bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Authors: Carnell Rachel K.
Published: September 2012

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the eighteenth-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Brontë's critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an eighteenth-century model of the public sphere, Brontë espouses not so much a twentieth-century-style challenge to the Victorian model of separate spheres as a nineteenth-century-style nostalgia for the classical liberal model of bourgeois public debate. At the same time, the awkward rupture in Brontë's narrative represents the inherent contradictions between the different levels of discourse-literary, political, and scientific-within the public sphere itself and the complex ways in which these contradictions are both accorded and denied cultural power.
The Play of Chance and Ego in Daniel Deronda
Authors: Stone Wilfred
Published: September 2012

Gambling is a major issue in Daniel Deronda (1876), and it mediates a major conflict in George Eliot's system of belief. When the wayward Gwendolen gambles at roulette and marriage, she is made to suffer a heavy penance; yet when the author's darling Deronda risks his whole English inheritance for a visionary ideal, he is blessed. Gwendolen inhabits a deterministic world in which effect follows cause with relentless insistence, while Deronda, the flawless hero, inhabits one largely ruled by miracle and coincidence. These two gamblers receive very different treatment, and I probe this ambiguity under the rubrics of chance, play, and egotism. Eliot condemns chance because it substitutes luck for responsibility, yet she grants Deronda all the luck of a fixed game. He is her new savior, of a new faith at deep odds with any "religion of humanity." Play, gambling's other name, is Gwendolen's "doing as one likes" until, with Deronda teaching, she learns "duty." But on examination, this duty seems to include laundering the winnings of her marriage "gamble." Egotism, a bad word for Eliot, is Gwendolen's affliction in what we would now call narcissism. The gambler's character, experts agree, is self-centered, narcissistic, even solipsistic. Gwendolen is cured of her disease, but no cure is implied for the gambling age in which she lives, an age in which speculation and investment are increasingly hard to distinguish-and one in which Eliot, now rich, is deeply implicated. Gwendolen's deliverance promises no deliverance for that unregenerate society, and Deronda's New Jerusalem offers only a visionary, and essentially escapist, remedy. As George Eliot's last will and testament, this novel is a most troubled bequest.
Jane Eyre: "Hazarding Confidences"
Authors: Sternlieb Lisa
Published: September 2012

This essay argues that Jane Eyre (1847) is an elaborate confidence game in which Rochester takes Jane into his confidence in order to lie to her and that Jane responds by first masquerading as his confidante and then taking the reader into her confidence to lie to her as well. Jane's retrospectively informed narration must be seen as working against her naive, romantic plot. Brontë has not written a conventional marriage plot but rather a revenge novel in which Jane reveals secrets that the blinded Rochester cannot read. Jane actively and consciously uses Bertha to draw attention away from her own act of revenge. Unlike Bertha's terrifying ineptitude, Jane's revenge works because it is controlled, sustained, articulate, and above all disguised. I argue against a correlation between Jane's acquisition of speech and her development as the writer of her story. Jane never writes within the pages of her novel; it is crucial to her success that Rochester fall in love with a silent listener, a woman he believes has no story of her own.
Rereading the Book in Henry James's The Ambassadors
Authors: Kohan Kevin
Published: September 2012

This essay argues that in Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903) Mrs. Newsome, who appears to be merely a representative of everything un-Jamesian, particularly a lack of moral and aesthetic imagination, should not be so quickly dismissed. Post-structuralist critics do not hesitate to denounce her. They typically identify Mrs. Newsome's "book" of expectations for Strether, her emissary, and for Chad, her successor, with the closed book of logocentric tyranny; both are said to rely on unambiguous reference and to enforce the cold rationality of linear causation. Derridean readers of The Ambassadors unmistakably prefer Madame de Vionnet's Paris, embodying as it apparently does their own essentially skeptical doctrines about representation. James, however, plays a more subtle game of balance and synthesis, suggesting that while Newsome's book is firm against new impressions, expecting experience to submit utterly to preconceived plans and moralistic evaluations, it also successfully asserts against Parisian representational openness and mystery the viability of reasonable explanation. Her book is vindicated insofar as it stands for the persistent relevance of linear causality and for the nonabsolute grounding of speculation in the concrete world of events and consequences. Newsome's extreme rationalism is in fact denied full authority early in the novel, whose true subject is located when extreme skepticism seems to dominate and explanation seems irrelevant. During the course of the story, time's subtle order slowly reemerges, and James the realist steps forward from behind the post-structuralist veil.
The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant
Authors: Jeffery Peter
Published: September 2012

From the fourth to the twelfth century, the city of Jerusalem had its own liturgical rite and chant repertory, which used the Greek language. Until recently, however, very little was known about this tradition because hardly any medieval manuscripts of it survived. But the Greek texts were translated into Georgian when the church of Georgia adopted the rite of Jerusalem as its own, and critical editions of these translations, made from tenth-century manuscripts, have recently been published. The translations show that the chant repertory of Jerusalem exercised much influence on the other medieval chant repertories in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Latin. When texts from Jerusalem survive in these other traditions, they tend to be set to melodies that are consistent with the modal assignments and neumes of the Georgian sources. This suggests that the features these melodies share do go back in some way to the lost melodies that were once sung in Jerusalem itself.
Oh! Susanna: Oral Transmission and Tune Transformation
Authors: Spitzer John
Published: September 2012

Early prints of "Oh! Susanna" by Stephen Foster transmit versions of the tune that differ strikingly from one another. It is likely that these variants arose as "Susanna" was orally transmitted among minstrel-show performers. Variant readings are compared in order to establish a stemma that shows not only the filiation of sources, but also the ways in which oral and written aspects were mixed in the transmission of "Susanna." The variants in versions of "Susanna" demonstrate four general tendencies of oral transmission: (1) a tendency to alter rhythms in order to clarify the beat; (2) a tendency to pentatonicize the melody; (3) a tendency for a salient harmony to draw the melody to the chord root; and (4) a tendency to eliminate differences between parallel passages. Analysis reveals that the four tendencies are also present in the transmitted versions of other songs from the repertory of nineteenth-century American minstrelsy.
The Invention of African Rhythm
Authors: Agawu Kofi
Published: September 2012

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing from their representations. In it, I develop a view of African rhythm in which its mechanical aspects (grouping, accents, periodicity) are shown to reside in broader patterns of temporal signification (movement, language and gesture). Although this is a less elegant proposition (in the mathematical sense), it is phenomenologically truer to the African experience. The latter, in turn, is not a mystified precolonial essence but the more "contaminated" and inherently contradictory condition of postcoloniality itself. "African music" in this construction is not synonymous with "African rhythm," although the latter's apparent complexity, explicitly thematized in earlier writings, reemerges against a richer conceptual background.
On the Temporal Control of Polyrhythmic Performance
Authors: Beauvillain C. , Fraisse P.
Published: September 2012

Timing control mechanisms were investigated in a complex rhythmic tapping task. Subjects performed a syncopated polyrhythm that consisted of two conflicting pulse trains (e. g., three elements per pattern repetition versus four elements per pattern repetition). The correlations between adjacent interval durations were found to differ systematically with the tempo at which the polyrhythm was performed. Only at fast tempos were subjects able to simultaneously control two different pulse trains. Alternative models are proposed that differ in their assumptions about the underlying pulse train. A comparison of the models suggests that the underlying pulse train is the faster one.
Octave Equivalence and the Immediate Recall of Pitch Sequences
Authors: Deutsch Diana , Boulanger Richard C.
Published: September 2012

This article examines conditions under which tones standing in octave relation are treated as equivalent by the perceptual system. According to the two-channel model for the abstraction of pitch relationships proposed by Deutsch (1969, 1982), octave equivalence effects should not operate directly in the processing of melodic intervals. In an experiment to test this prediction, it was found that accuracy in immediate recall of pitch sequences was substantially lower when the tones within a sequence were distributed across two adjacent octaves than when they were all in the same octave. This finding is in accordance with the two-channel model. Its implications for musical processing, together with those of other studies on octave equivalence, are discussed.
A Generative Grammar for Jazz Chord Sequences
Authors: Steedman Mark J.
Published: September 2012

The recursive character of musical chord sequences makes generative grammar a suitable formalism for describing the rules that constrain such sequences. A small number of rules are presented which generate the members of a large class of complex chord sequences that are generally recognised to be closely related, namely the set of jazz 12-bar blues. The rules are illustrated using a testing corpus of jazz chord sequences, and certain extensions are considered.
Perception of Musical Interval Tuning
Authors: Hall Donald E. , Hess Joan Taylor
Published: September 2012

When musical intervals are altered from their usual frequency ratios, listeners may experience a sensation of mistuning. We report results of experiments in which subjects judged degrees of mistuning of all intervals from unison to octave, as well as major tenth and twelfth. Using two simultaneous tones with fundamental frequencies between 250 and 800 Hz and 5 to 10 strong harmonics in each, we find: (1) just intervals, rather than tempered, are considered best in tune; (2) the range of mistunings considered acceptable generally becomes narrower when expressed in cents but wider when described by beat rate as we go from unison to octave, fifth and fourth; (3) whether that trend continues to sixths and thirds depends on individual listening strategies; and (4) the difficulty of judgment generally increases in going from the consonant toward the dissonant intervals, with the latter often eliciting only crude discrimination. Ability to judge mistuning with dichotic stimuli was also tested. We conclude that the beat rates of nearly coinciding harmonics provide an important clue to mistuning, but that a more abstract ability to judge interval size is also used; relative importance of the two strategies differs among subjects.
Experimental Studies of Music Reading: A Review
Authors: Sloboda John A.
Published: September 2012

Studies of music reading are reviewed with respect to two principal questions: (1) What differences are there between the reading processes of good and poor readers? and (2) To what extent is musical knowledge implicated in reading for performance? The evidence reviewed shows (1) a typical "skill effect" such that better readers have better visual memories for notation and show more sensitivity to structural configurations in the stimuli and (2) that much of what is read is analyzed for musical significance prior to the formulation of motor commands for response. Music reading is in this respect, despite its atypical input modality, a true species of music perception.
Musical Analysis: Hearing Is Believing?
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: September 2012

Written by a musician untrained in psychology, this article draws attention to problems arising from the separation of the disciplines of perceptual psychology and musical analysis. Psychologists are apt to make prescriptions about the nature of music based on a narrow and often primitive understanding of the medium. Musicians, on the other hand, are in the habit of basing analysis on sweeping assumptions about the nature of perception for which there is little experimental evidence. The author argues, however, that although it would be useful for such assumptions to be subjected to rigorous psychological testing, the assumptions themselves are not to be dismissed as evidence of the way the mind understands music.
Studies in Musical Cognition: Comments from a Music Theorist
Authors: Hantz Edwin
Published: September 2012

This article is in three parts. First, four common misconceptions in the psychological literature with regard to the perception of and memory for tonal tunes are isolated and documented. They are (1) that tonal strength is proportional to tune length, (2) that tonality is equivalent to diatonicism, (3) that frequency (pitch) distance is directly proportional to tonal functional distance, and (4) that melodic structure consists only (or mainly) of the note-to-note contour of a melody. Counterexamples to each of these misconceptions are given, forming a framework for a discussion of some of the fundamental properties of tonality. Part two is a brief criticism of short-term recognition paradigms and their use in research on melodies. Part three discusses the limited literature on long-term memory for tunes. The author proposes three modes of long- term memory representations for tunes: images ("visual" shapes), sequences of events ("episodes" of tune-specific contexts), and hierarchic rule-governed structures. It is suggested that the modes may, themselves, constitute a hierarchy, and that accessibility of a given representation is crucially dependent on the requirements of the task and the choice of an appropriate retrieval strategy.
Pitch Relations and the Formation of Scalar Structure
Authors: Cross I. , West R. , Howell P.
Published: September 2012

The experimental study of the perception of pitch structure in music requires the use of a framework that is not necessarily tied to a particular musical culture or period. This article describes three sets of experiments in which rules governing the production of musical sequences are formally defined in terms of a closed system, the "circle of fifths." Experimental results indicate that important aspects of musical judgment are well accounted for by logical consequences of such formal definition, without the necessity of invoking either simplicity of frequency ratios or musical "well-formedness."
Interval and Contour in Melody Processing
Authors: Edworthy Judy
Published: September 2012

Musician subjects were required to detect interval and contour changes in transposed versions of standard melodies of 3, 5, 7, 9,11,13, and 15 notes. Subjects were significantly better at detecting contour alterations for melodies of up to 11 notes but significantly better at detecting interval alterations in the 15-note melodies. Serial position effects for 5-, 7-, and 9-note melodies showed contour to be immediately precise after transposition, whereas the ability to detect interval alterations improved as the melodies progressed. These results suggest that, on transposition, contour information is immediately precise but is lost as melody length increases. Interval information is initially less precise but is more resistant to forgetting in longer melodies. The implication of this is that contour can be encoded independently of tonal context, whereas interval information becomes more precise as a tonal framework is established. Some musical implications of the finding are discussed.
The Role of Perceptual-Discrimination Ability in Tests of Memory for Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm
Authors: Zenatti Arlette
Published: September 2012

Findings from a number of investigations into the role of memory in children's performance on musical tests are summarized. The influence of musical structure, musical acculturation, and temporal organization on discriminative capacities is reviewed.
Interplay between Analysis and Synthesis in Studies of Music Performance and Music Experience
Authors: Gabrielsson Alf
Published: September 2012

This article consists of three parts. In the first part, early empirical research on music performance is reviewed—with special emphasis on the contributions by C. E. Seashore and his co-workers at Iowa University in the 1930s. The second part presents a model for interplay between analysis and synthesis in studies of music performance and its relationship to listeners' experience of the music. The model means that music performance is analyzed with regard to various physical properties, and their relationships to listeners' experience are investigated by means of synthesized sound sequences that are systematically varied in different aspects. In the third part, this idea is illustrated by examples from an extensive research project on musical rhythm. It is shown that performance of musical rhythm is characterized by various systematic variations regarding the durations of the sound events relative to strict mechanical regularity and that these variations may be related to various aspects of the experienced rhythm.
An Exceptional Musical Memory
Authors: Sloboda John A. , Hermelin B. , O'Connor N.
Published: September 2012

This article reports a study on a musical idiot savant (NP) who is capable of memorizing large-scale pieces of piano music in three or four hearings. Attempts to memorize two contrasting pieces are documented, one a tonal composition by Grieg, the other an atonal piece by Bartok. The results are compared with those provided by a professional pianist. Transcription of the reproductions shows that NP's ability is confined to tonal music and is structurally based. In this respect, it resembles the performance of high IQ memorizers and supports the view that general intelligence is not a prerequisite for structure-based skill.
Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception
Authors: Lewin David
Published: September 2012

Recent years have seen an increasing influence on music theory of perceptual investigations that can be called phenomenological in the sense of Husserl, either explicitly or implicitly. The trend is problematic, particularly in what one might call its sociology, but it is also very promising. Potential or at least metaphorical links with Artificial Intelligence are especially suggestive. A formal model for "musical perceptions," incorporating some of the promising features, reveals interesting things in connection with Schubert's song Morgengruβ. The model helps to circumvent some traditional difficulties in the methodology of music analysis. But the model must be used with caution since, like other perceptual theories, it appears to make " listening" a paradigmatic musical activity. Composer/ performer/playwright/actor/director/poet can be contrasted here to listener/reader. The two genera can be compared in the usual ways, but also in some not-so-usual ways. The former genus may be held to be perceiving in the creative act, and some influential contemporary literary theories actually prefer members of this genus to those of the other as perceivers. The theories can be modified, I believe, to allow a more universal stance that also regards acts of analytic reading/listening as poetry.
Similarities among Transformed Melodies: The Abstraction of Invariants
Authors: Carterette Edward C. , Kohl Donald V. , Pitt Mark A.
Published: September 2012

In studying the abstraction of musical ideas from diverse invariants, six-note melodies of varying note durations and note intensities were used as prototypes. Four types of transformations on a prototype distorted each of four musical components: contour, interval, loudness, and duration. In an acquisition phase, listeners heard simple transformations on a single prototype, but in recognition heard both simple and compound transformations as well as the prototype, which had been unheard in acquisition. Predictions were borne out, namely, that both prototypes and simple transformations were falsely recognized with greater certainty than any other transformed melodies; and latencies of recognition of the prototypes, an alternative measure of certainty, were shorter than latencies of recognition of any other transformed melodies. It is argued that the methods used enable the examination of the properties of musical transformation spaces.
The Need for Limits in Hierarchical Theories of Music
Authors: Swain Joseph P.
Published: September 2012

In recent years, music theorists and cognitive psychologists have agreed that hierarchical organizations are an effective means of describing structural and perceptual aspects of music. This article proposes that any hierarchical theory should be limited because the amount of information humans are able to take in and process is limited, as is well known in the cognitive field. When music is perceived according to Gestalt principles, the limit of organization will be three or four musical events on a level. When music perception is aided by cultural experience, this number of events may be exceeded by grouping the events into processing units called musical constituents. In this way, the hierarchical theory accounts for both the abstract and cultural aspects of musical experience. The notion of structural limits explains why the hierarchical model has been so persuasive and, by the use of three examples, shows how it can be a useful perspective for musical analysis.
The Effect of Tonal Structure on Rhythm in Piano Performance
Authors: MacKenzie C. L. , Vaneerd D. L. , Graham E. D. , Huron D. B. , Wills B. L.
Published: September 2012

The effect of tonal structure on rhythm in piano performance was examined. Although music structure is viewed as having rhythmic and tonal aspects, the tonality of a score might alter the rhythm in performance. Five skilled pianists sight read short segments of music under different tonal conditions. Timing in performance was monitored, and the variability of successive intervals was used as a measure of rhythmic precision. Results indicate significant differences between tonal and atonal conditions for the rhythm in performance. Possible explanations are considered, including the past experience of the pianists, expression in performance, biomechanical transitions, and other aspects of music structure visible from the score.
Sensitivity to Key Change in Chorale Sequences: A Comparison of Single Voices and Four-Voice Harmony
Authors: Thompson William F. , Cuddy Lola L.
Published: September 2012

Two experiments examined sensitivity to key change in short sequences adapted from Bach chorales. In Experiment 1, musically trained listeners identified key changes in single-voice (i.e., soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and in four-voice presentations of the sequences. There were two main findings. First, listeners judged the distance and direction of key change in single voices and in four-voice harmony with approximately equal ease. Second, for four-voice harmony but not for single voices, the direction of key change on the cycle of fifths influenced perceived distance. For an equivalent number of steps on the cycle, greater distance was associated with modulations moving in the counterclockwise, rather than in the clockwise, direction. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2, in which musically untrained listeners rated perceived distance of key change. In addition, the directional asymmetry found for four-voice harmony also was found for individual bass voices. The evidence suggests that harmony and melody operate somewhat independently in the implication of key structure. Difficulties for a strictly hierarchical model of perceived musical pitch structure are discussed and a partially hierarchical model is considered.
Spun Steel and Stardust: The Rejection of Contemporary Compositions
Authors: Smith J. David , Witt Jordan N.
Published: September 2012

Audiences consistently reject contemporary orchestral music. One reason given for this is that inaccessible form and syntax cause cognitive/perceptual difficulties for listeners. Another possible explanation is that contemporary music is impoverished in emotional or referential expression. Why do listeners say they reject atonal music? We compared their responses to tonal and serial works by the same two composers (Schoenberg and Webern). Listeners rejected the atonal works, found them less expressive along some affective dimensions but not others, and found them less rich in referential meanings. In fact, emotional and referential considerations determined preference at least as strongly as syntactic considerations. We discuss the modern music revolution in this light and consider the importance of nonsyntactic aesthetic dimensions in a psychology of music.
Accent Structures in the Reproduction of Simple Tunes by Children and Adult Pianists
Authors: Drake Carolyn , Dowling W. Jay , Palmer Caroline
Published: September 2012

This paper examines the influence of three accent structures on the reproduction of simple musical tunes by 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and adult pianists. In the metric accent structure, periodically spaced beats are accented; in the melodic accent structure, events after a jump in pitch interval or after a turn in contour are accented; and in the rhythmic grouping accent structure, the first and last events of a rhythmic group are accented. Four themes were created in which all three accent structures coincided. Three variations were derived from each theme in which each accent structure in turn was moved out of synchrony with the other two. In a fourth variation, all three accent structures were out of synchrony with each other. Both the children's and the pianists' reproductions were the most accurate when the accent structures coincided and the least accurate when they conflicted. Intermediate results were obtained when the rhythmic grouping and melodic accent structures were displaced, but no deterioration in performance was observed when the metric accent structure was displaced, demonstrating the relatively unimportant role played by intensity variations in these conditions. These results were obtained only for the melody scores—no deteriorations were found in the rhythm scores. For the pianists, fewer errors were made on the accented notes than on the others. So, the juxtaposition of the three accent structures does indeed influence the perception of musical sequences. When attention is drawn to the same point in time by several different accent structures, the segmentation of the sequence into smaller units is efficient and reproductions are good. However, when attention is drawn to too many points in time, segmentation is less efficient and reproductions are poorer.
Musical Parsing and Musical Affect
Authors: Jackendoff Ray
Published: September 2012

This paper explores the issue of what is going on in a listener's mind during the real-time processing of music, such that it is possible to account for the listener's understanding of the music. The issue will be approached through evidence internal to music itself, and also by analogy with evidence from the processing of language. I will then examine how processing of the sort I propose provides a basis for considering a particular issue in the theory of musical affect.
Piano Trills
Authors: Moore George P.
Published: September 2012

Trills by skilled pianists were studied by using a piano in which the on-off timing and dynamic level (hammer velocity) of notes were recorded digitally. In addition, finger flexion-extension accelerations and elecromyographic (EMG) activity were monitored simultaneously and digitized. The data allow estimates to be made of joint angle, duration of contact between finger and key, and time from finger-key contact to note onset. Finger accelerations and EMG activity appear at characteristic phases of the trill cycle; their magnitude and timing depend on trill speed, dynamic level, and the locus at which the finger strikes the key. The data document the considerable speed and precision with which skilled performers can execute trills.
Phonatory Vibrations in Singers: A Critical Review
Authors: Sundberg Johan
Published: September 2012

Most Western opera singers report feeling phonatory vibrations, that is, vibrations caused by phonation, in different parts of their bodies while singing. As one perceives one's own voice quite differently from the way one's listeners perceive it, it has been hypothesized that phonatory vibrations may be useful as a feedback signal for the control of phonation. These vibrations have been examined in some articles, which are reviewed. It is concluded that in singing at fundamental frequencies lower than about 350 Hz (pitch F₄ ) the amplitudes of the vibrations in the chest wall may be easy to use as a feedback signal, as they reflect an aspect of phonation that is relevant to singers. However, vibrations in the face and the skull seem to vary considerably between different vowels and can therefore be assumed to be more difficult to use for controlling phonation, which is basically independent of vowel quality.
Cognitive Meanings of Musical Elements as Disclosed by Event-Related Potential (ERP) and Verbal Experiments
Authors: Cohen Dalia , Granot Roni , Pratt Hillel , Barneah Anat
Published: September 2012

The study included six experiments on responses to harmonic and melodic intervals, using two complementary methods: event-related potentials (ERP) and verbal responses. Three experiments were performed with each method, using the same musical material: (1) isolated harmonic intervals (m 2nd, m 3rd, p 5th); (2) nine pairs of melodic intervals comprising combinations of three intervals (prime, ascending 2nd, ascending M 6th); (3) 27 pairs of harmonic intervals: nine combinations of the three intervals from Experiment 1, and the three intervals from Experiment 2. All subjects in the ERP experiments were knowledgeable in music, whereas in the verbal experiments, subjects varied in their cultural background (Western or Arab), age, and musical knowledge. The results showed specific responses to intervals, even without context, indicating that intervals may be viewed as meaningful words, even when presented in isolation. Furthermore, the results of comparisons within and between experiments confirmed earlier assumptions on the contribution of musical elements to tension or excitement, as opposed to relaxation, and underscored the importance of cognitive principles such as the "inverted U function," contrast, levels of consciousness, and hierarchy.
What Mediates Infants' and Adults' Superior Processing of the Major over the Augmented Triad?
Authors: Trainor Laurel J. , Trehub Sandra E.
Published: September 2012

In this paper, the claim that the major triad has special status for infant as well as adult listeners is evaluated. In Experiment 1, infants and adults were required to detect a downward semitone change in a fivenote melody based on the major triad and in another five-note melody based on the augmented triad. Both infants and adults performed significantly better on the major triad melody. In Experiment 2, infants and adults were evaluated on their detection of a downward semitone change in a five-note melody that incorporated a perfect fifth or augmented fifth relation but that also contained non-Western intervals. Again, infants and adults performed significantly better on the melody that incorporated the perfect fifth relation. These findings imply that enhanced processing of perfect fifth relations may account for infants' and adults' effective processing of the major triad.
An Exploration of the Use of Tempo in Jazz
Authors: Collier Geoffrey L. , Collier James Lincoln
Published: September 2012

Eight- and sixteen-bar segments of a large number of historical jazz recordings were timed with a stopwatch, and summary statistics were calculated from those measurements. A variety of aspects of the control of tempo were analyzed. Tempo is normally distributed when calculated in terms of metronome markings, but not when calculated in terms of durations. Jazz performance is very stable, even for solo performers. However, systematic patterns in the small variability observed indicate that it can serve expressive purposes, as evidenced by positive intercorrelations among alternative versions of the same tunes, as well as other factors. It was also discovered that when the bands execute a rapid "double time," the ratios among the tempo changes deviate systematically from exact doubling. Many of the effects can be summarized by hypothesizing that there are two (and perhaps more) preferred tempo ranges.
Music Perception and Musical Communities
Authors: Swain Joseph P.
Published: September 2012

Should certain negative results cause music theory to abandon its dependence on perception studies for the corroboration of its key principles? Recent experiments in music perception that have failed to confirm certain important principles of music theory are reviewed from the perspective of musical communities. A musical community is defined to be those listeners for whom a given musical perception is real and useful. It is argued that (1) the significance of experimental results should be interpreted not only according to traditional criteria of statistical significance but also according to the status of relevant musical communities; (2) a perceptual object that is real for only a small minority of listeners may yet be deemed significant if that minority performs some crucial activity in the musical culture; (3) important perceptual objects can be explicitly taught by advanced musical communities; (4) although this perspective calls into question the objectivity of theoretical principles, music theory must continue to incorporate the results of experiments in music perception.
On the Perception of Interleaved Melodies
Authors: Gallun Erick , Reisberg Daniel
Published: September 2012

A recent result indicates a direct influence of musical anticipations on musical perception. Specifically, Dowling, Lung, and Herrbold (1987) reported that subjects listening to interleaved melodies have an easier time detecting small changes in a cue melody than they do in detecting larger changes, because the former are in accord with their anticipations, whereas the latter are not. However, we report a series of experiments that fail to replicate the result of Dowling et al.
Modeling the Target-Note Technique of Bebop-Style Jazz Improvisation: An Artificial Neural Network Approach
Authors: Toiviainen Petri
Published: September 2012

In cognitive science and research on artificial intelligence, there are two central paradigms: symbolic and analogical. Within the analogical paradigm, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have recently been successfully used to model and simulate cognitive phenomena. One of the most prominent features of ANNs is their ability to learn by example and, to a certain extent, generalize what they have learned. Improvisation, the art of spontaneously creating music while playing or singing, fundamentally has an imitative nature. Regardless of how much one studies and analyzes, the art of improvisation is learned mostly by example. Instead of memorizing explicit rules, the student mimics the playing of other musicians. This kind of learning procedure cannot be easily modeled with rule- based symbolic systems. ANNs, on the other hand, provide an effective means of modeling and simulating this kind of imitative learning. In this article, a model of jazz improvisation that is based on supervised learning ANNs is described. Some results, achieved by simulations with the model, are presented. The simulations show that the model is able to apply the material it has learned in a new context. It can even create new melodic patterns based on the learned patterns. This kind of adaptability is a direct consequence of the fact that the knowledge resides in a distributed form in the network.
A Model of Retroactive Tone-Center Perception
Authors: Leman Marc
Published: September 2012

In this paper, a model for tone-center perception is developed. It is based on an auditory model and principles of schema dynamics such as self-organization and association. The auditory module simulates virtual-pitch perception by transforming musical signals into auditory images. The schema- based module involves data-driven long-term learning for the self-organization of a schema for tone-center perception. The focus of this paper is on a retroactive process (called perceptual interpretation) by which the sense of tone center is adjusted according to a reconsideration of preceding perceptions in view of new contextual evidence within the schema. To this purpose, a metaphor is introduced, in which perceptual interpretation is described as the movement of a snaillike object in an attractor space. Additionally, the mathematical details of the model are presented, and the results of computer simulations are discussed.
Roles for Spectral Centroid and Other Factors in Determining "Blended" Instrument Pairings in Orchestration
Authors: Sandell Gregory J.
Published: September 2012

Three perceptual experiments using natural-sounding instrument tones arranged in concurrently sounding pairs investigate a problem of orchestration: what factors determine selection of instruments to achieve various degrees of "blend" (fusion of multiple timbres into a single timbral image). The principal finding concerns the spectral centroid of the instruments (the midpoint of the spectral energy distribution). Blend worsened as a function of the overall centroid height of the combination (the centroid of the composite spectrum of the pair) or as the amount of difference between the centroids of the two instruments increased. Slightly different results were found depending on whether the instruments were on the same pitch or separated by a minor third. For unisons, composite centroid, attack similarity, and loudness envelope correlation accounted for 51% of the variance of blend. For minor thirds, centroid difference, composite centroid, attack similarity, and synchrony of offset accounted for 63% of the variance of blend. In a third experiment, instruments were manipulated to have different centroid levels to test if centroid made an independent contribution to blend. The results show that changes in centroid affect blend even when that is the only aspect of the sound that is changing. The findings create the potential for an approach to orchestration based on abstract properties of sound as a substitute for the traditional approach of teaching entirely by example.
The Cognitive Reality of Hierarchic Structure in Tonal and Atonal Music
Authors: Dibben Nicola
Published: September 2012

Three experiments that form an empirical basis for discussing the cognitive reality of hierarchic structure in music are reported. The first experiment showed evidence of listeners' ability to match a performed reduction of an extract of tonal music to the piece of music from which it was derived. A second experiment showed that this choice of reduction could not be attributed to the relative " coherence" of reductions. These two experiments provide evidence for the internal representation of tonal music in terms of a hierarchy of events such as that proposed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff ( 1983). In a third experiment using atonal music, subjects were less successful in choosing as the best reduction that which resembled the extract at higher levels of the structural hierarchy. Thus there is no evidence for the perception of a hierarchy of events in atonal music of the sort proposed by Lerdahl (1989). This empirical work therefore suggests that whereas the tonal system allows events within a tonal work to be heard within a strict hierarchy, no such hierarchy exists for atonal music. This finding has two main implications. First, a new conception of the term "prolongation" is needed if it is to apply to atonal music. The lack of a pitch hierarchy means that atonal events are unable to "stand for" other events in the way that tonal events are, and it is this action of standing for that allows prolongation to occur. Second, if as this research suggests, atonal music is not perceived in terms of a hierarchic structure, then another approach may be to investigate associational properties of the music and the role that these play in the formation of a structural representation.
Profiles of Processing: Eye Movements during Sightreading
Authors: Goolsby Thomas W.
Published: September 2012

Temporal and sequential components of the eye movement used by a skilled and a less-skilled sightreader were used to construct six profiles of processing. Each subject read three melodies of varying levels of concentration of visual detail. The profiles indicates the order, duration, and location of each fixation while the subjects sightread the melodies. Results indicate that music readers do not fixate on note stems or the bar lines that connect eighth notes when sightreading. The less-skilled music reader progressed through the melody virtually note-by-note using long fixations, whereas the skilled sightreader directed fixations to all areas of the notation (using more regressions than the less-skilled reader) to perform the music accurately. Results support earlier findings that skilled sightreaders look farther ahead in the notation, then back to the point of performance (Goolsby, 1994), and have a larger perceptual span than less-skilled sightreaders. Findings support Slobodans (1984) contention that music reading (i. e., sightreading) is indeed music perception, because music notation is processed before performance. Support was found for Sloboda's (1977, 1984, 1985, 1988) hypotheses on the effects of physical and structural boundaries on visual musical perception. The profiles indicate a number of differences between music perception from processing visual notation and perception resulting from language reading. These differences include: (1) opposite trends in the control of eye movement (i. e., the better music reader fixates in blank areas of the visual stimuli and not directly on each item of the information that was performed), (2) a perceptual span that is vertical as well as horizontal, (3) more eye movement associated with the better reader, and (4) greater attention used for processing language than for music, although the latter task requires an "exact realization."
Autism and Pitch Processing: A Precursor for Savant Musical Ability?
Authors: Heaton Pamela , Hermelin Beate , Pring Linda
Published: September 2012

Musically naive autistic children were compared with musically naive mental age-matched control subjects for their ability to identify and remember single-note frequencies or speech sounds. As an analogy to testing for absolute pitch, subjects were asked after two different time intervals to point out animal pictures previously paired with these stimuli. The results showed that although both groups identified and recalled speech sounds equally well, those with autism demonstrated a superior ability for single-note identification over both time intervals. The findings are discussed in terms of an enhanced capacity, characteristic of autistic persons, to process and retain isolated, context-independent elements of stimulus arrays.
The Perception of Structural Stability in Atonal Music: The Influence of Salience, Stability, Horizontal Motion, Pitch Commonality, and Dissonance
Authors: Dibben Nicola
Published: September 2012

Two experiments that investigate the perception of structural stability in atonal music are reported. The first experiment suggests that listeners may hear atonal music in terms of the relative structural importance of events and that listeners' hearing is greatly influenced by metrical and durational structure. A second experiment reveals that, even in the absence of clear rhythmic, timbral, dynamic, and motivic information, listeners infer relationships of relative structural stability between events at the musical surface. The effects of three main variables (pitch commonality, horizontal movement, and dissonance) and two salience criteria (register and parallelism) are considered. The results indicate that in the absence of a clearly differentiated surface structure, listeners' judgments of stability are influenced by the dissonance of chords and the horizontal movement of voices. It is concluded that salience (phenomenal accents), voice-leading, and dissonance are potentially important factors in the abstraction of relationships of relative structural importance, and hence to any inference of prolongational structure in atonal music.
Perceptual and Acoustical Features of Natural and Synthetic Orchestral Instrument Tones
Authors: Kendall Roger A. , Carterette Edward C. , Hajda John M.
Published: September 2012

Four experiments were conducted to explore the timbres of natural, continuant orchestral instruments with emulation based on sampling, frequency modulation ( FM) synthesis, and a hybrid consisting of sampling and synthesis techniques combined. Identification of instruments using verbal labels was significantly better for the natural and sampling- based signals than for either FM synthesis or the hybrid technique, a result also found for aural categorization. Perceptual scaling of timbral similarities demonstrated great consistency across a series of independent variables, including musical training, monophonic and stereo presentation, and long versus short signal durations. The first dimension of the classical multidimensional scaling (CMDS) solutions mapped onto long- time- average spectral centroid. The second dimension mapped onto a measure of spectral variability. Little evidence was found for the mapping of attack time or signal duration onto either dimension. A third dimension separated most natural instruments from their emulated counterparts. Experiments using verbal attribute ratings confirmed the correlation of spectral centroid, the first dimension of the perceptual space, and ratings of nasality; the second dimension correlated with spectral variability and modestly correlated with ratings of rich, brilliant, and tremulous. Mismatches of spectral distribution and variability resulted in poor emulations of the natural instruments. Results suggest that further study of centroid and time-variant psychophysical properties is warranted.