum Musiksinn unter dem Einfluß psychiatrischer Krankheiten Neurophysiological studies of the sense of music under the influence of psychiatric diseases [*]
The study shows that psychiatric disease implies a breakdown in the expression and reception of music.
Musikalische Rezeptionsstrategien und Differenziertheit des musikalischen Urteils in verschiedenen sozialen Situationen Musical reception strategies and differentiation of musical judgement in different social situations [*]
The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between social situations and individual strategies of music appreciation and perception. Based on a theory of the social use of music four more or less restrictive situations of music appreciation and perception are constructed by different types of open questions. They differ with respect to whether the music under issue is familiar to the subjects, whether it is heard and whether the subjects are explicitly encouraged to perceive thoroughly and to verbalize. Statements on music in the four situations are compared in terms of five perceptional strategies: orientation along primary components (melody, harmony, rhythm, structure), secondary components (instrumentation, vocals, sound, genre/style, special effects), contents, emotional estimation, the use of music. Data from students in grades four to ten are analyzed by means of t-test. The findings of this study are: The less restrictive a situation is the greater is the variety of applied perceptional strategies and the more it stimulates perception. The selection of perceptional strategies differs with situational conditions ; i. e. in different situations different perceptional strategies are dominant.
Der Einfluß grafischer vs. verbal-analytischer kognitiver Strukturierung beim Erlernen eines Musikstücks The influence of graphical vs. verbal-analytical cognitive structuring when learning a piece of music [*]
In an experiment the following methods of learning were compared: group "A" learned a piece of music only mentally by heart under the condition of a given verbal analysis and group "B" learned mentally by using a coloured-graphic analysis. The results showed that the non-verbal, coloured-graphic analysis group "B" reached the larger achievement . We concluded that the traditional kind of analysis does not effectively support the learning of a piece of music by heart. This could be a suggestion for the music theory to develop other kinds of analysis which could be better applied for learning by musicians.
Beethovens Metronomisierungsproblem Beethoven's metronomization problem [*]
There are two experiments reported. Experiment 1 shows that musicians have a different frame of reference for the tempo of a musical piece. Experiment 2 shows that the assessment of the musical tempo is very complex depending on general factors of musical interpretation.