In this article we made a comparison of the timings of the down and up beats in eighth notes of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins by using a sound editing software program. A “delayed ratio,” a “bounce ratio,” and an “upbeat ratio” were defined as the duration ratio of the length between the onset of the bass and that of downbeat divided by one beat bass, the duration ratio of the downbeat divided by one beat bass, and the sum of delayed ratio and bounce ratio, respectively. The delayed ratio and the upbeat ratio became larger from Hawkinsʼ era through Youngʼs to Parkerʼs, whereas the bounce ratio became smaller from Hawkinsʼ era to Youngʼs and Parkerʼs. In this way the main change of the timing of eighth notes is considered to have occurred during the transition from swing jazz to bebop from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s. It is also speculated that especially a large delayed ratio by Parker was passed on to Modern Jazz.

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Musical improvisation seems to require some knowledge and skills for real-time construction of musical structures. Musical harmonies are one of major referents for improvisation in jazz performance. As a cognitive skill for an appropriate recognition of such musical harmonies, we hypothesized that jazz musicians can detect the basic harmonic character of tension harmonies and examined this hypothesis by empirical comparison between jazz musicians and classical musicians. The jazz musicians showed higher scores than the classical musicians in all the discrimination tasks. This result seems to support our hypothesis. It was also suggested that this jazz musiciansʼ cognitive skills are supported by both their knowledge about chord progressions in functional harmonies and a sound corpus of various tension chords characterized according to basic chord character.

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We investigated the effect of live performance where the audience shares time and place with a performer on the audienceʼs psychological evaluation of the performance. Each of 110 audience members evaluated the impression of either the live or recorded performance by means of continuous (during the performance) and overall rating methods (after the performance). Results showed that the audience evaluated the live performance as better and affectively richer than the recorded one, for both pieces with different impressions. By contrast, the audience avoided extreme evaluation for continuous ratings of valence and arousal in the live rather than the recorded condition. These results suggest that different mechanisms exist between overall and continuous evaluation of live music performance.

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The present paper reviewed the autonomic nervous responses during music listening and outlined methods of measurements and analysis of heart rate (HR), especially used as indices of music response. The autonomic nervous responses vary according to the arousal dimension of musical emotion. The stimulative music activates the sympathetic nervous system, while the sedative one activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Strong emotion such as chills is related to activities of the sympathetic nervous system. HR, which is used in studies for music listening, is analyzed by level, time series changes, and variability. We especially explained outlines about indices of frequency-domain and time-domain analysis. It is important for selection and analysis of indices on demand to the research purpose.

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