Music in Quarantine: Connections Between Changes in Lifestyle, Psychological States, and Musical Behaviors During COVID-19 Pandemic.

Music is not only the art of organized sound but also a compound of social interaction among people, built upon social and environmental foundations. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, containment measures such as shelter-in-place, lockdown, social distancing, and self-quarantine have severely impacted the foundation of human society, resulting in a drastic change in our everyday experience. In this paper, the relationships between musical behavior, lifestyle, and psychological states during the shelter-in-place period of the COVID-19 pandemic are investigated. An online survey on musical experience, lifestyle changes, stress level, musical behaviors, media usage, and environmental sound perception was conducted. The survey was conducted in early June 2020. Responses from 620 people in 24 countries were collected, with the large proportion of the responses coming from the U.S. (55.5%) and India (21.4%). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed causal relationships between lifestyle, stress, and music behaviors. Elements such as stress-level change, work risk, and staying home contribute to changes in musical experiences, such as moderating emotion with music, feeling emotional with music, and being more attentive to music. Stress-level change was correlated with work risk and income change, and people who started living with others due to the outbreak, especially with their children, indicated less change in stress level. People with more stress-level change tended to use music more purposefully for their mental well-being, such as to moderate emotions, to influence mood, and to relax. In addition, people with more stress-level change tend to be more annoyed by neighbors' noise. Housing type was not directly associated with annoyance; however, attention to environmental sounds decreased when the housing type was smaller. Attention to environmental and musical sounds and the emotional responses to them are highly inter-correlated. Multi-group SEM based on musicians showed that the causal relationship structure for professional musicians differs from that of less-experienced musicians. For professional musicians, staying at home was the only component that caused all musical behavior changes; stress did not cause musical behavior changes. Regarding Internet use, listening to music via YouTube and streaming was preferred over TV and radio, especially among less-experienced musicians, while participation in the online music community was preferred by more advanced musicians. This work suggests that social, environmental, and personal factors and limitations influence the changes in our musical behavior, perception of sonic experience, and emotional recognition, and that people actively accommodated the unusual pandemic situations using music and Internet technologies.

Collaborating in Isolation: Assessing the Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Patterns of Collaborative Behavior Among Working Musicians.

The Covid-19 pandemic severely limited collaboration among musicians in rehearsal and ensemble performance, and demanded radical shifts in collaborative practices. Understanding the nature of these changes in music creators' patterns of collaboration, as well as how musicians shifted prioritizations and adapted their use of the available technologies, can offer invaluable insights into the resilience and importance of different aspects of musical collaboration. In addition, assessing changes in the collaboration networks among music creators can improve the current understanding of genre and style formation and evolution. We used an internet survey distributed to music creators, including performers, composers, producers, and engineers, all active before and during the pandemic, to assess their perceptions of how their music, collaborative practice, and use of technology were impacted by shelter-in-place orders associated with Covid-19, as well as how they adapted over the course of the pandemic. This survey was followed by Zoom interviews with a subset of participants. Along with confirming previous results showing increased reliance on nostalgia for musical inspiration, we found that participants' collaborative behaviors were surprisingly resilient to pandemic-related changes. In addition, participant responses appeared to be driven by a relatively small number of underlying factors, representing approaches to musical collaboration such as musical extroversion or musical introversion, inspiration clusters such as activist musicking, and style or genre clusters.

Sound design for auditory biofeedback and motor performance in participants with stroke: a pilot study.

Background: Although auditory biofeedback (ABF) has proved to be effective in stroke rehabilitation, there are a variety of means by which to present information through sound. Objectives: To examine if ABF sound design influences the motor performance of patients with stroke. Methods: A total of four people with chronic stroke participated . They were asked to track target signals by their paretic ankle dorsiflexion. Half of the participants were assigned to one of the two groups. Those in the Error ABF group heard ABF that alerted them to the error between the target and the joint angle. Those in the Full ABF group heard ABF that presented both the target and the angle separately by modulating the frequencies of two sounds. Therefore, when there was no error, no sound or two sounds with the identical frequency were heard in the Error and Full ABF sessions, respectively. The same visual BF (VBF) was always present regardless of the group. The accuracy of the task was quantified via an accuracy index (AI, ranging from -100 to 100). All participants were trained by repeating tracking, and the pre- and post-training AIs were obtained. Results: The AIs of all participants increased after training, but the increase was greater for the Error ABF group (mean increase = 8.9 and 14.9 for the Full and Error groups, respectively). Conclusions: The Full ABF was less effective than the Error ABF, probably because the VBF was present, and the information provided by the Full ABF was therefore redundant.

Comparative Effects of Auditory Electromyographic Biofeedback for Participants Who Are Blind and Sighted.

This study examined differences in auditory electromyographic biofeedback (AEB) effects between participants who were sighted and blind. Past research makes clear that AEB is effective for people who are blind, particularly because of their reported superiority in auditory processing, but no study has directly compared AEB efficacy between participants who are sighted and blind. A total of 11 participants who were sighted and 10 who were blind performed a motor task requiring 20 nonfatiguing muscle contractions at 20% maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) with or without AEB. AEB reduced the error (calculated as the absolute difference of two consecutive contractions) among both participant groups, and the error for the group without biofeedback was greater for the participants who were blind than that for the sighted participants (5.20% ± 2.05% MVC and 3.30% ± 1.26% MVC, respectively; p < .05). This finding was consistent with subjective rating data, also indicating a trend toward greater difficulty for participants who were blind when performing without biofeedback. Moreover, the AEB/no biofeedback condition showed fewer errors for the participants who were blind than for the participants who were sighted during the last part of the task ( p = .036), indicating that participants who were blind were better at maintaining the AEB effect. These data suggest that the poor motor performance of participants who were blind was greatly improved with AEB, suggesting important applications of AEB for assistive technologies, adapted sports, and activities of daily living.