Linking vestibular, tactile, and somatosensory rhythm perception to language development in infancy.

First experiences with rhythm occur in the womb, with different rhythmic sources being available to the human fetus. Among sensory modalities, vestibular, tactile, and somatosensory perception plays a crucial role in early processing. However, a limited number of studies so far have specifically focused on VTS rhythms in language development. The present work investigated VTS rhythmic abilities and their role in language acquisition through two experiments with 45 infants (21 females, sex assigned at birth; M age = 661.6 days, SD = 192.6) with middle/high socioeconomic status. Specifically, 37 infants from the original sample completed Experiment 1, assessing VTS rhythmic abilities through a vibrotactile tool for music perception. In Experiment 2, linguistic abilities were evaluated in 40 participants from the same cohort, specifically testing phonological and prosodic processing. Discrimination abilities for rhythmic and linguistic stimuli were inferred from changes in pupil diameter to contingent visual stimuli over time, through a Tobii X-60 eye-tracker. The predictive effect of VTS rhythmic abilities on linguistic processing and the developmental changes occurring across ages were explored in the 32 infants who completed both Experiments 1 and 2 by means of generalized, additive and linear, mixed-effect models. Results are discussed in terms of cross-sensory (i.e., haptic to hearing) and cross-domain (i.e., music to language) effects of rhythm on language acquisition, with implications for typical and atypical development.

Co-designed mini-games for children with visual impairment: a pilot study on their usability.

Digital games aimed at improving cognitive and/or motor-sensory skills need to be carefully designed to take into account the characteristics and needs of particular categories of users. Several novel mini-games explicitly aimed at children with visual impairment (VI) were co-designed by a multidisciplinary team which involved computer engineers and a therapy team from the Robert Hollman Foundation (Padova, Italy). These games are played by children moving within a large-scale interactive environment - i.e., a floor portion placed under a motion capture system capable of tracking one or more people - with the game linking the players movements to the audio and visual output to produce meaningful interactions. We report on a pilot study of the usability of the system involving 11 children with VI. The results allowed us to improve the system and to define a set of guidelines useful for designers and developers of similar systems. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11042-022-13665-7.

The Magnetic Urtext: Restoration as Music Interpretation.

This paper discusses historical-critical thought to address the problems of restoration and preservation of tape music, proposing viable solutions to the matter of digitizing the historically valuable data that exists on and is represented by magnetic tapes. A detailed program of research and restoration and some software for helping in creation of critical editions of the musical works are proposed. We also present some of the issues and controversies that must be considered and approaches we have applied in the preservation of tape music, highlighting how these interpretations can impact later performances (playback) of these tape documents. Fundamentally, we argue that the act of tape music restoration has a parallel with the interpretation of the "Urtext score" in the performance of music from the Common Practice Era.

Illuminating Music: Impact of Color Hue for Background Lighting on Emotional Arousal in Piano Performance Videos.

This study sought to determine if hues overlayed on a video recording of a piano performance would systematically influence perception of its emotional arousal level. The hues were artificially added to a series of four short video excerpts of different performances using video editing software. Over two experiments 106 participants were sorted into 4 conditions, with each viewing different combinations of musical excerpts (two excerpts with nominally high arousal and two excerpts with nominally low arousal) and hue (red or blue) combinations. Participants rated the emotional arousal depicted by each excerpt. Results indicated that the overall arousal ratings were consistent with the nominal arousal of the selected excerpts. However, hues added to video produced no significant effect on arousal ratings, contrary to predictions. This could be due to the domination of the combined effects of other channels of information (e.g., the music and player movement) over the emotional effects of the hypothesized influence of hue on perceived performance (red expected to enhance and blue to reduce arousal of the performance). To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate the impact of these hues upon perceived arousal of music performance, and has implications for musical performers and stage lighting. Further research that investigates reactions during live performance and manipulation of a wider range of lighting hues, saturation and brightness levels, and editing techniques, is recommended to further scrutinize the veracity of the findings.

Control and value appraisals and online multiple-text comprehension in primary school: The mediating role of boredom and the moderating role of word-reading fluency.

BACKGROUND: Online multiple-text comprehension is a key skill of the 21st Century, yet the study of its relations with boredom in young students has been disregarded. Boredom is an achievement emotion expected to be predicted negatively by antecedents like control and value appraisals and to be associated to a negative performance. Notwithstanding its documented domain-specificity, scarce attention has been paid to investigating these relations with primary-school students in the reading domain, and specifically for online multiple-text comprehension, and to how such relations are moderated by basic cognitive abilities. AIMS: Considering separately two settings (homework, test), we studied the mediation of boredom in the relation between control-value appraisals and online multiple-text comprehension in primary-school students, focusing on the moderating role of word-reading fluency. SAMPLE: Participants were 334 fourth and fifth graders. METHODS: We evaluated students' reading-related self-efficacy and task-value, reading-related boredom for homework and tests, word-reading fluency, and online multiple-text comprehension. RESULTS: Path analyses revealed negative relations between control-value appraisals and boredom for homework and tests, and between boredom and online multiple-text comprehension for tests only. For the latter, word-reading fluency moderated the relation between appraisals, boredom, and comprehension: Boredom negatively related to comprehension only for students with high word-reading fluency. CONCLUSIONS: Findings are discussed focusing on antecedents of online multiple-text comprehension as a literacy skill critical in the 21st Century. We underlined their implications for learning in general and specifically for the current educational changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Computational Creativity and Music Generation Systems: An Introduction to the State of the Art.

Computational Creativity is a multidisciplinary field that tries to obtain creative behaviors from computers. One of its most prolific subfields is that of Music Generation (also called Algorithmic Composition or Musical Metacreation), that uses computational means to compose music. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of this research field, it is sometimes hard to define precise goals and to keep track of what problems can be considered solved by state-of-the-art systems and what instead needs further developments. With this survey, we try to give a complete introduction to those who wish to explore Computational Creativity and Music Generation. To do so, we first give a picture of the research on the definition and the evaluation of creativity, both human and computational, needed to understand how computational means can be used to obtain creative behaviors and its importance within Artificial Intelligence studies. We then review the state of the art of Music Generation Systems, by citing examples for all the main approaches to music generation, and by listing the open challenges that were identified by previous reviews on the subject. For each of these challenges, we cite works that have proposed solutions, describing what still needs to be done and some possible directions for further research.

On the role of auditory feedback in robot-assisted movement training after stroke: review of the literature.

The goal of this paper is to address a topic that is rarely investigated in the literature of technology-assisted motor rehabilitation, that is, the integration of auditory feedback in the rehabilitation device. After a brief introduction on rehabilitation robotics, the main concepts of auditory feedback are presented, together with relevant approaches, techniques, and technologies available in this domain. Current uses of auditory feedback in the context of technology-assisted rehabilitation are then reviewed. In particular, a comparative quantitative analysis over a large corpus of the recent literature suggests that the potential of auditory feedback in rehabilitation systems is currently and largely underexploited. Finally, several scenarios are proposed in which the use of auditory feedback may contribute to overcome some of the main limitations of current rehabilitation systems, in terms of user engagement, development of acute-phase and home rehabilitation devices, learning of more complex motor tasks, and improving activities of daily living.