Exploring the intersection of culture, consciousness, and physicality, this book introduces a Physical Culture Theory that views culture as a self-organizing pattern of electric forces. It emphasizes the role of music as a key example, integrating acoustics, psychology, and ethnology into a cohesive framework. The theory rejects the divide between nature and nurture, proposing that all cultural phenomena are interconnected systems. It also advocates for ethical considerations in culture and arts as fundamental human rights, aiming to expand these concepts across various fields in the future.
This unique reference book offers a holistic description of the multifaceted field of systematic musicology, which is the study of music, its production and perception, and its cultural, historical and philosophical background. The seven sections reflect the main topics in this interdisciplinary subject. The first two parts discuss musical acoustics and signal processing, comprehensively describing the mathematical and physical fundamentals of musical sound generation and propagation. The complex interplay of physiology and psychology involved in sound and music perception is covered in the following sections, with a particular focus on psychoacoustics and the recently evolved research on embodied music cognition. In addition, a huge variety of technical applications for professional training, music composition and consumer electronics are presented. A section on music ethnology completes this comprehensive handbook. Music theory and philosophy of music are imbedded throughout. Carefully edited and written by internationally respected experts, it is an invaluable reference resource for professionals and graduate students alike.
Nonlinearities are foundational in musical systems, encompassing instruments, timbre, rhythm perception and production, and neural networks involved in music perception. This volume reviews past and present research in these areas. In Musical Acoustics, nonlinearities in instruments often yield musically intriguing features, as tone production arises from synchronization and self-organization within the instruments. The suggested Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF) serves as an iterative framework applicable to all musical instruments, effectively reproducing complex and perceptually significant initial transients. In Music Psychology, nonlinearities influence various musical features, including pitch, timbre, and rhythm perception. Self-organizing models uniquely explain sudden phase transitions during rhythm production and tapping. Neural networks, both Kohonen and connectionist types, can replicate tonality, timbre similarities, and musical phrases. The volume also explores signal processing tools for nonlinear sound analysis, utilizing methods in the Fourier domain, such as Wavelets and correlograms, and in the phase-space domain, including fractal dimensions and information structures. Additionally, it introduces Physical Modeling of instruments using Finite-Element and Finite-Difference methods to address the complexity of instrument bodies and wave couplings. Ultimately, it concludes that most musical systems are self-org
In the volume perspectives on current trends in Systematic Musicology as well as aspects of disciplinary history are presented along with results from current research. Contributions to this volume, covering a broad range of areas, are organized into four sections: theory, methodology, and disciplinary history, musical acoustics (including modelling and signal processing) and organology, music psychology, neuromusicology, music theory and analysis, and ethnomusicology and folk music studies. In the first section, leading scholars in the field contemplate future trends in Systematic Musicology viewed as a proactive science, on the one hand, while reflecting its development (and that of Comparative Musicology, a discipline that has been close to Systematic Musicology from the beginning), on the other. The second section offers a number of articles that report results from research undertaken in musical acoustics making use of up-to-date methodology, plus some articles that are devoted to organology from an historical point of view. In the third section, contributions deal with statistical methods in music psychology, music perception and cognition as well as aspects of music theory and analysis. Section four is devoted to ethnomusicology and folk music research; while some of the articles deal with theoretical issues, others offer findings obtained from field work. This volume also contains a bio-biographical appendix.
Computational Mechanics of the Classical Guitar describes a new dynamic paradigm in instrument acoustics based on time-dependent transient analysis and simulation of complete musical instruments. It describes the current state of theoretical and experimental research into the guitar for engineers, instrument makers and musicians. This includes a summary of the basic equations for the mechanics of vibrating bodies and a presentation of the FDM (finite difference method) model with which the true vibrational behaviour of the instrument as an entire system can be understood for the first time. This monograph presents various new theoretical and experimental results and insights into guitar playing such as the coupling between the strings and the top plate or a description of the finger noise made when the fingers slide over the strings before plucking.
