Simultaneity (music)

Abstract: File sharing may substantially undermine intellectual property rights of digital goods. This paper concentrates on the music industry. I estimate the effect of music downloads on music sales using two data sources: a panel of aggregate music sales by country for 1997-2002 and a European individual level cross section of 15,000 people from October 2001. Using the number of internet and broadband users by country as a measure of users of P2P systems, the panel of aggregate data shows a large impact of downloads on music sales. In the micro data, a simple comparison of means shows that people who regularly download music online are more likely to buy music. The positive relationship persists when controlling for observed characteristics. However, simultaneity between tastes for music and peer-to peer usage makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of music downloads on music purchases. To break that simultaneity, I use measures of internet sophistication and the speed of the internet connection as instruments. The results suggest that peer-to-peer usage reduces the probability of buying music by an average of 30%. Based on this estimate for the reduction in the probability of buying music, back of the envelope calculations indicate that without file sharing sales in 2002 would have been around 7.8 percent higher. * Department of Economics, University of Chicago (alezentn@uchicago.edu). I wish to thank Austan Goolsbee, Steven Levitt and Hugo Sonnenschein for their advice and encouragement. I also thank very useful comments from Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Gary Becker, Dennis Carlton, Carolina Czastkiewicz, Julio Elias, Jonah Gelbach, Thomas Hubbard, Anupam Jena, David Levine, Jose Liberti, Douglas Lichtman, Laura Martinolich, Kevin Murphy, Alejandro Rodriguez, and Chad Syverson.

Abstract: To overcome differences in physical transmission time and neural processing, the brain adaptively recalibrates the point of simultaneity between auditory and visual signals by adapting to audiovisual asynchronies. Here, we examine whether the prolonged recalibration process of passively sensed visual and auditory signals is affected by naturally occurring multisensory training known to enhance audiovisual perceptual accuracy. Hence, we asked a group of drummers, of non-drummer musicians and of non-musicians to judge the audiovisual simultaneity of musical and non-musical audiovisual events, before and after adaptation with two fixed audiovisual asynchronies. We found that the recalibration for the musicians and drummers was in the opposite direction (sound leading vision) to that of non-musicians (vision leading sound), and change together with both increased music training and increased perceptual accuracy (i.e. ability to detect asynchrony). Our findings demonstrate that long-term musical training reshapes the way humans adaptively recalibrate simultaneity between auditory and visual signals.

Abstract: The Significance of the Motive in Mahler's Music. The melodic surface of Mahler's music, with its wealth of detail and florid exploitation of traditional polarities such as the suspension, is surely one of its most immediately attractive features. Embedded in this surface are the atomic melodic components which we know as motives, the lucid and memorable musical elements which are combined in the most artistic and often "simple" ways to form melodies. Among these motives are some which appear to have the deepest symbolic significance in the composer's music-for example, the turn, the octave leap, and the appoggiatura, symbols which elicit direct and strong responses from the sensitive listener even without benefit of learned theoretical explanations. Although the present article proceeds from this traditional idea of motive, it extends that fam liar concept in three directions. First, the motive is regarded as fundamentally an intervallic structure, hence can occur in simplest form as a simultaneity. (The Adagietto contains striking instances of this phenomenon.) Second, the motive is not restricted to the foreground stratum, but may occur at the middleground level in expanded form. Finally, as it will be shown, one can appropriately speak of "motivic counterpoint" in Mahler's music, and that term offers a significant degree of analytical advantage. Because the article incorporates certain novel features in its approach to the study of the music, a few words of explanation, including a disclaimer, are in order. First the disclaimer: Musical examples for this article were prepared by Melvin Wildberger.