Search results for "Melody"

Automated Extraction of Motivic Patterns and Application to the Analysis of Debussy’s Syrinx

2009

A methodology for automated extraction of repeated patterns in discrete time series data is presented, dedicated to the discovery of musical motives in symbolic music representations. The basic principle of the approach consists in a search for closed patterns in a multi-dimensional parametric space, comprising various features related to melodic and rhythmic aspects, which can be organized into note-based and interval-based descriptions. The pattern description is further reduced through a lossless pruning of the sequence description. This requires in particular a detailed estimation of the specificity relations between patterns. For instance, a pattern is more specific than its suffix, an…

Statistical features and perceived similarity of folk melodies

2001

Listeners are sensitive to pitch distributional information in music (N. Oram & L. L. Cuddy, 1995; C. L. Krumhansl, J. Louhivuori, P.Toiviainen, T. Järvinen, & T. Eerola, 1999). However, it is uncertain whether frequency-based musical features are sufficient to explain the similarity judgments that underlie listeners' classification processes. A similarity rating experiment was designed to determine the effectiveness of these features in predicting listeners' similarity ratings. The material consisted of 15 melodies representing five folk music styles. A multiple regression analysis showed that the similarity of frequency-based musical properties could account for a moderate amount …

Autocorrelation in meter induction: the role of accent structure.

2006

The performance of autocorrelation-based meter induction was tested with two large collections of folk melodies, consisting of approximately 13 000 melodies for which the correct meters were available. The performance was measured by the proportion of melodies whose meter was correctly classified by a discriminant function. Furthermore, it was examined whether including different melodic accent types would improve the classification performance. By determining the components of the autocorrelation functions that were significant in the classification it was found that periodicity in note onset locations was the most important cue for the determination of meter. Of the melodic accents includ…

2018

A music reader has to “look ahead” from the notes currently being played—this has usually been called the Eye-Hand Span. Given the restrictions on processing time due to tempo and meter, the Early Attraction Hypothesis suggests that sight readers are likely to locally increase the span of looking ahead in the face of complex upcoming symbols (or symbol relationships). We argue that such stimulus-driven effects on looking ahead are best studied using a measure of Eye-Time Span (ETS) which redefines looking ahead as the metrical distance between the position of a fixation in the score and another position that corresponds to the point of metrical time at fixation onset. In two experiments of…

Influence of expressive versus mechanical musical performance on short-term memory for musical excerpts

2012

Recognition memory for details of musical phrases (discrimination between targets and similar lures) improves for up to 15 s following the presentation of a target, during continuous listening to the ongoing piece. This is attributable to binding of stimulus features during that time interval. The ongoing-listening paradigm is an ecologically valid approach for investigating short-term memory, but previous studies made use of relatively mechanical MIDI-produced stimuli. The present study assessed whether expressive performances would modulate the previously reported finding. Given that expressive performances introduced slight differences between initially presented targets and their target…

Motown, Disco, and Drumming

2019

In a study of tempo perception, London, Burger, Thompson, and Toiviainen (2016) presented participants with digitally ‘‘tempo-shifted’’ R&B songs (i.e., sped up or slowed down without otherwise altering their pitch or timbre). They found that while participants’ relative tempo judgments of original versus altered versions were correct, they no longer corresponded to the beat rate of each stimulus. Here we report on three experiments that further probe the relation(s) between beat rate, tempo-shifting, beat salience, melodic structure, and perceived tempo. Experiment 1 is a replication of London et al. (2016) using the original stimuli. Experiment 2 replaces the Motown stimuli with disco…

Influence of virtual room acoustics on choir singing.

2015

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted)The aesthetic appreciation of a choir performance heavily relies on both the singers' skills and the acoustical characteristics of the venue. Choir directors usually know that choral performances are greatly influenced by room acoustics, while the choir singers experience the difference between singing in a small room for practice and performing in a comparatively large space like a concert hall. Clearly, it would be beneficial for musicians to understand both the effect of room acoustical features on their performance and how best to adjust tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and other musical parameters with respect to a given venue's acoustical environment.…

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

2020

ABSTRACTEvaluative beauty judgments are very common, but in spite of this commonality, are rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience. Here we investigated the neural and musical attributes of musical beauty using a naturalistic free-listening paradigm applied to behavioral and neuroimaging recordings and validated by experts’ judgments. In Study 1, 30 Western healthy adult participants rated continuously the perceived beauty of three musical pieces using a motion sensor. This allowed us to identify the passages in the three musical pieces that were inter-subjectively judged as beautiful or ugly. This informed the analysis for Study 2, where additional 36 participants were recorded with funct…

Auditory Profiles of Classical, Jazz, and Rock Musicians: Genre-Specific Sensitivity to Musical Sound Features

2016

When compared with individuals without explicit training in music, adult musicians have facilitated neural functions in several modalities. They also display structural changes in various brain areas, these changes corresponding to the intensity and duration of their musical training. Previous studies have focused on investigating musicians with training in Western classical music. However, musicians involved in different musical genres may display highly differentiated auditory profiles according to the demands set by their genre, i.e., varying importance of different musical sound features. This hypothesis was tested in a novel melody paradigm including deviants in tuning, timbre, rhythm,…

Prenatal Music Exposure Induces Long-Term Neural Effects

2013

We investigated the neural correlates induced by prenatal exposure to melodies using brains' event-related potentials (ERPs). During the last trimester of pregnancy, the mothers in the learning group played the ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ -melody 5 times per week. After birth and again at the age of 4 months, we played the infants a modified melody in which some of the notes were changed while ERPs to unchanged and changed notes were recorded. The ERPs were also recorded from a control group, who received no prenatal stimulation. Both at birth and at the age of 4 months, infants in the learning group had stronger ERPs to the unchanged notes than the control group. Furthermore, the ERP amp…