This paper examines the influence of health conditions on academic performance during adolescence. To account for the endogeneity of health outcomes and their interactions with risky behaviors we exploit natural variation within a set of genetic markers across individuals. We present evidence that specific genetic markers have good statistical properties to identify the impacts of ADHD, depress...

Is there a distinction between New Interfaces for Musical Expression and New Interfaces for Controlling Sound? This article begins with a brief overview of expression in musical performance, and examines some of the characteristics of effective “expressive” computer music instruments. It becomes apparent that sophisticated musical expression requires not only a good control interface but also v...

Two modest-sized symbolic corpora of post-tonal and post-metric keyboard music have been constructed, one algorithmic, the other improvised. Deep learning models of each have been trained and largely optimised. Our purpose is to obtain a model with sufficient generalisation capacity that in response to a small quantity of separate fresh input seed material, it can generate outputs that are dist...

SkipStep is a novel touchscreen application that allows users to write, perform, and improvise music on multiple virtual instruments via MIDI. It is a looping-based instrument that incorporates step sequencer and keyboard inspired interfaces with generative music capabilities. Additionally, SkipStep allows for collaborative performance over Wi-Fi, allowing users to either send musical material ...

Can websites be designed to be both utilitarian and hedonic? This article approaches this question by identifying Web attributes, their direct impacts on experiential flow, and their direct and indirect impacts on the utilitarian and hedonic aspects of Web performance. The results presented here support the proposal that, as an information-laden medium, a successful website must be able to use ...

Absolute pitch (AP) is commonly known to be an extremely rare and highly valuable musical ability. However, there are a few reports indicating that AP is relatively prevalent among musicians in East Asia (China and Japan) compared to the West (Deutsch et al., 2006, 2013; Miyazaki et al., 2012). More evidence is needed to shed more light on the prevalence of AP among different countries. On the ...

This paper addresses the problem of identifying musical instruments in polyphonic music. Musical instrument identification (MII) is an improtant task in music information retrieval because MII results make it possible to automatically retrieving certain types of music (e.g., piano sonata, string quartet). Only a few studies, however, have dealt with MII in polyphonic music. In MII in polyphonic...

Musics, like languages and genes, evolve through a process of transmission, variation, and selection. Evolution of musical tune families has been studied qualitatively for over a century, but quantitative analysis has been hampered by an inability to objectively distinguish between musical similarities that are due to chance and those that are due to descent from a common ancestor. Here we prop...

Musical composition typically requires several years of experience and knowledge in music theory that includes but is not limited to chord progression, melody note theory, and an understanding of whole-step/half-step passing tones among others. Due to the complexity of musical composition, even experienced musicians may find the writing process challenging and time consuming. Songwriters may fi...

We have spent the past 2 years evaluating Sistema Scotland’s ‘Big Noise’ programme, an arts-based social intervention targeted at socioeconomically deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. Drawing inspiration from Venezuela’s decades-old ‘El Sistema’ movement, Sistema Scotland’s first programme was established in Raploch, Stirling in 2008, with their second intervention site at Govanhill, Glasgow e...