Psychological studies have shown that the performer's body movements provide an important source of information for the perception of a musical performance. lndeed, it has been shown that visual information can provide even experienced musicians with a stronger indication of a performer's explicit expressive intention than sound information. The research in this article focused on a single case study of a solo pianist to discover how the body moves during performances and which movements provide salient visual cues to the observers. Analysis of three differently intentioned performances of the same piece of music revealed that a single pianist used varying types of identifiable movement and degrees of movement. There were connections between the size of movement and the degree of expressive intention in the performances, with the most expressive performance producing the greatest degree of movement. Additionally, certain locations in the musical structure were found to elicit particulartypes of expressive movements, for example, making a decisive surging forward movement as a cadence point was reached. But links between the type and size of movement and musical structure were not simple. For instance, expressive information was more apparent in certain areas of the body than others; on some occasions movements were of a similar nature across the three performance intentions, whereas at other times the movement were different, despite being at identical structural points in the music. These results are not straight forward, and so the current paper concludes with a discussion of what the findings imply about the nature of bodily expression in performance.

The process of music-making requires a high degree of specific self-observation and self-control. The goal of the present investigation was therefore to ascertain the degree of self-consciousness as a personality trait of musicians during training. 197 music students at the Freiburg Conservatory filled in two questionnaires ("Fragebogen zur Erfassung dispositionaler Selbstaufmerksamkeit" and "Epidemiologischer Fragebogen für Musikstudenten"). The music students as a whole do not differ from other students with the regard to private and public self-consciousness. Music students whose playing-related problems are partly psychological and who use physical training methods, show a significantly higher degree of private self-consciousness than students who use no training method and have no or predominantly physical problems. lt seems that with music students, the degree of private self-consciousness plays a significant role in motivation to prevent playing-related problems.

This article reports two experiments regarding the nature of musical working memory. According to Baddeley (1986) there are two existing subsystems: a verbal-auditory and a visuo-spatial one. The question is whether musical working memory has its own subsystem or uses one of the two well examined subsystems. The experiments showed relatively little reduction of performance of a musical memory task when a verbal secondary task was added. This disruption was caused by task difficulty not by verbal interference. Tue participation of visuo-spatial processes or structures can not be excluded and requires further consideration. The analyses indicated that melody and rhythm are not separately processed regarding the two subsystems, verbal and spatial. The degree of disruption of the melody task corresponded to that of the rhythm task. The resulting data was in agreement with the assumption of an independent musical subsystem. The findings are discussed in relation to other research in musical working memory.

This study investigates two sources of data on stereotypical emotion categories in every-day contexts and in music. The first set of data consists of subjective ratings of a series of emotion words. Three separate questions were presented to subjects, namely to what extent music (1) represents, (2) evokes, and (3) influences a given emotion. Averaged profiles of subjective ratings were found highly correlated. A number of significant differences among individual items with respect to type of question were observed. The second set of data was derived from a database, which stores 2933 lyrics from German Songs and Lieder over various centuries. Word fields instead of single entries were used in the retrieval process. Frequencies of emotion categories in lyrics and subjective ratings were significantly correlated. Results suggest that music represents or evokes primarily those emotions, which are either genetically coded or learned early in infancy. Basic emotions in everyday-life and in music are comparable to the extent that specific aspects of learning of social codes are negligible.

In this study, we tried to find out whether listening to music can change the thermal pain threshold and influence the natural process of sensibilization (i. e. continuous falling of the pain threshold during the time of stimulation). We also examined the influence of additional variables, namely sex, status of musician or non-musician, emotional and cognitive pain-management and coping strategies of the subjects, and concerning music, style, tempo and volume. We used an apparatus very similar to what is known as the HardyDolorimeter, which induces pain by radiation heat. As a measure of stimulus intensity we took the subject's skin temperature. Tue thermal pain threshold could be significantly raised by listening to music, as could the process of sensibilization be prevented. Based on the Gate-Control Theory (Melzack & Wall 1965), the study suggests that listening to music might serve as a cognitive coping strategy which can increase pain tolerance. Obviously, different ways of listening and different degrees of paying attention to music play an important role.

Various styles of Afro-American influenced Popular Music characteristically rely on micro-rhythmical organisation. The kinetic energy of the music, the motional and emotional effects of the musical process, depend on phenomenas like groove, drive and swing. So far, there hasn't been much research on these in music psychology. Whereas there are some preliminary studies in Popular Music and Jazz Studies, which concentrate on the analysis of micro-rhythmical variation against the metronomical beat, especially in ensemble playing, emphasising the perceptual importance of these variations. This paper presents a survey of these studies, which contribute some new aspects and approaches to the research of performance.