How does musical texture relate to large-scale form in classical string quartets? Are certain textural strategies associated with sections or formal functions in a sonata movement? Some music theorists have argued that contrapuntal textures are more common in developments and transitions. In their view, these medial sections would use polyphony to foster a sense of looseness, instability, and momentum. Our study tested these claims by examining a pre-existing corpus of string quartet movements in sonata form by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. We measured texture in terms of average onset synchrony, where lower onset synchrony represents greater rhythmic and textural independence among parts. Although average onset synchrony was lower in developments, compared to expositions, for most pieces in the corpus (65.22%), there was a significant interaction between section and composer, and post hoc analysis indicated that this difference in onset synchrony was significant only for Beethoven. Within expositions, transitions did not tend to have lower onset synchrony, and there was no significant effect for subsection. However, there was a significant main effect for composer here. Overall, these results imply that textural strategies in classical sonata form are complex and may vary from piece to piece and from composer to composer.

No abstract available.

It is typically assumed in the empirical aesthetics literature that generalizable abstract stimulus attributes like familiarity, fluency, and complexity drive preferences. This general nature means that they can, at least in principle, apply to any stimulus regardless of its characteristics and sensory modality. However, most studies in this tradition are restricted to group-level trends and particular stimulus properties. Therefore, they say nothing about amodal or general preferences for particular levels of such abstract attributes independently from their characterization at the individual level. Moreover, the hypothesis of a general, amodal preference for attributes like complexity was not empirically supported and only scarcely tested until we provided empirical evidence against it in our Clemente et al. (2021) study. In their quest for empirical evidence in favor of a preference for complexity across the auditory and visual modalities, Friedman et al. (2024) made two central claims: First, they found it surprising that aesthetic sensitivity for visual and musical complexity did not correlate in our study. Second, they expressed concerns about the comparability of the musical and visual stimuli we used. In this commentary, I show how these claims and the premises on which they rely are debatable and how the results of Friedman et al. (2024) support our conclusion that stimulus information rather than abstract attributes like complexity drive evaluative judgments such as liking.

This commentary situates Friedman et al. (2024) – and by extension, Clemente et al. (2021) – within a broader research context. Both papers raise important issues, but neither study’s result can be considered definitive. The operationalization and assessment of aesthetic constructs across many investigations should reflect the inherent diversity of human artmaking, yielding a structured sense of the conditions under which modality-specific versus modality-general representations predominate in aesthetic or evaluative cognition. Additionally, I note that this research enterprise touches on two sets of issues, which are simultaneously central to an understanding of the nature of human artistry, yet which remain under-represented in contemporary research. One concerns the murky evolutionary origin of our human artistic capacity, including the role of cross-modal processing and its role in aesthetic cognition. The second involves the first-person deployment of this capacity in creative problem solving, rather than in a merely receptive mode. Both speak to the importance of understanding inherent structure and constraints on human aesthetics and creativity.

The theory of Jesse Berezovsky (2019) is a rare foray of a physicist into the territory of music science. In their follow-up article in Empirical Musicology Review, Ryan Buechele, Alex Cooke, and Jesse Berezovsky (2024) show how the evolution of Western tuning systems and compositions can be rationalized by a theoretical model that describes a trade-off between minimizing sensory dissonance and maximizing compositional variety. From the Renaissance period onwards there was a trend towards more dissonance, and more compositional variety in both tuning systems and compositions. While this historical progression has perhaps been described qualitatively elsewhere, this model provides a more precise quantitative description of the phenomenon. The validity and scope of this model ought to be tested further by comparing its predictions with empirical measurements of tuning systems in both Western and non-Western cultures, alongside predictions of other theories of scale evolution. In the hope of encouraging and facilitating more of these interdisciplinary endeavors, I discuss some of my anecdotal experiences as a physical scientist embedded in the music science community, and offer advice on how to achieve better understanding and communication across disciplines.

In a provocative recent study, Clemente et al. (2021) found that individual differences in aesthetic sensitivity to stimulus complexity in the musical domain were uncorrelated with those in the visual domain. This ostensibly contradicts existing theory and research pointing to a link between idiographic preferences for musical and visual complexity. However, a review of their methodology reveals that Clemente et al. (2021) inadvertently introduced confounds in the temporal dynamics of their experimental stimuli as well as in their operational definitions of complexity in each domain. To address these confounds, we conceptually replicated part of their procedure using musical and visual stimuli that were either very closely matched in their temporal dynamics and/or for which complexity was operationalized more similarly. With these modifications, reliable positive correlations indeed emerged between aesthetic sensitivities to complexity across domains, providing renewed evidence for cross-modal correspondence in evaluative responses to musical sounds and visual images.

We explore a physics-based model describing systems of musical intonation. Under the assumption that tuning systems seek to balance minimization of dissonance with maximization of compositional variety, we can use the same methods that are used to describe how transitions between the phases of matter are governed by a balance between minimizing energy and maximizing entropy. In both cases, a parameter – temperature – controls the balance between these factors. We show that as the temperature is raised from low to high, our model generates tuning systems that closely resemble those used throughout the history of Western music, from just intonation, to meantone temperaments, to equal temperament. We demonstrate how our model reflects the way in which tuning systems evolved along with trends in composition by comparing the results of our model vs. temperature to a corpus of 9620 pieces vs. year of composition from 1568-1968. By changing parameters in the model, we also find that other tuning systems, such as 31-tone temperaments, emerge. These results provide a new lens for understanding tuning systems, and a new approach for generating novel systems of intonation.

The corpus study reported by De Souza, Dvorsky, and Oyon (2024) investigates texture in sonata form movements of classical string quartets (by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven) using onset synchrony. The following commentary provides some additional discussion on the behavior of various measures of onset synchrony when applied to this genre, and the potential of this research to be more widely generalizable.

No abstract available.

The following is a commentary on De Souza, Dvorsky, and Oyon's (2024) target article on polyphonic texture and sonata form. Their study suggests that development sections display more polyphony than exposition sections, as indicated by lower onset synchrony. However, the expected increase in polyphony during transitions was not observed. Using the exploration-exploitation framework from cognitive science, I propose potential explanations for these findings. I also recommend that future research on polyphonic texture incorporates expert evaluations alongside computational metrics to achieve a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of musical texture.