To what extent does the relationship between music and identity play a role in ethnomusicology? In which way can the findings of ethnomusicological research dealing with the many music cultures of the world contribute to the ongoing debate on this issue in other disciplines like music psychology? By drawing on examples from various African, Asian, and Latin American cul­tures as well as from jazz, the present paper will try to provide an overview of the role of music in creating and marking identity from a cross-cultural perspective. Processes resulting from or shaped by globalization will also have to be taken into account.

The aim of this study is the direct transformation of the open-earedness hy­pothesis into straightforward experimental hypotheses. Open-earedness re­ fers to the premise that young children have more tolerant attitudes towards unconventional music. Several previous studies on this topic are critically evaluated. An experimental design for the four grades in primary school was then developed to reveal transitions from high to lower open-earedness by means of a priori contrasts. With a „sounding questionnaire" 186 pupils gave judgements of liking for musical examples of different genres (classi­cal, avantgarde, ethnic, and popular music). The results revealed a decline in open-earedness between grades one and two. Surprisingly, this decline was based on the judgements for classical music. This result does not agree with a data re-analysis of Schellberg & Gembris (2003) which showed a decline between grades three and four. Finally, the suitability of the present cross-sectional design and the operationalization of „unconventional" music are discussed.

This paper explores individual evaluations of popular music, especially the relevance of emotional qualities with regard to the experience and evalua­tion of music. To elucidate common patterns of evaluation more than 1.000 customer reviews retrieved from the websites of the international online trader Amazon are examined with regard to different dimensions of judge­ment by means of qualitative content analysis. The reviews concern ten es­pecially successful pop and rock records. Quantitative methods support and extend the results. One outcome is that emotional qualities are of central importance for the concluding evaluation in many customer reviews. Two very different clusters of criteria emerge: first, „feeling" (containing the sub-categories „full of feeling, personal expression, intensity", „relaxation", and „beauty"), and second, „energy" (containing the sub-categories „physi­cal activation, powerful, rocks" as well as „fun, party, positive mood"). The paper depicts the lay-reviewers' views on these categories and shows which of the attributed qualities lead to positive evaluations in concrete examples. Concluding, the results are brought in relation to other historic aesthetics and are interpreted with reference to current philosophical-aesthetic theory.

A row of studies indicate that a preference for hard music correlates with sensation seeking and psychoticism, also with risk factors like suicidal ten­dency and depression. Nevertheless, different aspects speak against a direct relation between personality and the called variable. Thus forms of the ap­plication of music for emotion regulation by listeners of hard music up to now were not quantitatively studied. With the present study it should be examined, to what extent „real" heavy metal fans differ in their health, per­sonality, self-image and different modulation strategies from listeners of „normal" music and followers of hard music. Besides, it should be exam­ined whether the results from the literature are transferable. 200 visitors of heavy metal festivals, 117 students with a preference for pop music and 181 with a preference for hard music were instructed to complete the SKI, PANAS, BIS/BAS-Scale, a short version of the EPP-D psychoticism scale as well as the IAAM. Differences were calculated by means of MANOVA, correlation analyses and discriminant analysis.The results point to the fact that heavy metal fans do have no remarkable problems in health (p > 0.05). Furthermore they are less compulsive, more cooperative (SKI), having higher positive and negative affect (PANAS), positive drive (BAS), are more impulsive (p < 0.05) and do not have higher sensation seeking scores (P­ EPP-D).The analyses of the IAAM scales are showing that heavy metal fans use increasingly music in the everyday life for positive and negative emotion modulation (p < 0.05). Correlation analyses results in an age dependency of the strategy on modulating a negative strain (p < 0.05), but not in other strategies. Besides, all together strong gender differences exists. The discriminant analysis points to the fact that the existing research results may not be transferred to real metal fans and should be roofed anew.

Currently, the German classical music audience comprises of a disproportionate number of elderly people compared to the population as a whole. Until now, this situation's implications for the size of future audiences re­mained unclear: Will the classical music audience gradually die out in the coming decades? Or does the family- or work-related situation temporarily restrain the younger adults from attending classical music concerts? Sound data analyses described in this contribution suggest that the classical music listeners and hence the audience of live performances follow a cohort, rather than an age or life course effect. With the emergence of pop/rock music after World War II the conditions of musical socialization seem to have changed in favor of pop/rock music and clearly have stacked odds against classical music. Based only on the demographic transition in Germany between 1993/94 and 2004/05, an increase of 1.0 million visitors of classical music concerts was to be expected, but changes in other influence factors such as musical taste caused a counteracting 4.4 million persons drop-resulting in an overall decline of 3.4 million persons.

The experiments from 2002 follow the work of Bharucha and Stoeckig (1986, 1987). They play major and minor chords which had to be distin­guished as fast as possible. The present experiment was able to report results more precisely. (1) Decisions were much faster than in any other up to now reported harmony experiment. (2) A tonal prime prolonges response times significantly. (3) Response times longer than 450 ms provide evidence for the fact that the distance between chords is represented mentally by fifths. (4) Minor chords cause particularly differing tonal structures: lt seems as if minor chords activate related major tonalities. (5) Response times less than 440 ms are not affected by the tonality of a prime.

The present study investigated the development of tonal understanding and its relation to nonmusical abilities like general intelligence and visual-spa­tial processing. Five-to ten-year-old children were tested with the probe tone method to assess tonal comprehension (e.g. Krumhansl, 1990). Listeners provided a goodness-of-fit-rating for different probe tones as an ending of short melodies. General cognitive abilities and visual-spatial processing were assessed with the Culture FairTest (CFT 20-R, Weiß, 2006, and CFT 1, Cat­ tell et al., 1997) and the Mosaik-Test (HAWIK-111, Tewes et al., 2000, and HAWIVA, Eggert, 1976). Results indicated an age related increase in inter­nalization of the diatonic scale structure of Western music. There was only little evidence for a relationship between tonal comprehension and visual­ spatial processing. However, children with a higher level of tonal understanding showed a strong association between tonal comprehension and abstract reasoning. Implications of this result in relation to strategy changes in the probe tone method are discussed.