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CONCLUSION CONCLUSION COGNITIVE STRUCTURE, THEORY, AND ANALYSIS

Lawrence M. Zbikowski

in Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis

This concluding chapter returns to M. Swann and to his final encounter with Vinteuil's sonata after a year in which it became thoroughly intertwined with his love affair with Odette, the courtesan ... More

This concluding chapter returns to M. Swann and to his final encounter with Vinteuil's sonata after a year in which it became thoroughly intertwined with his love affair with Odette, the courtesan with whom he had become acquainted around the same time he first encountered the andante. This provides a frame for a review of the points made in the preceding chapters and an instrumentality for drawing conclusions from the whole.Less

Syntax

Aniruddh D. Patel

in Music, Language, and the Brain

Research by Leonard Bernstein published as The Unanswered Question in 1976 was embraced since it incorporated Noam Chomsky's ideas regarding generative linguistic theory with musical meaning and ... More

Research by Leonard Bernstein published as The Unanswered Question in 1976 was embraced since it incorporated Noam Chomsky's ideas regarding generative linguistic theory with musical meaning and structure. Although this may have received negative criticisms, this work played no small part in linguist Ray Jackendoff and musicologist Fred Lerdahl's skeptical book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, which discusses various structural relations perceived by a listener of music. Although comparative studies regarding musical and linguistic syntax may have brought about bouts of both skepticism and enthusiasm, this chapter attempts to 1) discuss musical syntax's background, 2) explain the similarities and differences evident between linguistic and musical syntax and 3) present neuroscientific findings on the linguistic-musical syntactic relations occurring within the brain.Less

The Role of Structure in the Musical Expression of Emotions

Aalf Gabrielsson and Erik Lindström

in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications

This chapter reviews empirical research on how different factors in the composed musical structure influence the perceived emotional expression. Most of this research deals with Western classical ... More

This chapter reviews empirical research on how different factors in the composed musical structure influence the perceived emotional expression. Most of this research deals with Western classical music. There are more than 100 studies of the relationship between musical structure and emotional expression, featuring a variety of methods. Section 14.2 reviews the methodological approaches that have been used in these studies. It then summarizes the findings from these studies for each structural factor in Section 14.3. Finally, Section 14.4 provides an overall summary and some implications for future research.Less

Psychological Structures in Music: Core Research 1980–1990

John Sloboda

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

The fundamental characteristic that distinguishes the psychologist of music from the music theorist or analyst is the former's concern with empirical measurement of musical behaviour or response. A ... More

The fundamental characteristic that distinguishes the psychologist of music from the music theorist or analyst is the former's concern with empirical measurement of musical behaviour or response. A secondary concern is with ‘generalisability’. Psychologists are concerned to discover commonalities of response that hold across members of a population. Problems of operationalising musical responses are not trivial ones. These problems explain, to a significant degree, why psychologists have made so little progress in exploring the higher levels of musical response, including the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the response. The selection of research topics must be guided by further considerations, and these considerations are ones that psychologists and music theorists probably share. For this reason, the central topics in psychological research have been concerned with aspects of musical structure that are common to the widest body of music for which there exists a formal literature of theory and analysis: Western tonal music, whether art, folk, or popular.Less

Generative principles in music performance

Eric F. Clarke

in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition

This chapter emphasizes the role of performance in exemplifying structural aspects of the music through expressive gradients, discontinuities, and contrasts. It embeds several ingenious experimental ... More

This chapter emphasizes the role of performance in exemplifying structural aspects of the music through expressive gradients, discontinuities, and contrasts. It embeds several ingenious experimental studies within a theoretical framework that emphasizes the importance of hierarchical mental representations as a means of controlling performances. It gives an account of generative principles involved in music performance at two levels. One level deals with the representation of musical structure in a form that gives a coherent and intelligent input into a motor system. The second level at which generative principles are identifiable is in the production and control of the expressive aspects of performance, which function so as to convey a particular interpretation of a musical structure.Less

Communicating structure, affect, and movement

Zoltán Dienes, Gustav Kuhn, Xiuyan Guo, and Catherine Jones

in Language and Music as Cognitive Systems

This chapter comments on the discussion in Chapter 16. It reviews a range of experimental studies on the implicit learning of complex musical structures and movement patterns. It shows that ... More

This chapter comments on the discussion in Chapter 16. It reviews a range of experimental studies on the implicit learning of complex musical structures and movement patterns. It shows that participants can learn specific complex musical structures, such as symmetries or inversions, without becoming aware of the knowledge they have acquired. Cognitive modelling of behavioural data demonstrates that simple recurrent networks or buffer models predict human behavioural characteristics in ways that exceed the modelling approach followed by Bharucha, Curtis, and Paroo.Less

Music cognition: theoretical and empirical generalizations

Carol L. Krumhansl

in Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch

This chapter steps back from the empirical results to consider what they reveal about the psychological basis of musical pitch structures. Certain properties of pitch systems are identified that may ... More

This chapter steps back from the empirical results to consider what they reveal about the psychological basis of musical pitch structures. Certain properties of pitch systems are identified that may be important for accurate encoding and memory. A number of traditional and novel pitch systems are analyzed for the presence or absence of these properties. The chapter concludes with a summary of the empirical findings, and a discussion of what they indicate about the nature of the perceptual and cognitive abilities underlying our musical experience.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

The Listener

Andreas C. Lehmann, John A. Sloboda, and Robert H. Woody

in Psychology for Musicians: Understanding and Acquiring the Skills

The third musical role, the listener, is discussed in this chapter. The opening section describes the physiological aspect of listening and reveals it to be a complicated process that transforms ... More

The third musical role, the listener, is discussed in this chapter. The opening section describes the physiological aspect of listening and reveals it to be a complicated process that transforms acoustical stimuli into images or notions that can be experienced. This musical experience is then shown to be influenced by various factors which exhibit the inherent malleability of a person's internal representation of music. Composers and musicians enable listeners to experience music emotionally through the use of musical structures that are recognized and understood by them. Another section discusses the skills of judging and critiquing music, which are shown to be difficult to acquire and easily disrupted. Throughout the chapter, several musical phenomena, including hearing color, having a tune “stuck in the head,” and the recall of biographically important songs, are explained though the sciences of physiology and psychology.Less

Cross-Cultural Understanding

in The Music between Us: Is Music a Universal Language?

Several features of musical perception appear to be characteristic of humans, and thus can be expected to affect the way music is organized despite their inadequacy to dictate musical structure in ... More

Several features of musical perception appear to be characteristic of humans, and thus can be expected to affect the way music is organized despite their inadequacy to dictate musical structure in detail. This chapter examines some “structural universals” of music that are typical of the way people organize music in all or most cultures. Although such “universals” are widespread patterns, they do not necessarily apply to all human music. Nevertheless, they are also capable of facilitating comprehension of much foreign music because they indicate patterns that should be familiar to members of most musical cultures. The chapter also considers certain factors that stand in the way of the listener who seeks to understand alien music. After discussing some of the obstacles to cross-cultural musical understanding, it concludes by focusing on how these obstacles might be overcome.Less

Isomorphic Cadences: Film as ‘Musical’

K. J. Donnelly

in Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film

This chapter argues that musical sensibility and sensitivity are of benefit for critically addressing sound in film, and indeed film and audiovisual culture more generally. Sometimes music and sound ... More

This chapter argues that musical sensibility and sensitivity are of benefit for critically addressing sound in film, and indeed film and audiovisual culture more generally. Sometimes music and sound dominate films, determining the aesthetic patterns and having particular ramifications for sound and image synchronization. This is most obvious in film musicals and music videos, but musical techniques are also apparent in non-musical films as discussed here. Dominance by music is not surprising, perhaps, seeing as there has been a perceived close relationship between the processes of the moving image and music. Indeed, on some levels, there appears to be a shared core of aesthetics and assumptions. Furthermore, psychological conditions such as synaesthesia have extended into cross-medium traditions, based upon structural isomorphism, which is most evident in audiovisual cadences, visual music (visuals often without music), and programmatic music (music without visuals).Less

Auf dem Flusse: Image and Background in a Schubert Song

David Lewin

in Studies in Music with Text

This chapter explores the relation of musical structure to textual imagery in Franz Schubert's song Auf dem Flusse, from Die Winterreise. First, it develops a general critical stance toward the ... More

This chapter explores the relation of musical structure to textual imagery in Franz Schubert's song Auf dem Flusse, from Die Winterreise. First, it develops a general critical stance toward the relation of music and text in Schubert's songs. The chapter then offers a reading of the text for this specific song. According to this reading, the text is in a sense “about” the creation and evaluation of a poetic image. From a theoretical view, the aspects touched on are of a traditional sort: the length of musical sections vis-à-vis text sections, tonality, modality, the relations of the vocal line to the soprano and bass lines of its accompaniment, and motivic rhythms.Less

Uncertainty, Disorientation, and Loss as Responses to Musical Structure

Andrew Dell'Antonio

in Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing

In a notion of inclusive musical structure, it is not clear that any particular kind of listening experience can usefully be picked out as the hearing of structure. Anything that one hears might be ... More

In a notion of inclusive musical structure, it is not clear that any particular kind of listening experience can usefully be picked out as the hearing of structure. Anything that one hears might be the result of structure in the inclusive sense. This chapter presents several musical analyses where the structural fact was learned through means other than hearing. The gathered facts were then used to find out what it might mean to hear them. In all these analyses it was finally found that the musical structure was neither conventionally structural in character nor necessarily similar in character or in density of information to the structural descriptions with which they are associated. The C-sharp minor Prelude in Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is also discussed where the perception is of an unrealized modulation to E major suggested by the beginning of a thematic statement in that key early in the piece.Less

What's Involved in Sounding Human?

in The Music between Us: Is Music a Universal Language?

According to ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, humans are capable of almost always recognizing other cultures' music as music, and thus are recognizing the so-called musical universals. What is it to ... More

According to ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, humans are capable of almost always recognizing other cultures' music as music, and thus are recognizing the so-called musical universals. What is it to sound human? Is there a generic way of sounding human the way a gibbon or a humpback whale sounds? Is it possible to use sound to recognize other members of the human species, as many songbirds do? In his groundbreaking book How Musical Is Man?, John Blacking raised the issue of whether there is a universal way of sounding human and argued that musicality is a basic part of our human inheritance. Blacking is essentially emphasizing the centrality of musical capacity in humans. This chapter considers how it is to sound human by focusing on acoustics and musical universality, the quest for universal musical characteristics of human beings, the difference between universals of musical perception and universals of musical structure, and musical perception and hearing activity in music.Less

Emotional Response to Music: A Review

John Sloboda

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

The reason that many people engage with music, as performers or listeners, is that it has power to evoke or enhance valued emotional states. Studies supporting this general assertion are reviewed in ... More

The reason that many people engage with music, as performers or listeners, is that it has power to evoke or enhance valued emotional states. Studies supporting this general assertion are reviewed in this chapter. In the light of this one might have expected the study of emotion to be central to the psychology of music. This has not been the case. This chapter discusses conceptual issues, including the inherent variability of emotional response. It also addresses some of the methodological issues arising primarily from difficulties of measurement. Notwithstanding the difficulties inherent in research on this topic, some progress has been made, and the chapter outlines some major findings, including some evidence that a major subset of emotional responses are cued by confirmations and violations of expectancy within the musical structure, in line with the predictions arising from the theoretical proposals first articulated by L. B. Meyer.Less

The Evolution of Apollo: Poetry, Musical Architecture, and Choreographic Equilibrium

Charles M. Joseph

in Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention

This chapter discusses the evolution of Apollo's musical structure and focuses on Stravinsky's instructive 1927 piano reduction, which is useful for outlining the ballet's initial staging ... More

This chapter discusses the evolution of Apollo's musical structure and focuses on Stravinsky's instructive 1927 piano reduction, which is useful for outlining the ballet's initial staging specifications. For example, the composer changed his mind, perhaps in consultation with Balanchine and Diaghilev, about the opening curtain. Originally it was to have risen at an earlier juncture of the Prologue's opening music. The keyboard score is also filled with Stravinsky's own piano fingerings—not at all unusual inasmuch as the tactilely oriented composer-pianist frequently drafted ideas arising from figurations fitting his hand. The fact that he took the time to enter the fingerings so carefully suggests that he practiced the keyboard score seriously, probably in preparation for playing the score himself during at least some of the rehearsals.Less

Music and/in Society

Kofi Agawu

in The African Imagination in Music

This chapter explores the place of music in African society and the ways in which that relationship has been conceptualized by scholars. Beginning with discourse, the chapter observes the absence of ... More

This chapter explores the place of music in African society and the ways in which that relationship has been conceptualized by scholars. Beginning with discourse, the chapter observes the absence of a word for music in many indigenous languages, and then outlines alternative emphases in the patterns of African talk about music. It then identifies the three main occasions for music making as work, ritual and recreation. Although music-making typically marks the various stages in a life cycle, emphasis is placed here on music in funeral traditions. A tripartite scheme for categorizing all known genres of African music as traditional music, popular music, art music is introduced and critiqued. The chapter finishes with reflections on the relationship between sound structure and social structure, and the importance of circles in capturing that relationship.Less

Serious: The Cultural Work of Classical Music and the Trap of Musical Sound

John J. Sheinbaum

in Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide

Notable writings by Theodor W. Adorno (“On Popular Music”), Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), and Lawrence Kramer (Why Classical Music Still Matters) seek to valorize classical music ... More

Notable writings by Theodor W. Adorno (“On Popular Music”), Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), and Lawrence Kramer (Why Classical Music Still Matters) seek to valorize classical music both through its own inner workings and through pointed comparisons to popular genres. The overall verdicts, however, are more directly related to the sensuous surface of the music rather than judgments grounded in objective musical structures. With against-the-grain readings of musical examples by Beethoven (Symphony No. 5), Duke Ellington (“Concerto for Cootie”), and Bruce Springsteen (“Lonesome Day”), this chapter surveys critically the philosophical and cultural roots of treating the conventional classical music value system as a universal truth. Popular music often indeed can perform the sorts of cultural work thought to be limited to classical music, and classical music can be approached in compelling ways from perspectives usually applied to popular genres.Less