Search results for "musical form"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Does Formal Musical Structure Affect Perception of Musical Expressiveness?
1996
The aim of the study was to assess the effect of systematic modifications in global musical structures on perceived expressiveness. Recorded performances of piano pieces of Bach, Mozart and Schonberg were segmented into short chunks of six seconds in average. These chunks were linked either in a forward order (Original version) or in a backward order (Inverted version). In the inverted version, the formal global structure of the pieces was destroyed, but the superficial features and the local structures inside the chunks were unaltered. Forty non-musician subjects were required to rate the musical expressiveness of these pieces on 29 semantic scales. Half listened to the three original ver…
Local versus global processing of harmonic cadences in the solution of musical puzzles
1998
The structure of Western musical pieces is delineated by several kinds of cadence. Half cadences in the main key indicate temporary endings; authentic cadences in the main key indicate definitive endings. Authentic cadences in the dominant key are of cognitive interest, since they mark a definitive ending at a local level but a temporary ending at a global level. This study investigated the local versus global processing of these cadences. Participants were presented with sections of 16-bar minuets displayed on a computer screen in the form of a musical jigsaw puzzle. The sections consisted of either the first or the second half of the minuet (8 bars each). The first section ended with eith…
A Musical Pattern Discovery System Founded on a Modeling of Listening Strategies
2004
Music is a domain of expression that conveys a paramount degree of complexity. The musical surface, composed of a multitude of notes, results from the elaboration of numerous structures of different types and sizes. The composer constructs this structural complexity in a more or less explicit way. The listener, faced by such a complex phenomenon, is able to reconstruct only a limited part of it, mostly in a non-explicit way. One particular aim of music analysis is to objectify such complexity, thus offering to the listener a tool for enriching the appreciation of music (Lartillot and SaintJames, 2004). The trouble is, traditional musical analysis, although offering a valuable understanding …
Effects of Global and Local Contexts on Harmonic Expectancy
1998
Several psycholinguistic studies have investigated the influence of local and global semantic contexts on word processing. The first aim of the present study was to examine local and global level contributions to harmonic priming. The second was to test a spreading-activation account of harmonic context effects (Bharucha, 1987). The expectations for the last chord (the target) of eight-chord sequences were varied by simultaneously manipulating the harmonic relationship of the target to the first six chords (global context) and to the seventh chord (local context). Human performances demonstrated that harmonic expectancies are derived from both the global and local levels of musical structur…
Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm
2012
We investigated the neural underpinnings of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of a naturalistic musical stimulus. Participants were scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while listening to a stimulus with a rich musical structure, a modern tango. We correlated temporal evolutions of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of the stimulus, extracted using acoustic feature extraction procedures, with the fMRI time series. Results corroborate those obtained with controlled stimuli in previous studies and highlight additional areas recruited during musical feature processing. While timbral feature processing was associated with activations in cognitive areas of the cerebel…
Peirce and Greimas from the Viewpoint of Musical Semiotics: An Outline for a Comparative Semiotics
1982
In semiotics it has become more and more evident that the dream of a unified semiotical science is an unreachable ideal. In this situation of extreme heterogeneity it is also legitimate to ask what kind of unifying metatheories one might develop in general semiotics, as well as in its special branches, like that of musical semiotics.
Emotional Responses During Music Listening
2014
The aim of this chapter is to summarize and present the current knowledge about music and emotion from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Existing emotional models and their adequacy in describing emotional responses to music are described and discussed in different applications. The underlying emotion induction mechanisms beside cognitive appraisal are presented, and their implications on the field are analyzed. Musical characteristics such as tempo, mode, loudness, and so on are inherent properties of the musical structure and have been shown to influence the emotional states during music listening. The role of each individual parameter on emotional responses as well as their interactions …
The Pursuit of Happiness in Music: Retrieving Valence with Contextual Music Descriptors
2009
In the study of music emotions, Valence is usually referred to as one of the dimensions of the circumplex model of emotions that describes music appraisal of happiness, whose scale goes from sad to happy. Nevertheless, related literature shows that Valence is known as being particularly difficult to be predicted by a computational model. As Valence is a contextual music feature, it is assumed here that its prediction should also require contextual music descriptors in its predicting model. This work describes the usage of eight contextual (also known as higher-level) descriptors, previously developed by us, to calculate happiness in music. Each of these descriptors was independently tested …
De los inicios de la Sinfonía a Beethoven. Un paradigma de construcción europea
2020
Durante la primera mitad del siglo XVIII, la escena musical europea está protagonizada por diversos estilos instrumentales con un marcado acento nacional, resultado de la herencia del convulso siglo anterior, y que confluirán en la creación de un lenguaje instrumental que hará posible la materialización de la forma musical más importante dentro del género orquestal: la sinfonía. La obra de los grandes compositores que sentarán las bases del género sinfónico desde entonces, Haydn y Mozart principalmente, no hubiera sido la misma sin la síntesis integradora de estilos que se produce a lo largo del siglo. Distintos elementos extra musicales (filosóficos, políticos, sociales, etc.) inciden dire…
Musical structure modulates semantic priming in vocal music.
2004
It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A.,Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. Cognition, 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further by investigating how musical harmony may potentially interfere with the processing of words in vocal music. Eight-chord sung sentences were presented, their last word being either semantically related (La girafe a un tres grand cou, The giraffe has a very long neck) or unrelated to the previous linguistic context (La girafe a un tres grand pied, The gi…