Rethinking Gender and Music Education

Koelsch et al. claim that irregular musical events give rise to emotional responses. The emotional response elicited by an unexpected harmony can be enhanced when perceived in a musical context played with emotional expression. The neural mechanisms of music-syntactic processing operate independently of the emotional factors communicated by musical performance.1 Sandor maintains that the art of piano playing begins at the point when we can translate the score into the motion patterns necessary for the communication of the subtlest musical impulses: the art of piano technique begins at the point where technical problems have already been resolved and where a sophisticated technique serves the creative purposes of the interpreter. The mechanics of piano playing ought to be completely painless, enjoyable, and gratifying whether one practices or concertizes. The piano responds to one's technique, and it produces sounds accordingly, has all the expressiveness of the clavichord and can be louder than the harpsichord, is limited in the amount of sound it can produce and in the responsiveness of its mechanism, and is a percussion instrument and notes tend to sound isolated from one another.2 Zbikowski asserts that the same musical structures that serve as sonic analogues for the movements of the dancer provide the basis for musical understanding even if one does not know the dance: listening leads philosophy past sound and past resonance to music as the place where sound and resonance become complete. Music is somewhat exceptional in its lack of an essential visual or proprioceptive component. The kind of consciousness associated with attending to music is different from the kind of consciousness associated with attending to language. Musical practice includes sounds, kinesthetic experiences, and the emotions associated with both (the kind of consciousness summoned by music is a testament to what it means to be human in the fullest sense of the word).3Huddleston and Zhang put it that that complete pieces of music can be created according to personal definitions of creativity without direct human involvement in the evolutionary process. Musical GAs are grouped by their methods of fitness evaluation and the scope of the music they attempt to create. GAs with objective fitness measures require all objective rules to be statically defined before evaluation can begin. A user-defined compositional structure can be easily solved by a simple GA in piecemeal to construct complete rhythmic pieces. Evaluating creativity in musical genetic algorithms (GAs) requires a balance between objective and subjective fitness measures.4Music listeners may have a superior ability to discriminate between, recognize and verbalize different sound qualities. Music listeners find vocal quality difficult to articulate.5 Robinson contends that some music has the power to affect our feelings without much, if any, cognitive mediation: emotions vary in degree of cognitive content, the expression of a feeling by music can sometimes be explained straightforwardly in terms of the arousal of that feeling, whereas a piece of instrumental music can express attitudes or emotions in its (implied) author, and can be sad in a boring mindless inexpressive way or in a more revealing and expressive way (music frequently affects us emotionally: it evokes or arouses emotions in us).6 Everything that we listen to constitutes part of our musical training. The conception that music has a power to alter people is the main social impact of music. Improvised music is created through, interpreted by, and negotiated in human relationships. In the process and experience of improvised music, social relationships are created, being part of society.7Emotion perception in music relies on shared acoustic and neural mechanisms, musical experience influences the neural processing of affective speech-related events, whereas auditory expertise results in subcortical sensory processing malleability of pitch and timing. …