• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.67-83
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• 2013

Assessment in music therapy is a vital part for both the therapist and client in the process of therapy. Based on what is assessed, objectives are identified to formulate specific action procedures and strategies. The existing assessment tools involve lists of skills and behaviors in developmental domains without the music assessment protocol. In this study, the authors attempted to develop an assessment protocol using rhythm production for assessing skills in cognitive and emotional-behavior domain, namely Music Therapy Assessment for Cognitive and Emotional Behaviors (MACEB). The test items of the MACEB-Rhythm were developed using rhythmic patterns varying in terms of item difficulty, which are based on the various degree of clarity in the grouping/gestalt, saliency in part-whole relationship, and complexity in repetition vs. variability. Also the developed tool purported to examine one's level of emotional behavior trait by analyzing performance of musical parameters such as tempo, pacing, and loudness in the reproduced output. In order to verify the logical sequencing of test items, firstly 61 subjects participated in verifying the item difficulty for the selected 15 pilot items. The test items were revised and re-sequenced based on the gathered scores of item difficulty. In the second procedure, seven experts in the fields of music education, music therapy and music psychology whose research interest lie in music cognition revised the developed rhythm protocol items focusing on learning sequence, cognitive process and feasibility for skills assessment. The study attempted to provide foundations for using rhythm as an assessment protocol prior to its verification of assessment validity and reliability.

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.59-68
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• 2006

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic guidelines for listening and analyzing GIM music literature. Many GIM practitioners have developed listening guidelines for GIM music literature, however, there needs to be a more structured guidelines and criteria for beginning GIM trainees. This paper has utilized the psychoanalytic and existential analysis of musical elements suggested by Bruscia, which focuses on the rhythmic and tonal components of musical elements. These components deal with the energy level and emotional depth embedded in the music, which are important essences in imagery experiences. The paper further reviewed various approaches of analyzing music which are musical, phenomenological, and heuristic. These approaches include both musical analysis and analyzer's subjective experiences of music. However, it is more essential firstly to understand the basic musical criteria in relation to psychoanalytic and existential aspects before going into subjective experiences of music listening for the beginning GIM trainees.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.11 no.1 s.30
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• pp.3-14
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• 2006

Music summarization means a technique which automatically generates the most importantand representative a part or parts ill music content. The techniques of music summarization have been studied with two categories according to summary characteristics. The first one is that the repeated part is provided as music summary and the second provides the combined segments which consist of segments with different characteristics as music summary in music content In this paper, we propose and evaluate two kinds of music summarization techniques. The algorithm using multi-level vector quantization which provides a repeated part as music summary gives fixed-length music summary is evaluated by overlapping ration between hand-made repeated parts and automatically generated summary. As results, the overlapping ratios of conventional methods are 42.2% and 47.4%, but that of proposed method with fixed-length summary is 67.1%. Optimal length music summary is evaluated by the portion of overlapping between summary and repeated part which is different length according to music content and the result shows that automatically-generated summary expresses more effective part than fixed-length summary with optimal length. The cluster-based algorithm using 2-D similarity matrix and k-means algorithm provides the combined segments as music summary. In order to evaluate this algorithm, we use MOS test consisting of two questions(How many similar segments are in summarized music? How many segments are included in same structure?) and the results show good performance.

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2004

Being engaged in the musical tasks needs cognitive skills to perceive musical sound, organize them into meaningful unit, store them in the memory and retrieve them when needed. These skills are also required for academic tasks indicating that there is positive correlation between skills for musical and academic tasks. Based on these findings, the study purported to examine whether the developed sessions can enhance cognitive skills which is composed of auditory information skills, which is composed of perceiving sounds, organizing them into groups based on the existing information or organization pattern, and short-term memory skills. Eighteen elementary students in 4, 5, and 6th grades have participated in the study. The study has administered Music Cognitive Skills Test(MCST) before and after implementing music therapy sessions. The MCST consisted of five parts, first one measuring the rhythm imitating skills, second, measuring the melodic imitation skills, third, measuring discriminative skills in identifying higher pitch, fourth, measuring discriminative skills in identifying identical chords, and lastly, measuring the tone retention skills. The results indicated that there was statistical difference between the pre and post test in rhythm and melody imitation skills. Because reproduction of perceived rhythm patterns requires memory skills, imitating patterns are considered cognitive skills. Also melody is defined adding spatial dimension to the rhythm which is temporal concept. Being able to understand melodic pattern and to reproduce the pattern also requires cognitive skills. The subjects have shown significant improvement in these two areas. In other areas, there were definite increase of scores, however, no significant differences. The study also explores interpretation of these results and also observed consistencies among the participants in completing the musical tasks.