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The Perception of Emotion in Music

Emery Schubert and Gary E. McPherson

in The Child as Musician: A handbook of musical development

At what age can children perceive emotion in music? How might this evolve as they mature? These two questions form the focus of this chapter which ... More

At what age can children perceive emotion in music? How might this evolve as they mature? These two questions form the focus of this chapter which deals with the perception of emotion in music from birth to adolescence. Drawing on available evidence, it proposes a framework that can be used to understand how children develop their abilities to perceive emotion in music. It provides a definition for emotion and the mechanisms for connecting emotion and music before surveying the general development of emotional perception throughout childhood. The main part of this chapter draws on literature that helps explain how children perceive emotion in music rather than the emotion a child experiences in response to music. The theoretical position proposed here is that throughout childhood, different forces work in parallel in a spiral like manner and that decoding emotional information from music is a dynamic combination of one-to-one connections and general associations.Less

Biological and Environmental Factors in Music Cognitionand Learning

Steven M. Demorest

in MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning: Volume 1: Strategies

This chapter considers the historical debate of the role nature versus nurture in the knowledge people acquire through experiences. It looks into the debate's significance in the study of music ... More

This chapter considers the historical debate of the role nature versus nurture in the knowledge people acquire through experiences. It looks into the debate's significance in the study of music learning, and the developments which led to scientists exploring simultaneously how human biology constrains one's experience of the world. It provides a sampling of more recent research in the fields of aural perception, music cognition perception, and the neurobiology of music cognition, and discusses how their findings shape the way educators approach music teaching and learning. It investigates how a person's implicit understandings of music are shaped by enculturation, and how this can aid students through potential challenges of cross-cultural musical understanding. It also highlights research on amnesia, an inability to hear or retain certain kinds of musical information, and emphasizes at recent discoveries on studies on a rare form congenital amnesia that prevents people from developing normal musical competence.Less

Music between Reaction and Response

Holly Watkins

in Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music

Chapter 5, “Music Between Reaction and Response,” evaluates music’s capacity to thwart conceptions of the human based on the sovereign power of rationality. Music’s ability to blur the boundaries ... More

Chapter 5, “Music Between Reaction and Response,” evaluates music’s capacity to thwart conceptions of the human based on the sovereign power of rationality. Music’s ability to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies has long been recognized, as two Greek myths attest: Orpheus made music that inspired human-like attention in animals, trees, and stones, while the Sirens reduced passing sailors to the level of animals incapable of resisting their song. Recast in terms employed by Jacques Lacan and criticized by Jacques Derrida, these myths portray music as calling forth a response in creatures thought merely able to react and, contrariwise, stripping away the capacity for response in humans, leaving nothing but reaction in its place. The chapter revisits eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentaries by the philosophers and critics Johann Georg Sulzer, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Eduard Hanslick in order to illuminate persistent anxieties over the admixture of reaction and response in musical listening. Addressing more recent studies in music perception and ethology, the chapter weaves research on the physiological reactions involved in musical responsiveness into a philosophical perspective on the expressiveness of sound that accommodates the communicative arts of both humans and animals.Less

Experimental Studies of Music Reading: A Review

John Sloboda

in Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, emotion, ability, function

The psychological study of music reading is atypical of music perception studies in two ways. First, this chapter identifies a clearly defined behavioral goal in most non-laboratory music reading ... More

The psychological study of music reading is atypical of music perception studies in two ways. First, this chapter identifies a clearly defined behavioral goal in most non-laboratory music reading situations. This is not the case for many music listening behaviours. Second, the object of perception is visual, not auditory. The first of these features provides the investigator with some advantages; the second poses some problems. Both merit further comment. The most common goal of music reading is the production of a coherent musical performance. The reader converts the visual input into a set of prescriptions for performance — he finds out which notes to play, in which sequence and combination they are to occur, and much else. In this central case the goal is a performance that must satisfy certain conditions, and behavioural measures capable of shedding some light on the underlying cognitive processes can be derived from quantifiable aspects of the performance.Less

Learning and Perceiving Musical Structures: Further Insights from Artificial Neural Networks

Barbara Tillmann, Jamshed J. Bharucha, and Emmanuel Bigand

in The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

This chapter summarizes the applications of artificial neural networks to music cognition, notably to the learning and perceiving of musical structures. It presents a hierarchical self-organizing ... More

This chapter summarizes the applications of artificial neural networks to music cognition, notably to the learning and perceiving of musical structures. It presents a hierarchical self-organizing model that learns basic regularities of the Western tonal system by mere exposure and simulates tonal acculturation. After learning, the model simulates a variety of experiments dealing with the processing of tone, chord, and key relationships. It then provides a parsimonious account of these data sets by postulating activation as the unifying mechanism underlying various cognitive tasks. The modelling of music cognition presented in this chapter is restricted to behavioural data. Nevertheless, the computational processes are based on fundamental neural constraints. Future developments of artificial networks simulating neuropsychological cases and establishing direct links to neural correlates will contribute to enhance the understanding of mechanisms of music perception.Less

Neural Correlates of Music Perception

Stefan Koelsch

in Language, Music, and the Brain: A Mysterious Relationship

This chapter provides an overview of neural correlates of music-syntactic and music-semantic processing, as well as of music-evoked emotions. These three aspects of music processing are often ... More

This chapter provides an overview of neural correlates of music-syntactic and music-semantic processing, as well as of music-evoked emotions. These three aspects of music processing are often intertwined. For example, a music-syntactically irregular musical event does not only evoke processes of syntactic analysis in the perceiver, but might also evoke processing of meaning, an emotional response, decoding of the producer’s intentions, etc. In addition, it becomes clear that the neural correlates of these processes show a strong overlap with the processes engaged during the perception of language. These overlaps indicate that “music” and “language” are different aspects, or two poles, of a single continuous domain: the music-language continuum. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.Less

Brain Mechanisms

Eckart Altenmüller and Wilfried Gruhn

in The Science & Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning

This chapter reviews current knowledge about the brain mechanisms involved in music perception, music production, and music learning. It argues that a basic understanding of the enormously complex ... More

This chapter reviews current knowledge about the brain mechanisms involved in music perception, music production, and music learning. It argues that a basic understanding of the enormously complex neurobiological processes that underlie the musician's training and performance will eventually stimulate new insights into the practice and theory of music education. So far, the results of laboratory experiments have been, by necessity, restricted to very limited aspects of music making. Consequently, the brain mechanisms that underlie the rich universe of accomplished musicianship are mostly still inaccessible to brain research. To understand neural substrates of music performance it is first necessary to understand some basic neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. The chapter introduces essential general information for musical readers.Less

Mechanisms of Musical Memory in Infancy

Jenny R. Saffran

in The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

This chapter summarizes the recent findings suggesting that as previously observed in the language domain, infants possess powerful memory abilities that allow them to represent myriad aspects of ... More

This chapter summarizes the recent findings suggesting that as previously observed in the language domain, infants possess powerful memory abilities that allow them to represent myriad aspects of their musical environments. These memories provide a corpus of musical experiences from which infants can begin to acquire the structures that characterize their native musical systems. While the primary focus is on music, the literature on infant speech and language perception are used in order to suggest avenues of overlap and difference, and as a source of potentially fruitful areas for future study. The chapter begins by reviewing the infant music perception and possible relationships with speech perception. It introduces the idea of long-term memory for music in infancy. In general, there is a surprising level of similarity in infant memory representations for music and for language. The results lend further support to an emerging picture of infants as remarkably adept at implicitly learning and remembering the structured information that characterizes the environment in which they develop.Less

Music cognition in childhood

Kathleen A. Corrigall and E. Glenn Schellenberg

in The Child as Musician: A handbook of musical development

This chapter examines the development of music perception and cognition during early and middle childhood. Although infants have fairly sophisticated musical abilities, it takes many years to acquire ... More

This chapter examines the development of music perception and cognition during early and middle childhood. Although infants have fairly sophisticated musical abilities, it takes many years to acquire adult-like musical knowledge. Much of this development occurs early in life, when children accumulate informal listening experience with the music of their culture. With increasing musical experience and general cognitive development, children’s knowledge of culture-general aspects of musical structure improves. Even larger developmental changes are seen in their acquisition of culture-specific knowledge of pitch and temporal structures. In some cases, formal music training accelerates the development of culture-specific knowledge and improves explicit understanding of musical concepts. In other cases—such as perceiving emotion expressed musically—music training has little effect. Future research could include age groups (i.e., toddlers) and musical cultures (e.g., Chinese, Indian) that have been largely neglected to date.Less

From Ear to Foot: How Choreographers Interpret Music

Sabine Wilden

in Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance

With the aim of exploring the relationship between music and dance, and in particular, exploring choreographers’ diverse methods when working with music, two studies were executed. For the first, ... More

With the aim of exploring the relationship between music and dance, and in particular, exploring choreographers’ diverse methods when working with music, two studies were executed. For the first, fourteen professional choreographers participated in a survey including general questions about how they use music when choreographing, and specific questions concerning four short musical tracks taken from Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet. Responses demonstrated choreographers’ multifaceted approaches to incorporating music in their dance creations. Nevertheless, answers showed striking consistency in how individual musical passages would be interpreted. In a second, exploratory study, five student choreographers created and performed a solo dance to a complete musical piece. The music and the videotaped dance performances were analyzed for rhythmic, articulative, structural, and thematic qualities to ascertain which elements in the music predominantly influence choreographers.Less

Connecting the Dots

David Huron

in Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art

This chapter considers how successive pitches can give rise to a sense of line. Three key concepts are described: acoustic continuity, pitch proximity, and pitch comodulation. Both pitch distance and ... More

This chapter considers how successive pitches can give rise to a sense of line. Three key concepts are described: acoustic continuity, pitch proximity, and pitch comodulation. Both pitch distance and tempo are shown to influence whether successive tones tend to be heard as a single stream. We always hear one stream when the amount of pitch change is small (within the trill boundary). We always hear two streams (beyond the yodel boundary) when a pitch/time trajectory violates Fitts’s law—a law of how things move. The sense of connectedness in a musical line is shown to share a close kinship with the perception of movement in vision, and how bodies actually move.Less

Perceiving multiple keys: Modulation and polytonality

Carol L. Krumhansl

in Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch

This chapter summarizes two experiments that investigate how listeners perceive successive and simultaneous tonalities. The focus of the first experiment is on how listeners initially develop a sense ... More

This chapter summarizes two experiments that investigate how listeners perceive successive and simultaneous tonalities. The focus of the first experiment is on how listeners initially develop a sense of key, and how they assimilate modulations to new keys. The second experiment investigates the capacity to perceive more than one tonal organization simultaneously. The probe tone technique is applied to a bitonal passage in which materials from two distantly related keys are employed in parallel.Less

The Canon

David Huron

in Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art

A brief review is provided of sixteen core traditional rules of voice leading as formulated in the late Baroque period. These rules are typically taught as part of the core theory curriculum in ... More

A brief review is provided of sixteen core traditional rules of voice leading as formulated in the late Baroque period. These rules are typically taught as part of the core theory curriculum in conservatories and schools of music.Less

Afterword

David Huron

in Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art

For those readers who teach voice leading and who would like to incorporate aspects of the pertinent research into their classes, this afterword offers some essential pedagogical advice.

Key-postures, trajectories and sonic shapes

Rolf Inge Godøy

in Music and Shape

The focus of this chapter is on how our notions of shape in music emerge from experiences of sound-producing body motion such as hitting, stroking, bowing, shaking or blowing. Sound-producing body ... More

The focus of this chapter is on how our notions of shape in music emerge from experiences of sound-producing body motion such as hitting, stroking, bowing, shaking or blowing. Sound-producing body motion is seen as organized around postures at salient moments in the music, around so-called key-postures, and as making continuous trajectories between these key-postures. It is suggested that our experiences of both making and seeing such key-postures and continuous trajectories in sound-producing body motion link the sonic and visual elements in music, meaning that body motion strongly contributes to our notions of shape in music.Less

A Comparative Review of Human Ability Theory: Context, Structure, and Development

Heiner Gembris

in MENC Handbook of Musical Cognition and Development

This chapter places research on music perception and cognition into the larger context of research on music learning and development with its changing epistemological facets. It reviews recent trends ... More

This chapter places research on music perception and cognition into the larger context of research on music learning and development with its changing epistemological facets. It reviews recent trends in theoretical conceptions of human abilities and explores their educational implications. It provides a review of theory in the psychological literature that may prove of interest to musical practitioners and educators and stimulates discussion about the larger framework of which musical abilities are part, especially concerning the extent to which musical ability is unique to the domain of music or linked to other extramusical abilities. The emerging view highlights the fact that abilities are context-dependent and thus culturally situated, multiple, with important interconnections between different abilities, and sometimes difficult to draw together as needed even by the best of teachers.Less

Types of Part-Writing

David Huron

in Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art

Four additional perceptual principles are described that are occasionally linked to the practice of voice leading: onset synchrony, limited density, timbral differentiation, and source location. ... More

Four additional perceptual principles are described that are occasionally linked to the practice of voice leading: onset synchrony, limited density, timbral differentiation, and source location. Composers appear to treat these additional principles as compositional “options” that shape the music-making in perceptually unique ways. It is suggested that the reason why these four principles are often ignored is that they easily conflict with other goals that composers commonly pursue. Other goals include the goal of ensemble balance, lyric intelligibility, harmonic clarity, and rhythmic uniformity. Depending on which auxiliary principles are followed, different textures arise—such as the distinction between homophonic and polyphonic part-writing. It is proposed that different textures, like close harmony, tune-and-accompaniment, and pseudo-polyphony, represent different combinations of concurrent musical goals.Less

The Feeling of Leading

David Huron

in Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art

A distinction is made between part-writing and voice leading. Even though music may exhibit correct part-writing, the music may nevertheless sounds like it is meandering aimlessly: voice leading adds ... More

A distinction is made between part-writing and voice leading. Even though music may exhibit correct part-writing, the music may nevertheless sounds like it is meandering aimlessly: voice leading adds the sense of tending, yearning, resolution, or momentum that contributes to the feeling of music “going somewhere.” Research on melodic expectation is summarized. When the music fails to conform to expected voice movements, the music is likely to evoke a wandering or purposeless quality. Predictability transforms good part-writing into good voice leading. Predictability is increased when musical patterns follow the norms and clichés of established styles. Familiarity with a given musical work also increases predictability. For unfamiliar works, predictability is increased when music makes use of recurring or imitative figures, themes, or motives.Less