University of the Arts Helsinki

This study examines how social media exposure and visibility are negotiated within the ecosystems of musically gifted children enrolled in elite music education programmes. Drawing on interviews with 79 participants across five countries, including gifted children, parents, teachers, and institutional leaders, and an illustrated vignette prompting depersonalised reflection, the study conceptualises platform visibility as a relational and systemic phenomenon embedded in contemporary music careers. Using Care Ethics and Systems Thinking, the analysis examines how visibility is negotiated across five dimensions of care. Findings show that social media participation is understood as opportunity, professional necessity, and risk. While adults often view online visibility as beneficial for career development, gifted children report self-surveillance, perfectionism, anxiety, dependence on external validation, and concerns surrounding privacy and consent. Care is distributed across families, institutions, audiences, and platform infrastructures, yet strained by systemic pressures prioritising visibility, engagement, and exposure. The study introduces the concept of accelerated visibility trajectories to describe how artistic development, identity formation, public evaluation, and professionalisation become compressed within algorithmic feedback systems. It further conceptualises star syndrome as the compounding developmental effects of early visibility and sustained public exposure in gifted populations undergoing intensified training and digitally mediated talent development. The findings contribute to research on platformised cultural production, digital childhoods, and gifted education by showing how algorithmic visibility restructures childhood musical development. The study argues that existing ethical and child-protection frameworks remain insufficient for platformised environments, with gifted children facing distinctive risks, and calls for greater collective responsibility across families, institutions, and platform governance structures.

Children gifted for music are often described as possessing heightened perceptual and sensory abilities, yet little is known about how these abilities are understood within different family contexts or how giftedness is experienced as an identity. This mixed-methods study examined alignment between gifted children's and parents' perceptions of children's mental-perceptual abilities, the role of parental musical background, and how giftedness is explained and emotionally negotiated. Twenty-two children identified as gifted for music and 25 parents completed a survey based on Gagn & eacute;'s Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent assessing six mental-perceptual abilities, followed by semi-structured interviews. Quantitative analyses revealed a strong positive association between child and parent ratings, alongside a consistent tendency for parents to provide higher evaluations. Parental professional musical background did not significantly moderate alignment but was associated with greater variability in both children's and parents' ratings. Qualitative findings indicated shared experiential understandings of ability across families, alongside systematic differences in evaluative frameworks: musician parents more frequently drew on technical, comparative, and training-based standards, whereas non-musician parents relied on affective and everyday observations. Children across contexts often expressed modesty or ambivalence toward being labeled gifted, while parents balanced pride with concern about pressure. Overall, perceptions of mental-perceptual ability emerged as relationally constructed within family environments that shape how musical giftedness is recognized and supported.

Alban Berg’s Lulu is often seen as the tale of a femme fatale whose erotic power brings ruin through manipulation. This article reconsiders that view by reading the opera through Jean Baudrillard’s theory of seduction. Drawing on five key themes from Seduction, it argues that Lulu is less a destroyer of men than a disruptor of the logical systems seeking to define her. Through examples from the opera’s narrative and music, Lulu emerges not as a reflection of social paradigms but as resistance to fixed meaning, transparency and truth.

This article focuses on the second movement of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto with its parallel formal constructions. Alongside the variation form, it incorporates large-scale processes and symmetric constructions. Focusing on the attributes and positioning of various texture types reveals hierarchically higher-level groupings: the arias appear as refrains in the rondo, the hocket becomes the high point of the formal palindrome, and the chorales divide the music into a tripartite form, the proportions coming close to those of the Golden Ratio. On the theoretical level I explore the roles of secondary parameters in contemporary music, as discussed by Patricia Howland, Amy Bauer and Dora Hanninen, and the definitions of timbre by Stephen McAdams and Robert Hasegawa. My examination of ‘Aria, Hoquetus, Choral’ relies on widely known tools of music analysis. I observe: (1) the variation form and how it is disclosed; (2) the roles of primary and secondary parameters in the formal organization; (3) large-scale textural processes and (4) registral and timbral dramaturgies. I compare the outcomes of my score analysis with a spectrogram. The essential features of the visual representation support my parallel readings of the movement’s form and offer additional evidence for my interpretation.

Background: Theatre improvisation provides a psychologically safe environment for practicing adaptive interpersonal behaviour, which can enhance interpersonal competence and reduce psychosocial stress. Interpersonal synchrony (IPS)—the temporal alignment of neural, cardiac, and behavioural activity during joint task performance—may represent a putative physiological mechanism underlying these beneficial effects. The ImproSynchrony project aims to investigate whether IPS mediates the effects of improvisation training and to examine how IPS varies across age and levels of improvisation expertise. By combining neural, cardiac, behavioural, and self-report measures, the study aims to uncover the mechanisms through which improvisation training supports social functioning across the lifespan. Methods and analysis: The study is a 12-week controlled intervention study with a 12-month follow-up, designed to investigate the effects of improvisation training on IPS and social interaction competence across age groups (n = 200, ages 18–80). Prior to the intervention, differences in IPS will be examined by comparing groups of improvisation experts and novices. IPS will be assessed using electrophysiological measures (electroencephalography, EEG and electrocardiography, ECG), behavioural data (video recordings), self-reports, and qualitative data from learning diaries. These multimodal data will be collected at pretest, posttest, and follow-up to evaluate both immediate and long-term effects of the intervention. Discussion: The expected findings will clarify how improvisation training influences physiological and behavioural synchrony and social interaction quality. By including older adults, the study addresses a significant gap in improvisation research, with implications for enhancing social connectedness and mental health in ageing populations. The results will contribute to understanding how improvisation fosters empathy, cooperation, and effective interaction, offering practical insights for educators, policymakers, and practitioners.