Enhancing musicality: scientific, technological and practical challenges
Channel: MusicTechnologyGroup
Date: 2022-02-21

Keynote by Xavier Serra at the 26th International Symposium On Frontiers of Research in Speech and Music (FRSM 2021).

Everyone has the capacity for musicality, but to enhance specific musical abilities requires engaging in time-consuming educational activities. Most people listen to music using technologically sophisticated distribution platforms, but these platforms offer little support to help comprehend the music being played. Very little has been done on creating and promoting technologies to cultivate people’s musicality, even less from a multicultural perspective. To address this, we should better understand the auditory features and patterns that characterise particular music styles and we should design learning methodologies with which people can improve their listening abilities. I will examplify my ideas with the research we have done on Hindustani, Carnatic, Turkish-makam, and Chinese-jingju musics. I will also discuss the need to combine approaches from cognition, computational musicology, and education.