Max Weber wrote these methodological essays in the closest intimacy with actual research and against a background of constant and intensive meditation on substantive problems in the theory and strategy of the social sciences. They were written between 1903 and 1917, the most productive period of Max Weber's life, when he was working on his studies in the sociology of religion and Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Weber had done important work in economic and legal history and had taught economic theory. On the basis of original investigations, he had acquired a specialist's knowledge of the details of German economic and social structure. His always vital concern for the political prosperity of Germany among the nations thrust him deeply into discussion of political ideals and programs. Weber's methodology still holds interest for us. Some of its shortcomings, from the contemporary viewpoint, may be attributed to the fact that some of the methodological problems that he treated could not be satisfactorily resolved prior to certain actual developments in research technique. These few qualifications aside, the work remains a pioneering work in large-scale social research, from one of the field's masters.

The Methodology of the Social Sciences

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

/pdf/universality-and-diversity-in-human-song-3rg9yp983j.pdf

Universality and diversity in human song

The latest progress and future perspectives of thin film photovoltaic kesterite technology are reviewed herein. Kesterite is currently the most promising emerging fully inorganic thin film photovoltaic technology based on critical raw-material-free and sustainable solutions. The positioning of kesterites in the frame of the emerging inorganic solar cells is first addressed, and the recent history of this family of materials briefly described. A review of the fast progress achieved earlier this decade is presented, toward the relative slowdown in the recent years partly explained by the large open-circuit voltage (VOC ) deficit recurrently observed even in the best solar cell devices in the literature. Then, through a comparison with the close cousin Cu(In,Ga)Se2 technology, doping and alloying strategies are proposed as critical for enhancing the conversion efficiency of kesterite. In the second section herein, intrinsic and extrinsic doping, as well as alloying strategies are reviewed, presenting the most relevant and recent results, and proposing possible pathways for future implementation. In the last section, a review on technological applications of kesterite is presented, going beyond conventional photovoltaic devices, and demonstrating their suitability as potential candidates in advanced tandem concepts, photocatalysis, thermoelectric, gas sensing, etc.

/pdf/progress-and-perspectives-of-thin-film-kesterite-4l3js0gj7n.pdf

Progress and Perspectives of Thin Film Kesterite Photovoltaic Technology: A Critical Review

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

/pdf/music-as-a-coevolved-system-for-social-bonding-59cxv3huzt.pdf

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

Uncertainty and Surprise Jointly Predict Musical Pleasure and Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Auditory Cortex Activity

Western musical styles use a large variety of chords and vertical sonorities. Based on objective acoustical properties, chords can be situated on a dissonant-consonant continuum. While this might to some extent converge with the unpleasant-pleasant continuum, subjective liking might diverge for various chord forms from music across different styles. Our study aimed to investigate how well appraisals of the roughness and pleasantness dimensions of isolated chords taken from real-world music are predicted by Parncutt’s established model of sensory dissonance. Furthermore, we related these subjective ratings to style of origin and acoustical features of the chords as well as musical sophistication of the raters. Ratings were obtained for chords deemed representative of the harmonic language of three different musical styles (classical, jazz and avant-garde music), plus randomly generated chords. Results indicate that pleasantness and roughness ratings were, on average, mirror opposites; however, their relative distribution differed greatly across styles, reflecting different underlying aesthetic ideals. Parncutt’s model only weakly predicted ratings for all but Classical chords, suggesting that listeners’ appraisal of the dissonance and pleasantness of chords bears not only on stimulus-side but also on listener-side factors. Indeed, we found that levels of musical sophistication negatively predicted listeners’ tendency to rate the consonance and pleasantness of any one chord as coupled measures, suggesting that musical education and expertise may serve to individuate how these musical dimensions are apprehended.

/pdf/the-pleasantness-of-sensory-dissonance-is-mediated-by-3u6vz9hx27.pdf

The pleasantness of sensory dissonance is mediated by musical style and expertise.

This report describes a publicly available dataset of harmonic analyses of all Beethoven string quartets together with a new annotation scheme. The quantitative study of large datasets is gaining increasing importance in musicology, reflecting a global trend toward empirical corpus studies and big data methods in the sciences as well as the (digital) humanities. Several initiatives and publications exemplify these new developments (e.g., Mauch et al., 2007; Rohrmeier and Cross, 2008; Temperley, 2009; De Clercq and Temperley, 2011; Schubert and Cumming, 2015; Klauk and Zalkow, 2016; White and Quinn, 2016). Ever increasing digital music resources are available online in the form of large collections of audio recordings,1 scanned scores,2 or MIDI files.3 Furthermore, musicologists have produced collections of symbolic and audio music repositories, e.g., the Essen Folksong collection (Schaffrath, 1995), the score collection in Humdrum/KERN format4 (Huron, 1997; Sapp, 2014), and the corpora of audio resources of Non-Western classical music traditions gathered by the CompMusic project5 (Serra, 2014). However, raw audio or symbolic musical information is often insufficient to investigate more abstract structural properties of musical styles, such as harmony, counterpoint, or form. Sufficiently sophisticated and statistically fully reliable automated Music Information Retrieval (MIR) methods for structural inference are not yet available. Despite the availability of raw audio material and the recent research initiatives mentioned above, digital musicology still lacks large labeled corpora combining score and harmonic annotations. These corpora are necessary as ground truth data for the minute investigation of structural dimensions of music such as harmony. As we elaborate below, our research addresses this gap by providing a large dataset of expert-generated harmonic labels in the stylistically coherent corpus of Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets, the Annotated Beethoven Corpus (ABC). This corpus will be useful for the research purposes of empirical and digital musicology, such as deepening the understanding of musical syntax, voice-leading schemata, form, and style, as well as for the development and evaluation of computational models of harmony and musical structure in general.

/pdf/the-annotated-beethoven-corpus-abc-a-dataset-of-harmonic-3gprwj5tgu.pdf

The Annotated Beethoven Corpus (ABC): A Dataset of Harmonic Analyses of All Beethoven String Quartets

What Is a Cadence?: Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertoire

This article describes a new expert-labelled dataset featuring harmonic, phrase, and cadence analyses of all piano sonatas by W.A. Mozart. The dataset draws on the DCML standard for harmonic annotation and is being published adopting the FAIR principles of Open Science. The annotations have been verified using a data triangulation procedure which is presented as an alternative approach to handling annotator subjectivity. This procedure is suited for ensuring consistency, within the dataset and beyond, despite the high level of analytical detail afforded by the employed harmonic annotation syntax. The harmony labels also encode contextual information and are therefore suited for investigating music theoretical questions related to tonal harmony and the harmonic makeup of cadences in the classical style. Apart from providing basic statistical analyses characterizing the dataset, its music theoretical potential is illustrated by two preliminary experiments, one on the terminal harmonies of cadences and the other on the relation between performance durations and harmonic density. Furthermore, particular features can be selected to produce more coarse-grained training data, for example for chord detection algorithms that require less analytical detail. Facilitating the dataset’s reusability, it comes with a Python script that allows researchers to easily access various representations of the data tailored to their particular needs.

/pdf/the-annotated-mozart-sonatas-score-harmony-and-cadence-4l0knauuih.pdf

The Annotated Mozart Sonatas: Score, Harmony, and Cadence

In order to identify the impact of the degree of Cu–Zn order in kesterite Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 solar cell absorbers on defect states and band tails, we perform photoluminescence (PL), photoluminescence excitation, and time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) spectroscopy. The PL lineshape and further PL characteristics such as state filling are analysed as a function of Cu–Zn order. Furthermore, TRPL decays and band tails are quantified. No significant modification in the defect states is caused by changes in Cu–Zn order, meaning that the formation of the defect states is not mainly determined by disorder in the Cu–Zn plane. In regard to band tailing, a small tendency to a decrease in the tailing parameter for the states with a high degree of Cu–Zn order compared to states with a low degree of Cu–Zn order is obvious. However, this reduction is small compared to the reduction of the defect density accompanied by the increase in the degree of Cu–Zn order. Hence, band tails are not mainly formed due to disorder in the Cu–Zn planes.

Impact of the degree of Cu–Zn order in Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 solar cell absorbers on defect states and band tails

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