Melodic Content Research Articles

Spectrotemporal cues and attention jointly modulate fMRI network topology for sentence and melody perception

Speech and music are two fundamental modes of human communication. Lateralisation of key processes underlying their perception has been related both to the distinct sensitivity to low-level spectrotemporal acoustic features and to top-down attention. However, the interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes needs to be clarified. In the present study, we investigated the contribution of acoustics and attention to melodies or sentences to lateralisation in fMRI functional network topology. We used sung speech stimuli selectively filtered in temporal or spectral modulation domains with crossed and balanced verbal and melodic content. Perception of speech decreased with degradation of temporal information, whereas perception of melodies decreased with spectral degradation. Applying graph theoretical metrics on fMRI connectivity matrices, we found that local clustering, reflecting functional specialisation, linearly increased when spectral or temporal cues crucial for the task goal were incrementally degraded. These effects occurred in a bilateral fronto-temporo-parietal network for processing temporally degraded sentences and in right auditory regions for processing spectrally degraded melodies. In contrast, global topology remained stable across conditions. These findings suggest that lateralisation for speech and music partially depends on an interplay of acoustic cues and task goals under increased attentional demands.

Adaptation of National Traditional Music in Piano Art of China of the Twentieth Century

The purpose of the study is to describe the ways of influence of the national musical tradition on the piano culture of China. The emphasis is placed on highlighting the most specific components of music - melody, harmony, rhythm, programmatic, and others - as immanent features of the national mentality from the standpoint of the genesis of the twentieth century piano art. The purpose of the study is to highlight the adaptations of traditional Chinese musical culture in piano music to reveal its aesthetic significance and features in the context of the development of the twentieth century piano art. The scientific novelty is that for the first time the ways of influence of the national style on the formation of piano culture are considered from the standpoint of adaptations of specific features within one culture but in the transition from the national-traditional to the author's, composer's space. The research methodology employed cultural-historical and stylistic analysis, as well as hermeneutics and musicological analysis. Through these methods, the study identified that the key factors of the “Chinese style” encompass consistent approaches to composer work, prominently evident in melodic content, rhythmic organisation, harmony, and direct incorporation of timbres from traditional folk instruments. Conclusions. The forms of adaptation of national culture in the piano art of China during the 20th century are evident in various elements of the musical language. These include the distinctive melodic characteristics, particularly the reliance on the pentatonic scale, preservation of rhythmic freedom, and the form structure that incorporates the logical deployment and development of artistic imagery through the programming of the musical work. Additionally, the adaptation is seen in the specific use of timbres resembling authentic musical instruments and their characteristic melodic structures, enriched through the capabilities of the piano. Key words: cultural influences, Chinese style, piano music, adaptations, traditional music.

Silent lateral actors: the role of unpronounced nuclei in morpho-phonological analyses

Abstract In Government Phonology and its descendants, there is a direct relation between representational complexity and lateral strength, as only melodically filled nuclei can discharge government and licensing. This relation is only broken in special circumstances, e.g. when lateral actorship is granted by a systemic parameter. In this paper, I provide a normalisation of lateral actorship by showing that the latter's correlation with complexity also holds for some silent nuclei without introducing a dedicated parameter. The hypothesis is that representational complexity does not necessarily correspond to some phonetic event: a non-empty nucleus can be unpronounced, without this impinging on its lateral actorship. Turbidity Theory provides the formal tools for distinguishing between empty and unpronounced nuclei. This follows from splitting the association between melodic and prosodic units into two independent relations - projection and pronunciation. Empty nuclei lack melodic content, whereas unpronounced nuclei only lack the pronunciation relation. This approach is shown to account for disparate phenomena, such as glide mutation in Classic Arabic, inflectional markers spell-out in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and the apparently exceptional behaviour of muta cum liquida clusters in Hungarian and in the Italian dialect of Finale Emilia. This approach also allows for a refinement of our understanding of the so-called yers, as well as for constraining the use of floating melody.

Cadential Melodies

This article proposes that engaging with structural melodic content can expand how we conceive of cadential function and add nuance to the more harmonically driven approaches of Caplinian form-functional theory. Drawing on discussions by Schenker, Marx, and Schoenberg, we posit parallels between structural melodic configurations and the temporal formal functions of Caplinian theory. Through several analytic examples we suggest that certain melodic directions have default association with Caplin’s temporal functions: ascending lines are typically associated with initiating functions, while the static prolongation of structural tones typically serves as either initiating or medial functions. Conversely, descending melodic lines, especially terminating on ".fn_scaledegree(1)." (authentic cadences) or ".fn_scaledegree(2)." (half cadences) are endemic of concluding functions. We do not suggest that melodic considerations replace harmonic ones, but rather conclude that the two domains are symbiotic in the sense that melodic consideration can reinforce or undermine harmonic ones, and vice versa. Ultimately, we use this rebalancing of analytic focus as a means of reengaging with various problematic phrase types and suggest further efficacy for this approach with respect to nineteenth-century formal expansions.

Reconsidering the Role of Instrumental Technique in Creative Process: The ‘Canadian School of Double Bass’ Applied to Jazz Performance

Contemporary research exploring embodiment in music has suggested that creative musical thought is directly linked to a performer’s learnt physical techniques. Within this discourse, it is understood that an improvising musician’s embodied physical techniques play a primary role in informing their creative processes. This view suggests that subsequent changes or developments to a jazz musician’s physical technique may fundamentally influence the ways in which musical ideas are conceived while improvising. This article begins by unpacking a cross-section of literature in support of this claim, before presenting the results of a practice-led autoethnographic experiment exploring the relationship between instrumental technique and creative practice. In this experiment, I transition to a new way of playing the double bass, informed by Joel Quarrington’s The Canadian School of Double Bass, and observe transformations in hand frame, use of vertical shifts, use of register, feelings of tension and overall dexterity, all of which appear to influence my creative decision making. The results highlight how this reformed technical approach affected the physical accessibility of certain intervallic options, and appear to have fundamentally impacted my conception and construction of melodic content on a cognitive level.

Two palatovelar fricatives?! the case of theich-Lautin German

AbstractThis study concentrates on the alternation between two dorsal fricatives: [x] and [ç] in Modern Standard German. The primary source of data for the analysis include both native German words and loanwords. Moreover, the discussion encompasses some strictly related processes such asg-spirantization [g] > [x]/[ç], e.g.Ber[ç] ‘mountain’ andTa[x] ‘day’, and coronalization [ç] > [ʃ], e.g.mi[ʃ] ‘me’ found in various German dialects and colloquial variants. Finally, since it is responsible for the appearance of both alternants in an identical context, e.g.Frau[ç]en‘woman, dim’ andrau[x]en‘to smoke’, a brief look is taken at the historical development of the diminutive suffixchen.It is argued here that in contemporary German there are two palatovelar fricatives [ç] which differ in their internal organization of the melodic content. In loanwords and in the diminutive suffix-chen, [ç] is lexically specified for palatality, while after front vowels and coronal sonorants the same fricative shares the palatality element with the preceding segment. The analysis is couched in a recent version of Element Theory and it proceeds on two assumptions: a) front vowels and coronal sonorants [l ʁ n] in German are defined by the resonance element |I| and b) [ç] is a complex segment containing two resonants |I| and |U|.

Scott Joplin: A Guide for Music Educators PART II—King of Ragtime Composers

Scott Joplin was an African American composer and pianist of singular merit and influence. This article is the second in a three-part series considering the biographical, artistic, and cultural contexts of Joplin’s life and work. “King of Ragtime Composers,” focuses on Scott Joplin’s artistic processes, including his structuring of melodic and harmonic content and his novel contributions to ragtime. The discussion is followed by suggested student activities written in accordance with NAfME’s 2014 National Music Standards, including performing a ragtime accompaniment, playing an original Orff arrangement of Joplin’s “The Easy Winners,” improvising within a ragtime framework, and listening to and analyzing performance choices.

THE QUESTION OF STUDYING MUSICAL STYLISTICS SONGS OF UKRAINIAN CHURCH MONODY

Irmos as the leading genre of church monody in the Kyiv metropolis preserved centuries-old musical and poetic longevity from the time of the adoption of Christianity to the middle of the 19th century. This genre also seem to testify to the invariability of the melodic content during their perception and adaptation by the Balkan Slavs, and later in Russia. Irmos did not change their musical style during the reform of notation in the second half of the 16th century from neumatic (kuluzmiana) to linear-mensural (Kiev). Today, the Kyiv square note allows us to clearly and unambiguously read the melodic text of the church monody, including the irmos, and to expand the research discourse on this centuries-old song and music tradition. Some observations already emphasize the strong and perfect organization of musical forms and principles of formation, based on the actual musical principles. And this opens a direct path to learning the musical style of the chant church monody, in particular Irmos.

Network-theoretic analysis and the exploration of stylistic development in Haydn's string quartets

Mathematical methods, specifically Network Theory, are used here to investigate musical complexity as a marker of stylistic development. Proceeding from the premise that an 18th century classical composer's musical language becomes more complex over time, we suggest that this method, insofar as it quantifies and graphically represents complexity, could be a useful tool for exploring musical style, compositional maturity, and also issues of authorship or chronology. As a preliminary study of this concept, we chose a sample of six minuet movements (and one scherzo) from Haydn's string quartets from throughout his career, and analysed the melodic content of the first violin part. This intentional limitation to a small sample of works in a single genre whose authorship and chronology are beyond question allows us to focus on fundamental issues of musical content, and how that might develop and change during the period in which the works were composed.

Lyrics on the melody or melody of the lyrics?

The musicians say “When a marriage happens between a lyric and a melody, only then a true song is born”! A proper song should express the true meaning of its lyrics through the movements of its melodic structure. “Which impacts more: Melody or lyrics?”—The answer is still unknown. The present work explores the acoustical contribution as well as the neuro-cognitive impact of lyrics in different genres of songs evoking contrast emotions. Four songs of two different genres (i.e., two songs from each genre depicting opposite/contrast emotions: joy-sorrow) were recorded from a trained musician who was asked to consecutively sing (with proper meaningful lyrics) and hum (without using any lyric or meaningful words) the songs, the obtained audio signals were later put to acoustical analysis. Later EEG signals were recorded for five naA¯ve participants with different sets of song-humming (i.e., with lyric-without lyric) versions of the same melodic content as stimuli, to study their corresponding bio-signal (EEG) attributes. DFA technique was employed to calculate and compare the Hurst Exponent values for all of the recorded auditory signals as well as the EEG responses. This is a pilot study in the context of Indian music which endeavours to analyze the contribution of lyrics in songs of different genre as well as different emotional content in both acoustic and neuro-cognitive domain.

Speech versus music in the brain

Neuroscience To what extent does the perception of speech and music depend on different mechanisms in the human brain? What is the anatomical basis underlying this specialization? Albouy et al. created a corpus of a cappella songs that contain both speech (semantic) and music (melodic) information and degraded each stimulus selectively in either the temporal or spectral domain. Degradation of temporal information impaired speech recognition but not melody recognition, whereas degradation of spectral information impaired melody recognition but not speech recognition. Brain scanning revealed a right-left asymmetry for speech and music. Classification of speech content occurred exclusively in the left auditory cortex, whereas classification of melodic content occurred only in the right auditory cortex. Science , this issue p. [1043][1] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaz3468

Distinct sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation supports brain asymmetry for speech and melody.

Does brain asymmetry for speech and music emerge from acoustical cues or from domain-specific neural networks? We selectively filtered temporal or spectral modulations in sung speech stimuli for which verbal and melodic content was crossed and balanced. Perception of speech decreased only with degradation of temporal information, whereas perception of melodies decreased only with spectral degradation. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed that the neural decoding of speech and melodies depends on activity patterns in left and right auditory regions, respectively. This asymmetry is supported by specific sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation rates within each region. Finally, the effects of degradation on perception were paralleled by their effects on neural classification. Our results suggest a match between acoustical properties of communicative signals and neural specializations adapted to that purpose.

Use of Progressive Rock in Donkey Kong Country (1994)

Whereas most of Nintendo’s music from the 1990s used basic looping structure and simple chiptune-reminiscent sounds, Donkey Kong Country (1994), composed by British composer David Wise rather than by Nintendo’s in-house composition team, featured texturally more complex music, including features characteristic of the 1970s/80s progressive rock style such as short repeated melodies and chord progressions with layering (Collins 44).
 For example, in “Fear Factory” (Figure 1), we hear a repeated chord progression of (VI, iv, i) underneath a faster eighth-note melody. Very little harmonic movement occurs and the focus is more on the melodic layers that occur in this top voice. In addition, “Fear Factory” includes unconventional punk, “mechanic/industrial”, and “glitch” noises that emphasize melodic content (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v18pEFQb3EM&t=45s). As William Cheng discusses in Sound Play, the use of such unconventional sounds often contribute to a feeling of dissociation and alienation in the player, and create a divide between diegetic (that is, music the characters are aware of) and non-diegetic (that is, “background” music) soundscapes (Cheng 98-9). While this is not a direct element of prog-rock, both industrial and prog-rock music styles feature a strong focus on texture. Collins speculates that this may have been an attempt by Nintendo to capitalize on the ‘edgier’ market of other game producers such as Sega (Collins 46).
 In this paper, an analysis of form, melodic structure, and instrumentation from Donkey Kong Country’s “Treetop Rock” and “Fear Factory” will demonstrate features atypical of Nintendo style, which normally features catchy tunes, simple instrumentation, and pop-inspired harmonies.
 Figure 1:
 
 e-: VI iv I VI ivBibliography
 Cheng, William. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. The Oxford Music/media Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
 Collins, Karen. Game Sound an Introduction to the History, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

Discovery of Repeated Melodic Phrases in Folk Singing Recordings

In music, repetition is a fundamental concept to establish structure and create temporal relationships. Previous approaches to detecting repetition in music recordings have mainly focused on discovering repeated patterns of variable length and instrumentation at arbitrary locations. In this paper, we present a novel method for the discovery of repeated sung phrases in folk music recordings and, in particular, in oral music traditions, where written scores are usually unavailable. At a first stage, a segmentation algorithm partitions automatically generated note-level transcriptions of the singing melody into sections that correspond to the structural unit of a phrase. A clustering algorithm is then used to form clusters of phrases, where each cluster contains instances of the same melodic content. The clustering algorithm operates on the basis of a distance measure between melodic sequences and, to this end, various melodic distance measures are investigated. A detailed evaluation procedure is used to assess the performance of the algorithm on three different European music traditions and the influence of transcription and segmentation errors is investigated. The proposed system is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in audio-based approaches to repeated phrase discovery for this task.

Tonal Ambiguity in Popular Music’s Axis Progressions

The harmonic progression of aFCG (Am–F–C–G) and its transpositions constitute one rotation of what I callAxis progressions, namely progressions that begin with one of these four chords and cycle through the others in order, hence the Axis-a, -F, -C, and -G, respectively. Of these four progressions, the a-form and C-form, and to a lesser extent, the F-form, have become staples of mainstream popular songs from the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. The a-form is especially noteworthy for being both extremely widespread and tonally ambiguous, in that the perception of its tonality may waver between the major and Aeolian modes. Not only does the progression conflate aspects of the two modes, but it may also vary the degree to which those modes are expressed and their proportion within the progression, resulting in a vast array of possible tonal settings. This article posits that tonality in these settings depends primarily on the melodic content of the progression. A methodology for melodic analysis is then presented and applied to a number of examples of Axis-a (as well as some Axis-F) progressions, to demonstrate how diverse its settings can be.

Seeing is Believing: The Ongoing Significance of Symbolic Representations of Musical Works in Copyright Infringement Disputes

Since the mid-twentieth Century the development of audio recording and synthesized sound technologies has radically altered how popular songs are created, fixed, disseminated, and consumed. Courts adjudicating copyright infringement claims involving musical works whose content and creation depend on these technologies, still emphasize melody, harmony, rhythm, and words – all recordable in visible symbols – as the protectable core of these works. This emphasis has been criticized as obsolete, and inapt when applied to musical works created and documented by performers only in audible formats, in which sonic and stylistic attributes may contribute more than fundamental musical elements to the popular appeal of a song. The legitimacy of this criticism depends upon our understanding of both what constitutes a copyrightable musical work, and also notation’s efficacy to represent it. This article argues that the judiciary’s traditional view of protectable expression of musical works as limited to a combination of melody, harmony, rhythm, and words, continues to be valid today despite changes in how popular songs are typically created and fixed. Timbre, dynamics, and other stylistic sonic – and, increasingly, visual – attributes closely associated with performance may significantly affect the appeal and marketability of the audio/video recording of a popular song. Yet they may contribute little to the underlying copyrightable work of music. Consider that while a documented meaningful combination of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements alone may constitute a musical work, a similar combination of information about instrumentation, dynamics, tempo, etc. – i.e., elements more closely associated with the performance of a musical work – does not. Melody, harmony, rhythm, and words can be precisely recorded in graphical symbols. This article argues that given that sight is our most developed sense, visual documentation should be the medium by which courts and juries evaluate allegations of substantial similarity between two musical works. If courts permit litigants to present audible renditions of musical works, these renditions should be limited to MIDI-produced sound based on transcriptions of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic content of the works in question by a neutral party appointed by the court. If the judiciary were to broaden copyright protection for musical works to incorporate sonic and stylistic elements closely associated with their performance, this expansion could generate paralyzing uncertainty among popular musicians about the scope of protection for extant works. It could also lead to monopolization of musical ideas, which would inhibit the very production of original musical expression that copyright is supposed to promote.

Turkish Music Genre Classification using Audio and Lyrics Features

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has become a popular research area in recent years. In this context, researchers have developed music information systems to find solutions for such major problems as automatic playlist creation, hit song detection, and music genre or mood classification. Meta-data information, lyrics, or melodic content of music are used as feature resource in previous works. However, lyrics do not often used in MIR systems and the number of works in this field is not enough especially for Turkish. In this paper, firstly, we have extended our previously created Turkish MIR (TMIR) dataset, which comprises of Turkish lyrics, by including the audio file of each song. Secondly, we have investigated the effect of using audio and textual features together or separately on automatic Music Genre Classification (MGC). We have extracted textual features from lyrics using different feature extraction models such as word2vec and traditional Bag of Words. We have conducted our experiments on Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm and analysed the impact of feature selection and different feature groups on MGC. We have considered lyrics based MGC as a text classification task and also investigated the effect of term weighting method. Experimental results show that textual features can also be effective as well as audio features for Turkish MGC, especially when a supervised term weighting method is employed. We have achieved the highest success rate as 99,12\% by using both audio and textual features together.

Teleological strategies in 'Octandre' by Edgard Varèse

The objective of this work is the discovery and analysis of teleological strategies, i.e. the ways in which music that is not tonal-oriented finds points of orientation, how it is structured around them and directed towards them as formal supports. A modernist composition Octandre by Edgar Varèse which is composed of seven wind instruments and double-bass will serve as an analytical sample. An important element of the composition is the use of sound masses as basic building units, whose expressive meaning is within the general character of the sound, and not in the concrete melodic content. Seemingly, the relevance of individual pitches is minimized, which could indicate the possible statics and absence of goal-oriented movement. However, the analysis has discovered an orientation towards certain goals, as well as the crucial importance of parameters of pitches during the process of their realisation. By tracking these processes, as well as by analyzing the sets from which the sound masses of the work are built, it will be concluded that the analyzed work rests upon advisedly elaborated compositional strategies that make its course targeted.

Mak yong Music of Malaysia: Negotiating Complex Musical Content within Periodicity

Over the past many centuries the dance theater known as the mak yong has been a major form of indigenous Malay theater that relates stories using formal and improvised monologue and dialogue, stylized dance and acting, and vocal as well as instrumental music. While written historical records about any aspect of the musical style prior to the late-19th century do not exist, the musical features of the mak yong since the early to mid-20th century are evident to us today through remembered and live performances by mak yong artists who are still active in the 21st century. This article explores the musical style of the mak yong, dating from the early 20th century to current times, noting the musical features of periodic formal structures, resultant rhythms and a complex melodic content that bind this genre to aspects of an ancient Southeast Asian musical style as well as to influences from Middle Eastern music-culture.

‘Find out what it means to me’: Aretha Franklin's gendered re-authoring of Otis Redding's ‘Respect’

AbstractIn her re-authoring of Otis Redding's ‘Respect’, Aretha Franklin's seminal 1967 recording features striking changes to melodic content, vocal delivery, lyrics and form. Musical analysis and transcription reveal Franklin's re-authoring techniques, which relate to rhetorical strategies of motivated rewriting, talking texts and call-and-response introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The extent of her re-authoring grants her status as owner of the song and results in a new sonic experience that can be clearly related to the cultural work the song has performed over the past 45 years. Multiple social movements claimed Franklin's ‘Respect’ as their anthem, and her version more generally functioned as a song of empowerment for those who have been marginalised, resulting in the song's complex relationship with feminism. Franklin's ‘Respect’ speaks dialogically with Redding's version as an answer song that gives agency to a female perspective speaking within the language of soul music, which appealed to many audiences.