91黑料网

Doctoral Colloquium:听Sean听Wood听(PhD candidate, Musicology) and听Ziyue Piao (PhD candidate, Music Technology)

Title: The 鈥楲ittle Boy Blue鈥� Trend and Reverberations of Child Mortality in 1890s America (Sean Wood)

Eugene Field鈥檚 1888 poem 鈥淟ittle Boy Blue,鈥� about a child鈥檚 toys gathering dust after his untimely death, was once one of the most famous poems in America. At least 5 different musical settings of it appeared in the decade after its publication. These settings gesture toward the once-active market for tearjerking child-loss ballads at the turn of the 20th century. Often derided for their sentimental excesses, I argue that songs like these remain important and revealing artifacts, pointing to the influence of high child-mortality rates on a culture's assumptions, habits, and aesthetic preferences.

Sean Wood is a sixth-year PhD candidate in Musicology. His work will appear in ReSounding Loss, a forthcoming Oxford Handbook on music and grief.

Title: The Duality of Breath: From Physiological Spontaneity to Conscious Control in Musical Expression (Ziyue Piao)

Breathing exists at a unique intersection of human biology: it is a vital, spontaneous physiological process that functions autonomously, yet it remains one of the few autonomic functions we can consciously control for artistic expression. For musicians, this duality of breath serves as a dynamic engine for phrasing and emotion. In collaboration with Yamaha, this talk investigates how this dual nature can be captured and leveraged through wearable technology to enhance musical control. Drawing on two distinct case studies, I first explore the breathing-music coupling in piano performance, identifying how respiratory patterns appear through a visualization interface called the Breathing Mirror to emphasize somatic awareness. Building on this, I present findings from focus groups with singing teachers and students, defining the occurrence of kinesthetic mismatches, discrepancies between what a performer feels their body is doing and their actual physical movement. These insights inform the ongoing design of a breathing wearable; by capturing data from both singers and pianists, we have identified the most effective body areas for respiratory measurement in performance. Ultimately, our goal is to bridge these kinesthetic gaps, applying the duality of breath to unlock new levels of musical expression.

Ziyue Piao is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Technology and an FRQSC Doctoral Scholar, who is supervised by Marcelo M. Wanderley (music technology) and Isabelle Cossette (music education). Her research sits at the intersection of music technology, wearable design, and embodied interaction, with a specialized interest in how wearable systems can capture respiratory physiology and be applied to embodied musical practices.

听

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.