Erkki Huovinen
Biographic Data
| ID | 967264 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erkki Huovinen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erkki |
| FAMILY NAME | Huovinen |
| SIGNATURE | HUOVINEN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal College of Music in Stockholm |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0646-0043 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Concertmasters’ leading-tone intonation
Melodic intonation is generally considered a central expressive means in musical performance. In Western classical music, relationships between intonation in perception and performance have shown to be less straightforward than one might expect. In this study, we investigated leading-tone intonation for solo violin, as perceived and performed by six accomplished violinists. We selected excerpts from classical violin repertoire, each of which incl…
Conductors’ views on individual practice activities
This study explored how professional conductors understand the role of individual (purposeful) practice and how they describe the contents of such practice. Twelve professional conductors were interviewed and content analysis was used to analyze the data. The results show that the participants understood conducting as a lifelong learning process. Through intensive individual practice, they had built up a significant repertoire of musical works. B…
Brief Exposure to Notated Scores
This study concerns classical musicians' ability to recognize style periods from very brief visual exposure to musical notation. 25 professional pianists were shown nine 500-ms displays of musical excerpts from piano works by J. S. Bach, L. v. Beethoven, and F. Chopin. The pianists were told to describe what they saw and to assess the style period of the music. Recognition was relatively good: 49% of the verbal protocols included a correct style …
Expressive semitones
Studies of performance intonation and musicians’ own statements suggest that classical string instrumentalists often deviate in their intonation from equal temperament for expressive purposes. However, it is not clear to what extent corresponding perceptual preferences for intonational deviations might rely on listeners’ instrumental expertise or such contextual aspects as the metrical placement of tones. We investigated higher-education music st…
Fostering Composer Voice in Tertiary Teaching of Contemporary Music Composition
The aspiring composer’s development is commonly described using the metaphor of finding one’s own composer voice. A central goal for teaching composition in higher music education is to guide students toward finding such a voice—toward personal expression and creativity. In order to shed light on the teaching strategies associated with this goal, we analyzed composition teachers’ views on their students’ typical problems and how they deal with th…
Philosophy of Improvisation
Journal Article Philosophies of Improvisation Get access The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta (eds.) routledge. 2021. pp. xviii + 737. £31.99 (pbk)Philosophy of Improvisation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice Susanne Ravn, Simon Høffding and James McGuirk (eds.) routledge, 2021. pp. viii + 217. £31.19 (pbk) Erkki Huovinen Erkki Huovinen Royal College of Mus…
Cognitive Mechanisms in Temporally Controlled Rhythm Reading
Music-reading research has not yet fully grasped the variety and roles of different cognitive mechanisms that underlie visual processing of music notation; instead, studies have often explored one factor at a time. Based on prior research, we identified three possible cognitive mechanisms regarding visual processing during music reading: symbol comprehension, visual anticipation, and symbol performance demands. We also summed up the eye-movement …
Sight-singing in a group context
Studies on music reading have provided insights into the cognitive processes in sight singing. However, there has been limited research on sight singing in a group setting. This study aims to assess how choral singers approach music reading as they perform previously unfamiliar choral scores together. We addressed (1) how singers’ gaze direction is distributed over staff systems, and (2) how their gaze behaviour is influenced by note density and …
Narratives of versatility
Multi-instrumental musicianship appears in various musical traditions, also frequently figuring in systems of music teacher education. Multi-instrumentalism covers forms of musical creativity and versatile professionalism that differ from ideologies of specialization often emphasized in instrumental music education. Thus, it is relevant to ask whether and how multi-instrumentalism might also shape music teacher identities. This question was explo…
Expert pianists’ practice perspectives
The purpose of this study was to investigate how professional pianists practice music for a concert, and whether their individual cognitive orientations in such practice processes can be identified accurately from the resulting performances. In Study I, four pianists, previously found to be skilled music memorizers, practiced and performed a short piece by André Jolivet over the course of two weeks, during which their practice strategies were stu…
Improvising on Emotion Terms
Studies in musical improvisation show that musicians and even children are able to communicate intended emotions to listeners at will. To understand emotional expressivity in music as an art form, communicative success needs to be related to improvisers’ thought processes and listeners’ aesthetic judgments. In the present study, we used retrospective verbal protocols to address college music students’ strategies in improvisations based on emotion…
The Semantics of Musical Topoi
The article introduces an empirical approach to studying music’s extrinsic meanings, based on the idea of musical topos as a set of musical entities that is delimited and furnished with meaning by extramusical associations in a listener population. The proposed methodology involves free, associative responses as well as responses on semantic variables addressing the imagery. After deriving potential topical structures for a given musical domain f…
Silent music reading
This article addresses the silent reading of music notation, combining eye-movement measures with a semantic analysis of readers’ verbal descriptions of the notated music. A group of musical novices ( n = 16) and two groups of musical amateurs (less experienced n = 11 and more experienced n = 10) participated in three separate measurement sessions during a nine-month-long university music course designed for future primary-school teachers. In eac…
Imitation, interaction and imagery
This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss these strategies based on video documentation as well as the students’ written reports and discussion comments. O…
The Early Development of Sight-Reading Skills in Adulthood
In this study the effects of skill development on the eye movements of beginning adult sight-readers were examined, focusing on changes in the allocation of visual attention within metrical units as well as in the processing of larger melodic intervals. The participants were future elementary school teachers, taking part in a 9-month-long music training period. During this period, 15 novice sight-readers’ development was observed in three measure…
Bird's-Eye Views of the Musical Surface
This study presents a series of methods for the analysis of the average characteristics of pitch-class material on the surface level of musical works. The methods rely on so-called tail segmentation, the partitioning of a musical work into a large number of overlapping pitch-class sets of equal cardinality. The resulting data can be used as a means of scanning a piece of music in order to detect changes in the local prevalence of some chosen pitc…
The Semantics of Musical Topoi
The article introduces an empirical approach to studying music’s extrinsic meanings, based on the idea of musical topos as a set of musical entities that is delimited and furnished with meaning by extramusical associations in a listener population. The proposed methodology involves free, associative responses as well as responses on semantic variables addressing the imagery. After deriving potential topical structures for a given musical domain f…
Imitation, interaction and imagery
This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss these strategies based on video documentation as well as the students’ written reports and discussion comments. O…
Bird's-Eye Views of the Musical Surface
This study presents a series of methods for the analysis of the average characteristics of pitch-class material on the surface level of musical works. The methods rely on so-called tail segmentation, the partitioning of a musical work into a large number of overlapping pitch-class sets of equal cardinality. The resulting data can be used as a means of scanning a piece of music in order to detect changes in the local prevalence of some chosen pitc…
Bird's-Eye Views of the Musical Surface
This study presents a series of methods for the analysis of the average characteristics of pitch-class material on the surface level of musical works. The methods rely on so-called tail segmentation, the partitioning of a musical work into a large number of overlapping pitch-class sets of equal cardinality. The resulting data can be used as a means of scanning a piece of music in order to detect changes in the local prevalence of some chosen pitc…
The Early Development of Sight-Reading Skills in Adulthood
In this study the effects of skill development on the eye movements of beginning adult sight-readers were examined, focusing on changes in the allocation of visual attention within metrical units as well as in the processing of larger melodic intervals. The participants were future elementary school teachers, taking part in a 9-month-long music training period. During this period, 15 novice sight-readers’ development was observed in three measure…
Silent music reading
This article addresses the silent reading of music notation, combining eye-movement measures with a semantic analysis of readers’ verbal descriptions of the notated music. A group of musical novices ( n = 16) and two groups of musical amateurs (less experienced n = 11 and more experienced n = 10) participated in three separate measurement sessions during a nine-month-long university music course designed for future primary-school teachers. In eac…
Imitation, interaction and imagery
This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss these strategies based on video documentation as well as the students’ written reports and discussion comments. O…
The Semantics of Musical Topoi
The article introduces an empirical approach to studying music’s extrinsic meanings, based on the idea of musical topos as a set of musical entities that is delimited and furnished with meaning by extramusical associations in a listener population. The proposed methodology involves free, associative responses as well as responses on semantic variables addressing the imagery. After deriving potential topical structures for a given musical domain f…
Narratives of versatility
Multi-instrumental musicianship appears in various musical traditions, also frequently figuring in systems of music teacher education. Multi-instrumentalism covers forms of musical creativity and versatile professionalism that differ from ideologies of specialization often emphasized in instrumental music education. Thus, it is relevant to ask whether and how multi-instrumentalism might also shape music teacher identities. This question was explo…
Expert pianists’ practice perspectives
The purpose of this study was to investigate how professional pianists practice music for a concert, and whether their individual cognitive orientations in such practice processes can be identified accurately from the resulting performances. In Study I, four pianists, previously found to be skilled music memorizers, practiced and performed a short piece by André Jolivet over the course of two weeks, during which their practice strategies were stu…
Improvising on Emotion Terms
Studies in musical improvisation show that musicians and even children are able to communicate intended emotions to listeners at will. To understand emotional expressivity in music as an art form, communicative success needs to be related to improvisers’ thought processes and listeners’ aesthetic judgments. In the present study, we used retrospective verbal protocols to address college music students’ strategies in improvisations based on emotion…
Cognitive Mechanisms in Temporally Controlled Rhythm Reading
Music-reading research has not yet fully grasped the variety and roles of different cognitive mechanisms that underlie visual processing of music notation; instead, studies have often explored one factor at a time. Based on prior research, we identified three possible cognitive mechanisms regarding visual processing during music reading: symbol comprehension, visual anticipation, and symbol performance demands. We also summed up the eye-movement …
Sight-singing in a group context
Studies on music reading have provided insights into the cognitive processes in sight singing. However, there has been limited research on sight singing in a group setting. This study aims to assess how choral singers approach music reading as they perform previously unfamiliar choral scores together. We addressed (1) how singers’ gaze direction is distributed over staff systems, and (2) how their gaze behaviour is influenced by note density and …
Brief Exposure to Notated Scores
This study concerns classical musicians' ability to recognize style periods from very brief visual exposure to musical notation. 25 professional pianists were shown nine 500-ms displays of musical excerpts from piano works by J. S. Bach, L. v. Beethoven, and F. Chopin. The pianists were told to describe what they saw and to assess the style period of the music. Recognition was relatively good: 49% of the verbal protocols included a correct style …
Expressive semitones
Studies of performance intonation and musicians’ own statements suggest that classical string instrumentalists often deviate in their intonation from equal temperament for expressive purposes. However, it is not clear to what extent corresponding perceptual preferences for intonational deviations might rely on listeners’ instrumental expertise or such contextual aspects as the metrical placement of tones. We investigated higher-education music st…
Fostering Composer Voice in Tertiary Teaching of Contemporary Music Composition
The aspiring composer’s development is commonly described using the metaphor of finding one’s own composer voice. A central goal for teaching composition in higher music education is to guide students toward finding such a voice—toward personal expression and creativity. In order to shed light on the teaching strategies associated with this goal, we analyzed composition teachers’ views on their students’ typical problems and how they deal with th…
Philosophy of Improvisation
Journal Article Philosophies of Improvisation Get access The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta (eds.) routledge. 2021. pp. xviii + 737. £31.99 (pbk)Philosophy of Improvisation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice Susanne Ravn, Simon Høffding and James McGuirk (eds.) routledge, 2021. pp. viii + 217. £31.19 (pbk) Erkki Huovinen Erkki Huovinen Royal College of Mus…
Conductors’ views on individual practice activities
This study explored how professional conductors understand the role of individual (purposeful) practice and how they describe the contents of such practice. Twelve professional conductors were interviewed and content analysis was used to analyze the data. The results show that the participants understood conducting as a lifelong learning process. Through intensive individual practice, they had built up a significant repertoire of musical works. B…
Concertmasters’ leading-tone intonation
Melodic intonation is generally considered a central expressive means in musical performance. In Western classical music, relationships between intonation in perception and performance have shown to be less straightforward than one might expect. In this study, we investigated leading-tone intonation for solo violin, as perceived and performed by six accomplished violinists. We selected excerpts from classical violin repertoire, each of which incl…
Psychology (14 works) · Diverse Music Education Insights (11 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (11 works) · Visual arts (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · Communication (7 works) · Musical (7 works)