Pela Luz de uma Canção em Terras Estranhas: a Referência à Música Pop Anglófona na Poesia de Rui Pires Cabral*

Cultural Holism is a guiding ideology for music study proposed by Chinese scholar LUO Yifeng in 2006. It was proposed mainly based on the background of increasingly frequent cultural exchanges in the world today, and contemporary Western classical music works illustrate this trend by increasingly incorporating non-Western music elements. Cultural Holism accordingly aims to interpret the application and integration of different musical elements in the related works from a more comprehensive and neutral perspective. This study selects two representative works - Colors from China and Hommage to China - from a series of recent Chinese-style clarinet works created by Italian composers Michele Mangani and Giuseppe Ricotta, and conducts detailed musical analysis of the two works from the perspective of Cultural Holism in order to present specific examples of innovative uses and combinations of Western and Chinese musical elements, thereby bringing about a clearer and deeper understanding of these works.

This study uses the "Analysis-Synthesis Method" to analyse Liu Xiaogeng's integration of ethnic music elements of Yi and Dai culture into contemporary choral works. The two selected choral works were analysed using a case analysis method to reveal the ingenious integration of traditional Yi and Dai musical elements and modern composition techniques. Through in-depth interviews, we deepened music experts’ evaluation of Liu Xiaogeng’s works. This study highlights Liu Xiaogeng's unique artistic language and the impact of his works on national choral music. Through this exploration, the research highlights the significance of reinterpreting national music within choral genres, promoting cultural preservation and cross-cultural understanding through creative expression. These discoveries celebrate a rich cultural heritage while enriching the global landscape of choral music, inspiring further appreciation and exploration of diverse musical traditions within the choral genre.

The interactive drama, a relatively unexplored area of multimedia music discourse, combines elements of film and video game to provide its audience and participants an evolving experience. Because contemporary works of the medium incorporate further innovations that expand the plethora of branching options, the viability of each narrative path and its potential ending necessitates a flexible analytical model for narrative discourse. Music, if it shares the ability to participate in the narrative, must likewise possess this sense of malleability for the work, as its presence or absence in the presented (selected) pathway is not predetermined but remains in a state of potential at all times. This sense of narrative potential for music is a special quality inherent in the interactive drama, allowing for the filmic and ludic qualities of form and function to remain simultaneously “present” and “absent” in a given narrative and provide critical commentary on the events at hand as well as the overall prospective paths that exist in the web of options. Using the interactive drama Until Dawn, this article will explore the concept of narrative potential through three different musical elements that range in their comparative functions to traditionally filmic or ludic roles and their articulation to the underlying narrative. Regardless of supposed function, the music of Until Dawn reveals that narrative form and function of film and video game cannot be differentiated or simply synthesized, but fully appreciated as a unique form of the interactive drama on the multimedia continuum.

While listening to a piece of music, listeners automatically build a mental image of the song by abstracting its most prominent music elements. The mental representation of these elements is used to compare characteristics of different songs. Experiments have shown that musical timbre, tempo and genre play an important role in the perception of both inter- and intra-song similarity. However, it is not clear which musical cues dominate the listeners’ perception of similarity, and no theoretical or experimental framework has addressed the problem of establishing a hierarchical description of cue relevance. One of the main limitations in previous studies is in the narrow experimental methodology and the small number of songs and genres typically used in the perceptual experiments. Recent literature suggests that a large perceptual data-base could improve the performance ceiling reached by existing signal-based music-similarity algorithms. The aims of the present thesis are to gain a better understanding of the listener’s perception of similarity between songs of Western popular music and to collect perceptual data on an extended music data-base for both the test of theoretical models and the implementation of algorithmic applications. To investigate the perception of music similarity and collect a perceptual data-base, two perceptual experiments were conducted: a lab-based exploratory experiment to test and optimize the experimental method; and a larger-scale web-based experiment to extend the experimental paradigm to a larger set of stimuli and control variables. Both experiments used triadic comparisons of song excerpts selected from several genres of Western popular music: the participants listened iteratively to three song excerpts and chose the most similar and least similar pair. The experimental method was conceived to maximize the stimulus set size while keeping a reasonable experimental time for the participants. Data analyses include an examination of participant concordance to evaluate the existence of a stable and common perception of music similarity across and within participants, a comparison of the relative influence of control variables, and the investigation of factors underlying the organization of the participants’ perceptual space. The first part of this thesis focuses on the description of the experimental design used to collect the perceptual data. Several cross-checks of participants’ concordance in various conditions, and side experiments support the overall robustness of the experimental design and the simplicity of the task for the participant. The statistically significant concordance found within and across participants suggests the existence of a stable and common basis for the perception of music similarity. No difference was found in consistency between musicians and non musicians, and between participants classified as familiar and unfamiliar with the stimulus material. Within our experimental and selected-song context, we found a statistically significant evidence for a hierarchical salience of the control variables used in the stimulus selection on participants’ rankings: genre > tempo > timbre. The second part of the thesis includes a deeper analysis of the participants’ perceptual space using features calculated from the rankings of the second large-scale experiment. A quadratic discriminant analysis quantitatively confirmed the qualitative hierarchy of relevance in control variables found in the first experiment. We defined and labeled three axes slow-fast, vocal-non vocal, synthetic-acoustic that show significant separation of the excerpt classes. On the tempo axis, we found high correlation between the logarithm of the excerpt beats per minute and the projected positions of the excerpts. Finally, we found that the hierarchical order of relevance of control variables differs if evaluated globally, on the whole set of stimuli, or contextually, on a specific stimulus subset. In the last part of the thesis, we used commonly available feature-extraction algorithms to map the physical properties of each song signal to the participants’ perceptual space, in order to build an algorithm able to predict participant behavior. In this process, we evaluated the performance of the specific feature-extraction algorithms and the relevance of musicologically-grouped feature subsets: pitch, loudness, rhythm and timbre. A trained linear model can correctly predict 52:3 ?? 0:5% of the rankings on the most similar pair within song triads. This is a good result considering that the theoretical limit of algorithmic performance is 78 ?? 8%, estimated from participant concordance in the perceptual experiment. In predicting the perceptual similarity data, our model outperforms the current state of the art algorithm from the MIREX 2006 competition. Timbre features were found to be the most important subset for the prediction of inter-song perceptual similarity.