Metronome

Sergiu Celibidache, famous conductor of the second half of the twentieth century, dedicated his whole life to investigating the "univocal and uninterpretable relationship between man’s affective world and sound"; his goal was to found a science known as musical phenomenology.
Whereas the historical and biographical front has been researched quite fully, no systematic study of the primary sources yet exists: that is of the words, published or otherwise, spoken directly by the Romanian maestro himself. This essay aims to go some way towards filling this gap, and, to this end, all existing primary sources have been examined. Taking a hermeneutic approach, and based exclusively on those sources, it has been attempted to clarify what Celibidache meant when he spoke of ‘musical phenomenology’.

This study is based on the relationship between meditation, the present moment, and psychophysiology. We employed the metronome task to operationalize the extension of the present moment. A pre-post longitudinal study was conducted. The performance in the metronome task was compared before and after the interventions (meditation, story). The aim was to assess whether physiological changes (heart, breathing) during meditation influence the temporal-integration (TI) of metronome beats. Mindfulness meditators either meditated (n = 41) or listened to a story (n = 43). The heart and breathing activity were recorded during the intervention and compared to a resting-state condition. By applying path analyses we found that meditation led to an increase of the duration of integration intervals at the slowest metronome frequency (inter-stimulus interval, ISI = 3 s). After meditation, the higher the heart-rate variability (i.e., the root mean square of successive differences, RMSSD), the longer the duration of integration intervals at the fastest frequency (ISI = 0.33 s). Moreover, the higher the breathing rate during meditation, the greater the integration of intervals at ISI = 1 s. These findings add evidence to meditation-induced changes on the TI of metronome beats and the concept of the embodiment of mental functioning.

By the time Beethoven got a metronome, he had already produced many of his works. Nevertheless, he welcomed the invention with enthusiasm and, while writing which would become his later works, he found the time to produce metronome marks for earlier works, so that today we have Beethoven’s marks for all his Symphonies, the first eleven String Quartets, the Septet, the Hammerklavier piano sonata and a handful of other minor works. However, the true fact is that many of Beethoven’s original metronome marks are plainly ignored, to a greater or lesser degree, in most of the performances that we may hear of these works.

Gustavo Romanoff Salvini was a composer, singer and singing teacher and, among other things, inventor. He was born in Prussia in 1825 and arrived in Oporto in 1859, where he established a very reputable singing school. His method of teaching was based not only on the eminent specialists of the Italian School, but also on physiologists and orthophonists. In his work "My Singing Lessons" (whose manuscript we had the privilege to consult) , Salvini described in detail, and with some illustrations, the process of sound production, how posture, mouth, eyes and breathing influenced sound quality, using an accessible language, but yet revealing a very advanced cientific knowledge for his time. This practically unknown and never fully published work can and should be considered the first scientific treatise about Singing Voice ever written in Portugal, and for the use of the Portuguese. With this book, Salvini intended to write his "musical testament" and was trying  "to fill  up an inexplicable gap in the Portuguese musical life". Unfortunately he was unable to find support in his lifetime to publish this extraordinary book, which was posthumously and only partially published in 1931, by his family.
But before all this, in 1850, Salvini patented in Milan the "machine melographique", an instrument that should help the musicians in their study. What instrument would this be and what was its function? We cannot reveal yet, but what we can guarantee that, for the first time in history, the public of ANIMUSIC had the opportunity to see the drawings of the “machine melographique " and discuss its use.

This study is based on the relationship between meditation, the present moment, and psychophysiology. We employed the metronome task to operationalize the extension of the present moment. A pre-post longitudinal study was conducted. The performance in the metronome task was compared before and after the interventions (meditation, story). The aim was to assess whether physiological changes (heart, breathing) during meditation influence the temporal-integration (TI) of metronome beats. Mindfulness meditators either meditated (n = 41) or listened to a story (n = 43). The heart and breathing activity were recorded during the intervention and compared to a resting-state condition. By applying path analyses we found that meditation led to an increase of the duration of integration intervals at the slowest metronome frequency (inter-stimulus interval, ISI = 3 s). After meditation, the higher the heart-rate variability (i.e., the root mean square of successive differences, RMSSD), the longe...