bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poe's Ape of UnReason: Humor, Ritual, and Culture
Authors: Bryant John
Published: September 2012

For early Americans, humor was an effective means of integrating a diverse and factionalized society, whereas satire was not only divisive but a sign of despotism. Melville's achievement was to adapt amiable humor to the drama of political and psychological doubt inherent in a democracy. Poe, however, was relentlessly satiric. Still, we find a "humorizing" of Poe in three Ape Tales: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," and "Hop Frog." Clifford Geertz's notions of ritual as an interplay of self and culture and of symbol as an individual's peculiar enactment of larger cultural patterns show how humor and satire operate in the culture as both ritual and antiritual. Humor is ritualized accommodation: satire is ritualized attack. As ritual, humor fuses transcendental ideality ("worldview") and personal disbelief ("ethos"), allowing us to replay the drama of confidence and doubt. As antiritual, humor fulfills the same social functions but thorough unreliable narrative. Similarly, satire as ritual attack affirms the functionality of reader and culture but by reinforcing factions; and as antiritual it performs its affirmation thourhg such forms of unreliability as hoax. Poe relies heavily on the antiritual of satire, using the hoax as a means of enacting the private ethos of his repressed sexuality in the context of his worldview of transcendental beauty. While such antirituals betray a comic dysfunctionality in Poe, his ritualized replay of the ape reveals a development toward more integrative rituals of humor. "Rue Morgue" is a hoax against readers that effectively covers up Poe's problematic identification of himself with the tale's sexually charged ape of unreason. In "Tarr and Fether" the reader witnesses Maillard's hoax against the narrator and gains deeper insight into Poe's hidden sexuality. This neglected comic tour de force is more satiric ritual than antiritual. With "Hop-Frog" Poe replays the ape imagery in fairy-tale form and in fact becomes the ape of unreason. In acknowledging this identity he moves more fully toward a ritual of humor. Overall, the humorization of Poe's satiric intent suggests a certain cultural inevitability in the growth of humor over satire as an effective response to the divisiveness and metaphysical doubt inherent in the democratic experience.
Fetishism in The Spoils of Poynton
Authors: Sarris Fotios
Published: September 2012

Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton is, as the author describes it in his preface to the novel, "a story of cabinets and chairs and tables" and, more specifically, of the conflict over their possession. The attitudes of the Brigstocks, Fleda Vetch, and Mrs. Gereth toward the "spoils" manifest different forms of fetishism thath can be interpreted in both Marxian and Freudian terms, as well as in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's more recent theory of "political fetishishm." One of the implications of the struggle for possession of the "spoils" is that value and meaning do not somehow passively and objectively inhere in art but are rather a consequence of power, strategic action, and conflict. Thus, far from transcending the flux, chaos, and contingency of the market or history or "everyday life," as James's own preface might suggest it does, art is embroiled in and shaped by these forces. The struggle for possession also parallels, in its way-and thus bears upon-the critical debate surrounding The Spoils of Poynton and around the question of what role the author's stated or apparent intentions should have in the interpretation of the novel.
Anxieties of Representation: The Serial Illustrations to Hardy's The Return of the Native
Authors: Dalziel Pamela
Published: September 2012

The selectivity and obliquity of Arthur Hopkins's illustrations for the 1878 Belgravia serialization of The Return of the Native result in a distorted reading of Hardy's text, especially through their avoidance of the passionate and subversive and their tendency to represent the novel as substantially more conventional than it actually is. Hopkins's Thomasin and Venn are represented as unambiguously and conventionally "good"; there is no visual acknowledgment of the more radical Thomasin or the more threatening Venn. Wildeve is essentially avoided as a pictorial subject, as is the problematic Clym of the novel's final books. Eustacia, on the other hand, figures prominently in the illustrations, initially-in keeping with her departure from hegemonic notions of viruous femininity-as a somewhat "masculine" figure. Follwoing Hardy's insistence that she be rendered more conventionally attractive. Hopkins rather incongruously transforms her into an object of desire, only to revert in the final illustration to his less than sympathetic reading: refusing to participate in the erotics of death of Hardy's text, Hopkins punishes the "fallen woman" by reducing her to a misshapen corpse. Hardy's essential toleration-and in some instances actual encouragement-of what now seem "unrepresentative" representations of his work appears to have been related to his own anxiety about the novel's success and based on the recognition that the very conventionality of the illustrations could be a valuable ally in his struggle to render publishable a text that pushed persistently against the limits of the then acceptable.
W. D. Howells and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt's Disappointment of the Dean
Authors: McElrath, Joseph R.
Published: September 2012

William Dean Howells was sympathetic to African Americans. This is apparent not only in his fiction but in essays focusing on Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, and Charles W. Chesnutt. All three typed the "sweetness" that Howells was delighted to find among representative members of a still-oppressed race. The Howells-Chesnutt relationship was a cordial one in which the former publicly expressed his a appreciation of the latter's literary talent and thus assisted him in achieving his rise to celebrity; Howells's needs, too, were met, since Chesnutt displayed a freedom from "bitterness" that bode well for black-white relations in the future. The relationship ended abruptly when, with the publication of The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt disclosed a vindictive side of his personality that Howells had not seen. Reviewing Marrow as a "bitter, bitter" book, a disillusioned Howells also wrote to Henry B. Fuller: "Good Lord! How such a negro must hate us."
A Spiritual Autopsy of Stephen Crane
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2012

One of Crane's biographers calls his short and adventurous life "enigmatic" and his psyche "baffling and unavailable"; Crane's prose has been difficult to categorize, and his poetry has often been ignored or dismissed as cryptic. My effort to understand Crane is based first on a consideration of his poetry as a struggle for a personal faith and second on a spiritual analysis of his characteristics patterns of illness and the circumstances surrounding the decline of his health and his early death. I argue that the prevailing view of Crane as the boy-genius who sprang into literary life with an intact vision of human behavior (which he then went on to express) is based on an impoverished notion of creative genius, and I try instead to demonstrate the conflict that one can detect in Crane's writing and his life, a conflict that I assert has everything to do with his death at the age of twenty-eight: a tragic struggle between a mystic faith in solitude and self-revelation (that he eventually betrays) and a hard-boiled assertion of social and artistic conscience. I further argue that Crane's inner struggle has tremendous literary significance because it anticipates two very different twentienth-century movements in American letters and the tension between them-"expressionist" writers on the one hand and the modernists on the other.
The Contest of Memory in "Tintern Abbey"
Authors: Weele Michael Vander
Published: September 2012

Modern critics have been suspicious of the "abundant recompense" that "Tintern Abbey" claims for the replacement of youthful joys by mature thought. Many have contrasted unconscious motivation and surface articulation within the poem. But what if Wordsworth was more self-conscious about the efficacy of memory than we give him credit for? I argue that both the language and the structure of the poem show Wordsworth questioning the claims he was making for memory. But were there resources available for him to understand memory differently than we do-as well as to call that understanding into question? I argue that there were, and that they can be found both in texts echoed in the poem and in a long tradition of reflection on memory recently described by Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory (1990). Where critics such as Harold Bloom have seen a blind spot in Wordswoth's self-consciousness and have brought psychoanalytic theory to bear upon their analysis of memory, I argue that Wordsworth's categories for understanding and questioning memory were at least as historical and ethical as they were psychological and aesthetic. Seeing the author work out of and question a tradition of memory as ethical construction helps us understand what is at stake in the poem. Less productive is the assumption that only the poem's readers can figures the riven text below its smooth surfaces.
Precedent and Perversity in Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death
Authors: Setzer Sharon M.
Published: September 2012

First published in 1840, at the height of the controversy over capital punishment in England, Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death counter the movement toward political reform through their massive appeal to ancient history, poetical history, and the history of poetic form. While Wordsworth attempts to ground his authority in the biblical history reconstituted in Milton's Paradise Lost and the classical history of Lucius Junius Brutus recuperated during the French Revolution, his argument for the political imperative of the death penalty is inextricably bound up with the aesthetic imperatives of the sonnet form. The sonnet series as a whole thus betrays a perverse appropiation of literary and historical precedent as well as an uncritical acceptance of Petrarchan conventions.
Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe's "Berenice"
Authors: Brown Arthur A.
Published: September 2012

Maurice Blanchot writes that death is "man's greatest hope," for it "raises existence to being" and "is within each one of us as our most human quality." Literature, on the other hand, "manifests existence without being, existence which remains below existence, like an inexorable affirmation, without beginning or end-death as the impossibility of dying." Poe's stories of premature burial and of the dead coming back to life dramatize the horror of the impossibility of dying that is made present in the existence of literature. In "Berenice" our attention as readers to the details of the tale, our willingness to be told what "should not be told," reproduces the narrator's obsession with the teeth of Berenice-with that wich speaks of death and does not die-and implicates us in his violation of the still-living Berenice in her tomb. The destruction of Berenice-of the living being that can die-and the telling of "Berenice" coincide. Heightening our awareness of the literary act in which we are engaged, Poe forces us to enter the tale itself. Only in our own mortality do we find a way out.
A Subdued Gaiety: The Comedy of Mansfield Park
Authors: Perkins Pam
Published: September 2012

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is not, as has often been claimed, a dour morality tale, endorsing prim virtue over wit and charm. Fanny and Mary can be read as representatives of two opposing comic traditions, those of sentimental comedy and "laughing" comedy. The movement of the novel contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of these two traditions, ultimately suggesting that neither is entirely satisfactory. Fanny's moral good sense is unattractive without any leaven of Mary's charm, while Mary's witty amorality is shown to be both selfish and cruel. As Austen suggests the weaknesses of both comic traditions through the weaknesses of her heroines, she avoids endorsing either tradition and explores the limitations of both. Mansfield Park is not a funny novel, but in its exploration of comic conventions it continues, on a structural level, the playfulness that marks Austen's other works.
The Invisible Hand Made Visible: "The Birth-Mark"
Authors: Weinstein Cindy
Published: September 2012

Allegorical characters in Hawthorne's "The Birth-mark" function according to the logic of the market. Selves in this story are like territories that must continually be possessed and repossessed, and the birthmark becomes the site upon which characters fight one another for ownership, self-ownership, and identity. Aylmer views the circulations in Georgiana's bodily economy as signifying an independent self he wishes to control. The marked defines both the relations that characters have to each other and Hawthorne's own relation to his characters, especially Aylmer. Aylmer's desire to erase the birthmark figures his allegiance to the principles of the market economy, principles articulated in the famous invisible hand passage from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. In contrast, the visibility of the birthmark functions as a sign of Hawthorne's literary labor and authorial identity. Hawthorne thus finds himself in the curious position of having created a character whose raison d'etre seems to be the erasure of Hawthorne's own identity. His competitive relation with Aylmer, however, is perfectly logical given that the competition of the market governs all relations in the story. Furthermore, the erasure of the birthmark needs to be read in the context of antebellum American aesthetic ideology. The literary taste that demanded the erasure of the signs of labor grew out of cultural anxieties about new forms of mechanized and specialized labor, and its perceived attack on individual agency. An aesthetic of invisible labor functioned to keep literature separate from the problematics of industrial labor and the developing market economy, and yet, in demanding that authorial agency remain absent, this aesthetic reproduced one of the most troublesome consequences of mechanized labor. Allegory in "The Birth-mark" is thus read as a site upon which authors and readers inscribe the changing relations between labor and identity.
Lyric Displacement in the Victorian Monologue: Naturalizing the Vocative
Authors: Shaw W. David
Published: September 2012

Though a venerable lyric tradition of apostrophizing the breeze, the dawn, or the nightingale celebrates the Romantic poet's words of power, only inmates of mental hospitals actually talk to birds, trees, or doors-much less to holes in a wall, as Pound's speaker does in "Marvoil." This essay shows how Victorian dramatic monologues substitute human auditors for nonhuman ones in an effort to naturalize a convention that nineteenth-century poets find increasingly obsolete and archaic. Instead of talking to the dawn, Tennyson's Tithonus addresses a beautiful woman, the goddess who becomes the silent auditor of his dramatic monologue. Like Coleridge's conversation poems, Browning's and Tennyson's monologues are poems of one-sided conversation in which a speaker's address to a silent auditor replaces Shelley's vocatives of direct address to the west wind or Keat's apostrophes to autumn. In recuperating an archaic convention of lyric apostrophe by humanizing the object addressed, the Victorian dramatic monologue illustrates John Keble's theory of the mechanisms by which genres are disturbed, displaced, and transformed. The dramatic monologue becomes an ascendant genre in post-Romantic literature partly because it is better equipped than lyric poetry to oppose the dogmas of a secular and scientific age in which an antiquated belief in "doing-by-saying" (including a belief in oracles, prophecies, and knowledge as divination) is in rapid and widespread retreat.
Nature's Perilous Variety in Rossetti's "Goblin Market"
Authors: Grass Sean C.
Published: September 2012

Cristina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" has received over the past two decades a remarkable amount of attention from literary critics who have approached the poem from a variety of perspectives: Marxist, feminist, biblical, and even biographical. Many of these critical articles are too concerned, however, with their own theoretical paradigms to provide more than a narrow perspective on the place of "Goblin Market" as both central to and representative of Rossetti's verse as a whole. Instead of beginning with such a norrow perspective, this essay argues for a return to the actual language and structure of the poem itself as a means of exploring its central themes. Most specifically, it examines Rossetti's use of the list in "Globin Market" as indicative of the poet struggling to resolve her intense Tractarianism with both her love of nature and her tendency toward a Pre-Raphaelite embracing of detail and abundance. Such an analysis of the forces that shaped Rossetti the poet is essential for an understanding not only of "Goblin Market" but of her poetry as a whole. Thus, this analysis does not reject all other critical approaches; rather, it attempts to subsume them into a less narrow, hopefully more fruitful perspective from which we may view Rossetti's poetry as she herself perhaps did. Only through such an approach can we arrive at the central themes of temptation and moral discernment, especially as present in a symbolic and seductively diverse natural world, that Rossetti explores at the very crux of "Goblin Market."
Spectatorship in Mansfield Park: Looking and Overlooking
Authors: Murray Douglas
Published: September 2012

Claude glasses-fashionable devices carried by travelers in search of the picturesque-provide a pertinent introduction to Mansfield Park, for most of its characters are engaged in a process that recalls the device: they are on the prowl for pleasing visual experiences, and they achieve these experiences by framing and exclusion. Fanny Price is as guilty of selective spectatorship as anyone: she cuts and frames her experiences and memories. Though one of the novel's most practiced spectators, she does not relish the gaze of others turned upon her; she cultivates invisibility, rhapsodizing over places of darkness and concealment. She begins to see more fully-and to be more fully seen-when she visits the public places of Portsmouth, but by the novel's end she can become a heroine only by not seeing the distress of others; she retreats (Austen regretfully reports) to old habits. Austen knew from inside how demanding could be the gazes directed upon young women by Enlightenment society: as a young writer her works had been examined first by family and then by an increasingly larger public. In Fanny Price, Austen provides a complex, nuanced picture of the pain of being seen. At the same time, Austen distances herself from the girl who would be invisible. In Mansfield Park Austen summons and then dismisses the figure who fears to be fully seen and to see fully.
"Without a Cross": The Cultural Significance of the Sublime and Beautiful in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans
Authors: Blakemore Steven
Published: September 2012

This essay demonstrates that James Fenimore Cooper was incorporating the language and values of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) into the "world" of The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In the Enquiry Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful centers on traditional distinctions between men and women-an "eternal distinction" that Burke continually underscores. In Mohicans Cooper initially incorporates the beautiful into the sublime, in an intentionally illusive "mix" that corresponds to the illusory mixing of the white and Indian races. He then reinscribes Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful as an eternal distinction between whites and Indians-writing "out" the problem of the "Other" (gendered "femininity" and alien, "red" beauty) in a meditation of the significance of culture and race in America. In retrospect, Mohicans is a novel of ambiguous "crosses" and complicitous combinations-a novel of fatal and fruitful mixes comprising a series of covert traces telling a secret story contradicting Cooper's overt, racial ideology. Yet it is this "pristine" ideology that finally overpowers and double-crosses the novel's "other" message. Written in 1826, at a specific historical moment when the Indian tribes were being removed or destroyed, the novel reaffirms a racial ideology tortured with its own historical ambiguities.
Adoption and the "Improvement of the Estate" in Trollope and Craik
Authors: O'Toole Tess
Published: September 2012

Though the marriage plot is the most familiar vehicle in the Victorian novel for reconfiguring the family, the adoption plot is a prominent alternative version. This essay explores the intersection of comic adoption plots with the motif that Alistair Duck-worth has dubbed the "improvement of the estate." In the Victorian novel the variety of arrangements according to which children are transferred to households other than the one to which they are born reflects the fact that institutionalized adoption did not exist in Victorian England. An investment in traditonal patterns of property succession was one of the factors that delayed its advent. In the adoption plots of Dinah Craik's King Arthur: Not a Love Story and Trollope's Doctor Thorne, however, this concern is countered by a representation of adoption as the key to safeguarding or revitalizing the estate. Craik's novel makes a case for institutionalizing adoption by showing that it is the hero's adoption into a middle-class family that equips him to be the worthy steward of an ancestral estate. In Trollope's novel the salvation of the Greshamsbury estate hinges on the rescue of the illegitimate child, Mary, by the uncle who adopts her. Doctor Thorne suggests that adoption is the key to a social mobility that serves not just the individual but society at large.
Ruskin's Theoretic Practicality and the Royal Academy's Aesthetic Idealism
Authors: Harris Wendell V.
Published: September 2012

While Ruskin's personal eccentricities and intellectual foibles are well known, the influence exerted by Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and The Stones of Venice was in no small part a result of a kind of practicality and reasonableness not generally associated with Ruskin. He began writing at a fortunate time-seventy years of effort by the Royal Academy, seconded by the formation of other societies of British artists and the founding of the Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery, had prepared a public eager for instruction about the values of art. This kind of instruction had not been available: Ruskin spoke to a public happy to be shown both the links between aesthetic, moral, and religious values and how to judge merit in painting and architecture. Although Ruskin could be acerbic about Royal Academicians, the volumes that appeared in the first two decades of his writing career were effective in no small part because they were modifications rather than repudiations of the principles that, thanks to the Royal Academy, had become cultural commonplaces. He was thus able to alter accepted perspectives sufficiently to justify art as a mode of expressing appreciation for God's creation, to shift the concept of the grand style away from an exclusive dedication to historical painting, to focus serious attention on landscape painting (in which British artists were more successful than in historical painting and which the British public more fully appreciated), and to give both moral and practical reasons for the Gothic architecture that was already returning to favor.
The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Gaskell's North and South
Authors: Elliott Dorice Williams
Published: September 2012

This essay considers Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel about labor relations in the context of mid-century discussions of the female philanthropic visitor to the poor. By reclaiming the traditional mediating role of women's philanthropy in an environment where relations between the classes are based exclusively on the "cash nexus," Gaskell's novel represents a new social sphere that includes but is more than the domestic sphere of marriage, home, and children. Gaskell's woman visitor, however, has to contend with male professionals, especially clergymen, for access to and control of social space. Rejecting the South's social paternalism as nostalgic, Gaskell substitutes a new but still familial metaphor for class relations: in place of the parent-child metaphor, she offers marriage. Despite the fact that the novel's marriage plot functions as a model for class relations that requires the intervention of women philanthropists, however, the use of the marital metaphor still leaves both women philanthropists and the poor in a dependent and vulnerable position.
Wordsworth and the Polemic Against Hunting: "Hart-Leap Well"
Authors: Perkins David
Published: September 2012

Increasing compassion for animals led in Wordsworth's era to a polemic against hunting. Wordsworth's "Hart-Leap Well" is part of this campaign. Wordsworth's strategy and arguments in the second part of "Hart-Leap Well" are typical of the discourses that attacked hunting, chiefly for its cruelty, but Wordsworth was unusual in also leading readers in the first part of the poem to sympathize with the hunter's emotions, and he illustrates in the figure of Sir Walter the warrior virtues that hunting was said by its defenders to inculcate. The poem reaches more deeply, however, to explore irrational grounds of hunting's appeal in Sir Walter's enlarged sense of secure dominance, power, lust, and megalomania in the aftermath of the chase. As with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, egoistic self-assertion expresses itself in killing an animal and is figured as solitude. Just as Sir Walter embodies "the coarser pleasures of my boyish days" (as Wordsworth represents them in various poems), the figure of the poet possesses the more reflective, sensitive, and profound awareness that Wordsworth credits to his adult self. In "Hart-Leap Well" Sir Walter's mentality is that of the historical past, and the poet's represents the future. The poem offers a version of the Enlightenment plot of history as the moral progress of mankind. But in the end the poem may contemplate, with pleasure, the vanishing of mankind from the face of the earth, while nature remains in its beauty.
Functional Ambiguity in Musical Structures
Authors: Thomson William
Published: September 2012

This paper first establishes a definition of ambiguity and its significance to art and to perception in general. Its understanding is framed within a hierarchical conception of musical structure most similar to that of Leonard B. Meyer (1956,1973). Following (1) an illustrative survey of occurrences of intentional ambiguity found in the standard music repertory, and (2) a discussion of the limited attention paid by music theorists to ambiguity in the past, a general theory of musical ambiguity's causes is developed. The paper's final section consists of an extensive analysis of functional ambiguity as a principal expressive vehicle in Chopin's Mazurka, Opus 17, No. 4.
Some Effects of Inharmonic Partials on Interval Perception
Authors: Cohen Elizabeth A.
Published: September 2012

We have explored some of the effects of tuning intervals with inharmonic partials. The tones that composed the intervals had partials whose spacing is given by f$f_n = KA^{\log 2n/1} $where$f_n $ is the frequency of the wth partial and K = 2ɸ/Aɸ. We suggest that subjects can successfully (internally) assign a pitch to tones with a structured departure from harmonicity. We find that subjects appear to process intervals with nearly harmonic stimuli (A = 1.9-2.1) in a manner that supports the "best fit" pattern recognition theories of pitch perception. Subject perception of intervals whose component tones were stretched (A > 2.1) is best accounted for by noting the nature of auditory spectral resolution and by interval memory mechanisms. The results imply that temporal synchrony of harmonics becomes increasingly important to interval integrity after A= 2.1 and that the strength of the impression of conventional intervals is dependent on temporal synchrony.
The Petroushka Chord: A Perceptual Investigation
Authors: Krumhansl Carol L. , Schmuckler Mark A.
Published: September 2012

Five experiments investigated listeners' capacities for perceiving polytonality, in which materials from more than one key are employed simultaneously. The stimulus materials were based on a particularly striking example of polytonal writing from Stravinsky's Petroushka; it outlines in arpeggiated form the tonic triads of two maximally distant major keys, C and F# major. The first experiment demonstrates, using the probe-tone technique, that the two component voices presented in isolation establish the expected keys and that when they are combined some influence of both keys is felt. The second and third experiments indicate, however, that when presented dichotically the two components cannot be separated perceptually; this is attributed to the two voices having the same rhythmic and contour patterns and being sounded in the same pitch range. The fourth experiment replicated the findings of the first three, using listeners very familiar with the particular passage. The final experiment tested an alternative theoretical account, the octatonic collection. Probe-tone ratings following an octatonic scale did not account satisfactorily for the data for the musical passage, but the hierarchy of priorities proposed by Van den Toorn (1983) fit the data better than the major key profiles, especially for the experienced listeners.
III. From Theory to Practice
Authors: Lehr André
Published: September 2012

Modern digital computation techniques have made it possible to compute a base profile for a bell so that it will have some particular, predetermined eigenfrequencies. Practice has shown that with a combination of these modern techniques and the traditional skills of an experienced bell founder, a carillon bell can be made that contains an unconventional "major-third" partial and is in other respects at least as well-tuned as traditional carillon bells of high quality. An experimental movable carillon with 47 major-third bells was built and was found to be aurally quite distinguishable from a conventional carillon of comparable size. Criticizm on this new instrument comes mostly from professional carillonneurs, whereas other musicians or nonmusicians react generally in a positive way.
Switching between Musical Response Modes: Evidence for Global Parameter Settings
Authors: Weber Robert J. , Holmes Mike , Gowdy Rick , Brown Suellen
Published: September 2012

In four experiments a large temporal effect is demonstrated for alternating between different response modes of musical output: sing—whistle, sing–play. This effect, demonstrated for college students with some musical training, has theoretical implications for the setting of response mode parameters. Over the series of four studies, it is shown that the time to alternate between musical output modes is not due to peripheral competition for the components of the same motor system, or to central competition produced by concurrently trying to use the same central resources for several things at once. Syntactic disruption explains some of the alternation effect, but the most complete explanation is attributable to an output parameter setting mechanism in which different response modes may be set to ON/OFF. Both evidence and argument suggest that these parameters are set globally, and it takes time to change their values (about 200 msec per switch).
Scale Structure and Similarity of Melodies
Authors: Bartlett James C. , Dowling W. Jay
Published: September 2012

Four experiments explored an asymmetry in the perceived similarity of melodies: If a first-presented melody is "scalar" (conforms to a diatonic major scale), and is followed by a second melody slightly altered to be " nonscalar" (deviating from a diatonic major scale), subjects judge similarity to be lower than if the nonscalar melody comes first. Experiment 1 produced evidence that asymmetric similarity is not due simply to more strongly scalar melodies having greater memorability. Experiment 2 ruled out the hypothesis that asymmetric similarity depends on a taskspecific strategy reflecting demand characteristics. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated asymmetric similarity while controlling the number of onesemitone intervals in scalar versus nonscalar melodies. The data are consistent with Garner's principles that stimuli are perceived with reference to sets of alternatives and that good stimuli have few alternatives. Specifically, when melodies are presented in scalar—nonscalar order, but not when presented in nonscalar-scalar order, the first melody evokes a small set of alternatives which the second melody often violates.
Children's Perception of Musical Patterns: Effects of Music Instruction
Authors: Morrongiello Barbara A. , Roes Caroline L. , Donnelly Faith
Published: September 2012

Musically trained and untrained children between 4 and 6 years of age were tested for their discrimination of transformations of an unfamiliar six-tone melody. Transformations involved a change in one, two, or all three of the following features: melodic contour, musical intervals, or individual frequencies. In order to manipulate task difficulty, melodies were played at different presentation rates. Results revealed that discrimination performance varied as a function of (1) musical training, (2) what features of a melody were changed, (3) number of features of a melody that changed, and (4) rate of presentation. Musically trained children performed better than children without training, they showed enhanced sensitivity to the more specific melodic features (i. e., individual frequencies), they were better at detecting transformations involving changes in a fewer number of features, and their performance was unaffected by rate of presentation. In contrast, children without training attended primarily to more general pattern features (i. e., melodic contour) and needed a change involving a larger number of musical features for reliable discrimination of a transformation. In general, as the rate of presentation of the melody increased a decrement in performance occurred for untrained listeners, but the magnitude of these effects varied with transformation type.
The Tone Height of Multiharmonic Sounds
Authors: Patterson Roy D.
Published: September 2012

Multiharmonic tones containing resolved harmonics (1–7) of a fundamental, unresolved harmonics (8–24) of a fundamental, or both resolved and unresolved harmonics (1–24) were presented to listeners at each of six octaves ranging from 32 to 1024 Hz. There also were modified versions of each stimulus in which alternate harmonics were either attenuated or phase shifted. Listeners were asked to judge the tone height of the sounds when presented in a musical context. The results show that all three manipulations can affect tone height and that stimuli with the same period produce tone-height perceptions that differ by more than an octave!
Dynamic Pitch Perception for Complex Tones of Periodic Spectral Patterns
Authors: Nakajima Yoshitaka , Minami Hiroyuki , Tsumura Takashi , Kunisaki Hiroshi , Ohnishi Shigeki , Teranishi Ryunen
Published: September 2012

Pitch circularity as found in Shepard tones was examined by using complex tones that had various degrees of exactness in their spectral periodicities on the logarithmic frequency dimension. This dimension was divided into periods of 1400 cents by tone components, and each period was subdivided into two parts of a fixed ratio of 700:700, 600:800, 550:850, 500:900, 450:950, 400:1000, or 0:1400. Subjects made paired comparison judgments for pitch. When the subdividing ratio was 0: 1400 or 400:1000, the subjects responded to the spectral periodicity of 1400 cents, and, when the ratio was 700:700 or 600:800, they responded to the periodicity of 700 cents. Some seemingly intermediate cases between these two extremes or some qualitatively different cases were obtained in the other conditions. As we have asserted before, the human ear appears to detect a global pitch movement when some tone components move in the same direction by similar degrees on the logarithmic frequency dimension.
Event-Related-Potential Measurements of Cognitive Components in Response to Pitch Patterns
Authors: Cohen Dalia , Erez Avner
Published: September 2012

This study investigates the possibility of measuring cognitive responses to musical stimuli. The experiments were based on measurements of the event- related potential (ERP) of three electroencephalographic electrodes. The musical stimuli consisted of five-tone pitch patterns ( constant intensity, duration, and timbre), based on the Western tonal system. Subjects compared reference patterns with comparison patterns, which were either identical to the reference pattern or nonidentical because of predetermined changes in the comparison patterns. The patterns were presented in auditory or visual mode in a slow or a fast version. The results show a striking cognitive response to nonidentical tones in the comparison patterns and to a lesser extent to exceptional tones even in the reference patterns. Different levels of response were detected according to the type of pattern. We also found some evidence of factors contributing to "subjective equivalence" between different patterns. The correlation between results from this study and those from earlier studies based on the same measuring technique with different kinds of input data or using different methods and techniques is discussed.
Key-Distance Effects in Melody Recognition Reexamined
Authors: Takeuchi Annie H. , Hulse Stewart H.
Published: September 2012

Key distance is a theoretical measure of the relatedness of two musical keys. Key-distance effects in melody recognition denote that perception of a transposed melody depends on the key distance between the keys of the original and transposed melodies. Although key-distance effects in melody recognition are often cited in support of the psychological reality of key distance, a reexamination of studies reporting the keydistance effect and the results of three new experiments suggest that key-distance effects are not robust, if they exist at all. However, our experiments do indicate that perception of melodies is influenced by the context within which the melodies are presented. These context effects operate at both local and large- scale levels.
Absolute Pitch and Event-Related Brain Potentials
Authors: Tervaniemi M. , Alho K. , Paavilainen P. , Sams M. , Näätänen R.
Published: September 2012

An event-related brain potential (ERP) component called mismatch negativity (MMN) is elicited by physically deviant auditory stimuli presented among repetitive, "standard," stimuli. MMN reflects a mismatch process between sensory input from the deviant stimulus and a shortduration neuronal representation developed by the standard stimulus. The MMN amplitude is known to correlate with pitch-discrimination performance. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the MMN is different in absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors. ERPs were recorded from AP and non-AP groups, which were matched with regard to musical training. It was found that deviant stimuli differing from standard tones by a quartertone or a semitone elicited an MMN irrespective of whether the stimulus was located on (white key/black key) or off the Western musical scale. These results were obtained with both sinusoidal and piano tones. The MMN was larger and earlier when the stimuli were piano tones than when they were sinusoidal tones and when the standard-deviant difference amounted to a semitone rather than a quartertone. However, differences between the groups were not found in auditory information processing reflected by the MMN component of the ERP. In the light of the earlier MMN results showing a close correlation between the MMN and pitch- discrimination accuracy, it might be concluded that pitch discrimination and identification are based on different brain mechanisms. In addition, the differences in the MMN amplitude and latency between sinusoidal and piano tones might be interpreted as suggesting that sensory memory traces, as reflected by the MMN, are capable of storing information of very complex sound structures also.
Note-Onset Asynchrony in J. S. Bach's Two-Part Inventions
Authors: Huron David
Published: September 2012

Experimental evidence has shown that the perceptual segregation of concurrent auditory streams is enhanced when tone onsets are asynchronous rather than synchronous. Previous research has shown that the amount of onset synchrony is significantly less for polyphonic works than for homophonic works. In this study, an analysis of 15 polyphonic works by J. S. Bach shows that the amount of onset synchrony is significantly less than would be expected by chance, and so suggests that synchronous onsets are intentionally minimized by the composer. The results are consistent with the objective of maintaining the perceptual independence of the polyphonic voices.
Auditory Feedback and Musical Keyboard Performance
Authors: Finney Steven A.
Published: September 2012

In an investigation into the role of auditory feedback guidance in musical performance, musically experienced subjects performed on an electronic keyboard under altered feedback conditions that included pitch and timing manipulations, as well as absence of auditory feedback. The results largely replicated the data reported by Gates and Bradshaw (1974): performance in the absence of auditory feedback showed no impairment, whereas performance under delayed auditory feedback showed significant impairment. In an extension of the Gates and Bradshaw study, however, it was found that altered pitch feedback caused little or no impairment and that altering the pitches in the delayed auditory feedback condition significantly reduced the amount of delayed auditory feedback impairment. These results show that different components of auditory feedback (pitch and timing) have separable effects on musical performance and pose a problem for theories of auditory feedback effects that do not explicitly distinguish these components.
A "Cumulative" Method of Quantifying Tonal Consonance in Musical Key Contexts
Authors: Smith Allan B.
Published: September 2012

Huron (1994) recently calculated the tonal (sensory) consonance for interval categories for all scales that can be drawn from the 12 equally tempered pitch classes. Among scales with seven tones, the combinations that allow the highest tonal consonance were found in the diatonic major, natural minor, and several other scales. In this paper, an extension of Huron's approach that begins with a single tone and successively adds tones that bring the most tonal consonance to the existing set is tested. Based on (1) the order in which tones are added and (2) the mean tonal consonance of the intervals after each addition, values are assigned to each tone that are significantly correlated (p< .001) with ratings of stability that tones display in major and minor key contexts reported by Krumhansl and Kessler (1982). These findings suggest that tonal consonance is not only facilitated in major and minor scales, as Huron found, but that tonal consonance may also account for the tonal hierarchy for tones in both major and minor key contexts.
Children's Cognitive Representations of Musical Pitch
Authors: Lamont Alexandra , Cross Ian
Published: September 2012

Several recent investigations of children's cognition of musical pitch have examined the nature of children's sensitivity to the "tonal hierarchy" identified by Krumhansl (1990a). These studies presented children with musical "contexts," asking them to make judgments about subsequent pitches, and have produced strikingly divergent results. Factors of age and of type of "musical material used in context" appear to play significant roles in determining subjects' sensitivities. This paper describes two experiments that examine the time course of the development of children's cognitive representations of pitch relations, taking into account the contributions made to such representations by structural and by temporal factors (following West & Fryer, 1990). A probetone technique was used with two contrasting context types, one being a "typical" cadential sequence and the other consisting of different randomizations of the diatonic collection. This experiment was conducted on 285 children ranging between 6 and 11 years old, from two different single-sex schools. The results were further investigated in a gameplaying experiment—using chime bars— with children from each age group represented in the first experiment. These experiments appear to indicate that children's early representations of pitch relations are remarkably stable and that development may take the form of an increasing sensitivity to time-dependent characteristics of the musical surface leading to an internalization of the tonal hierarchy. Despite the different methodologies used here, results are broadly in line with those suggested by Krumhansl and Keil ( 1982), although children's representations of musical pitch as exhibited here appear to be more sophisticated than would be implied in that study.
Computational Modeling of Music Cognition: Problem or Solution?
Authors: Desain Peter , Honing Henkjan , Vanthienen Huub , Windsor Luke
Published: September 2012

The central purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the methods for computational modeling and to show how, although computational modeling should in principle be instrumental in the understanding of the structure of musical knowledge and the processes involved in music cognition, in practice it too often degenerates into a loose "if you want to understand the theory, here, look in my program" approach. We will show how many issues cannot be decided by inspecting computer programs as they are written nowadays, and we will indicate a possible solution, giving examples from the field of music cognition research.