Melodic Patterns Research Articles

Melodic Pattern Test of Temporal Processing: An Analysis of Different Response

Introduction: Among the auditory temporal processing skills has the temporal ordering of auditory signals that is essential for human communication. It is prerequisite for hearing system define the sound duration, the interval between them and the sequence they occur. These skills are essential for speech processing.

Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins:

Scholarly opinion has for many years been divided over Gunther Schuller's landmark 1958 article, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation.” Jazz theorists view the article's close analysis of Rollins's 1956 jazz saxophone improvisation “Blue 7” as one of their discipline's founding statements; historians and ethnomusicologists meanwhile tend to fault it for neglecting cultural context. In either instance the specific details of Schuller's analysis have been largely accepted as being internally consistent. The present study proposes that the analysis of jazz improvisation ought to engage more extensively with broader stylistic issues in addition to the specifics of isolated individual performances. Such a musically contextualized perspective reveals that Schuller's principal argument—that, in this particular improvisation, Rollins developed motivic elements of a composed theme—is false. “Blue 7” was in fact improvised in its entirety, and the melodic pattern that Schuller cited as a thematic motive was one of Rollins's habitual improvisational formulas, heard on many of the saxophonist's other 1950s recordings. This canonic recording, as well as the notion of Rollins as a “thematic” improviser, therefore needs to be reconsidered.

Effects of Metrical Encoding on Melody Recognition

We report two experiments exploring whether matched metrical and motivic structure facilitate the recognition of melodic patterns. Eight tonal melodies were composed from binary (four-note) or ternary (three-note) motivic patterns, and were each presented within a metrical context that either matched or mismatched the pattern. On each trial, participants heard patterns twice and performed a same-different task; in half the trials, one pitch in the second presentation was altered. Performance was analyzed using signal detection analyses of sensitivity and response bias. In Experiment 1, expert listeners showed greater sensitivity to pitch change when metrical context matched motivic pattern structure than when they conflicted (an effect of metrical encoding) and showed no response bias. Novice listeners, however, did not show an effect of metrical encoding, exhibiting lower sensitivity and a bias toward responding “same.” In a second experiment using only novices, each trial contained five presentations of the standard followed by one presentation of the comparison. Sensitivity to changes improved relative to Experiment 1: evidence for metrical encoding – in the form of reduced response bias when meter and motive matched – was found. Results support the metrical encoding hypothesis and suggest that the use of metrical encoding may develop with expertise.

Reading Hagiographic Motets: Christi nutu sublimato, Lamberte vir inclite, and the Legend of St. Lambert

Two fifteenth-century motets, Christi nutu sublimato ascribed to Johannes Brassart and the anonymous Lamberte vir inclite, are assumed to originate from the city of Liege on account of their common addressee, the diocesan patron St. Lambert. This resemblance is matched by notable similarities in manuscript transmission and musical style. Copied adjacently in two sources, I-AO 15 and I-TRmp 87-1, these works share distinct melodic motives and similar patterns of textural variety. Yet what do the texts of the two motets reveal about their shared saintly subject?A comparative reading of Christi nutu sublimato and Lamberte vir inclite uncovers previously unidentified hagiographic parallels originating from late-medieval accretions to St. Lambert’s life, strengthening the possibility that this music was written and sung in fifteenth-century Liege. We find the tools with which to interpret enigmatic references to legends and miracles related to Lambert’s youth, episcopate, and death in studies of literary and p...

How Jazz Musicians Improvise

It is well known that jazz improvisations include repeated rhythmic and melodic patterns. What is less understood is how those patterns come to be. One theory posits that entire motor patterns are stored in procedural memory and inserted into an ongoing improvisation. An alternative view is that improvisers use procedures based on the rules of tonal jazz to create an improvised output. This output may contain patterns but these patterns are accidental and not stored in procedural memory for later use. The current study used a novel computer-based technique to analyze a large corpus of 48 improvised solos by the jazz great Charlie Parker. To be able to compare melodic patterns independent of absolute pitch, all pitches were converted to directional intervals listed in half steps. Results showed that 82.6% of the notes played begin a 4-interval pattern and 57.6% begin interval and rhythm patterns. The mean number of times the 4-interval pattern on each note position is repeated in the solos analyzed was 26.3 and patterns up to 49-intervals in length were identified. The sheer ubiquity of patterns and the pairing of pitch and rhythm patterns support the theory that pre-formed structures are inserted during improvisation. The patterns may be encoded both during deliberate practice and through an incidental learning processes. These results align well with related processes in both language acquisition and motor learning.

Aiming for the singing teacher: An applied study on preservice kindergarten teachers’ singing skills development within a music methods course

This study examined the effects of a music methods course offered at a Cypriot university on the singing skills of 33 female preservice kindergarten teachers. To systematically measure and analyze student progress, the research design was both experimental and descriptive. As an applied study which was carried out in situ, the normal procedures of the course were not altered. The methods course incorporated singing instruction in 24 lectures and two 10-minute private singing tutorials at the beginning and middle of the semester. Students’ singing ability was measured before and after the course with a Singing Skills Assessment which required pitch matching and whole-song singing tasks. At the onset of the course 52% of participants could not echo sing accurately la-sol-mi patterns, 58% made several melodic mistakes when singing the criterion songs and only 36% could sing above A4. T test comparisons showed that by the end of the semester participants improved their singing skills significantly in the areas of pitch-matching melodic fragments ( p < .001), singing simple children’s songs ( p < .001), and highest pitch ( p < .001). It is proposed that music methods instructors include some private vocal tuition in their courses, in addition to learning children’s songs, training in melodic patterns and simple vocal exercises.

Melodic patterns in Símákonde

There are two distinct stem melodic patterns in Símákonde disjoint verb forms : penultimate melodies (H, L, LH and LHL) and a (macro) stem‑initial melodic high that is assigned to the left edge of the stem or of the macrostem. Tone doubling occurs only within the stem, but not on the penult. In a few tenses, the subject marker has a high tone that is realized on the subject marker and undergoes unbounded spreading to the following syllables of the pre‑stem.

The Intonation of Absolute Questions of Brazilian Portuguese

In this paper we describe three melodic patterns of absolute interrogatives from a phonetic point of view, obtained from a corpus in Goias (Brazil). The patterns are: a) Rising Final Inflection (30% to 52%), b) Rising-Falling Final Inflection, c) High Nucleus Final Inflection. These patterns have been established from the acoustic analysis and standardisation of 55 questions and from the verification of their validity in a perception test. We compared them with interrogative patterns obtained in different parts of Brazil and also in two Romance languages, Spanish and Catalan.

Burmese Super Trouper: How Burmese Poets and Musicians Turn Global Popular Music into Copy Thachin

Copy thachin, or Burmese cover songs of international hits, dominates the popular music scene in contemporary Burma/Myanmar. These songs in Burmese often retain melodic and stylistic patterns with international popular hits, but have lyrics rewritten by Burmese poets with varying degrees of fidelity to their original meaning. As I will argue, because of its explicit transience, copy thachin constitutes a mimetic transcription device whereby Burmese poets and musicians can engage an international other, but do so in a way that points to—yet does not always reveal—the global character of popular music.

The “Greek Project” of Catherine the Great and Giuseppe Sarti

The musical spectacle The Early Reign of Oleg—written by Empress Catherine II, with music by Giuseppe Sarti, Vassily Pashkevitch, and Carlo Canobbio—was performed in 1790 in St. Petersburg. Glorifying Russia's past and extolling its military power, the production foretold Catherine's unrealized plan of restoring the Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire through the inclusion of an excerpt from Euripides's Alcestis as a closing Greek Scene (Act V, scene 4). A multifaceted analysis of Sarti's music for the scene addresses such devices as melodrama, monodic texture, and the use of particular tonal structures, poetic meters, and melodic patterns appropriate for Attic paeans. Oleg's Greek Scene comprises Sarti's ingenious response to the pivotal antica e moderna debate, as well as to the political, intellectual, and cultural climate of late-eighteenth-century Russia.

Predictive information processing is a fundamental learning mechanism present in early development: Evidence from infants

Evidence is presented that predictive coding is fundamental to brain function and present in early infancy. Indeed, mismatch responses to unexpected auditory stimuli are among the earliest robust cortical event-related potential responses, and have been measured in young infants in response to many types of deviation, including in pitch, timing, and melodic pattern. Furthermore, mismatch responses change quickly with specific experience, suggesting that predictive coding reflects a powerful, early-developing learning mechanism.

Towards a Social Semiotic Approach of the Analysis of Emotion in Sound and Music

This paper explores the possibility of a social semiotic approach to popular music in order to document the voice qualities, melodies and instrumental sounds found in popular music using the case study of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’. The paper explores how these semiotic features, as well as the lyrics, communicate and reveal something of the subjectivity, the emotional world, created by musicians. Here the analysis explores Jackson’s use of restricted pitch ranges, breathiness, melodic patterns and gentle disjunctive articulation showing how these help to communicate the ‘tension’, and ‘trouble’ in the song. Taking a social semiotic approach the paper identifies the underlying available repertoire of meanings available to musicians and shows how musicians can skilfully draws upon these.

The learnability of language-specific fundamental frequency-based rhythmic patterns

In addition to durational patterns, melodic patterns from variations in f0 contribute to percepts of speech rhythm, too (June 2005, Niebuhr 2009). The overall regularity of these melodic patterns is language-specific. In lexical tonal languages like Mandarin, f0 patterns may be quite variable, as many or all syllables may be associated with a tone; in stress-accent languages like English, f0 variation may be less variable as it is driven by stress and prosodic boundaries (Eady, 1982). In accentual phrase languages like Bengali and French, f0 variation is typically quite regular as it is driven almost entirely by prosodic boundaries in a very constrained way. With only acoustic parameters from the input available, are melodic patterns from these different kinds of languages learnable? And how is learnability affected if speech is directed to young infants? To study this, we recorded parents reading language samples in laboratory speech and in simulated infant directed speech in the languages mentioned above, and we are analyzing the speech with durational and f0 variability measures and prosodic (ToBI) labels. We will present results on learnability of melodic patterns using computational methods for pattern classification from a selection of the languages.

Poetic improvisation in the Brazilian Northeast

This study concerns the singing called repente or cantoria, a modality of improvised sung poetry, practiced in the Northeast region of Brazil. Its practitioners are called repentistas, cantadores or violeiros, and they always sing in duets, alternating in the composition of strophes according to strict parameters of meter, rhyme and thematic coherence. There is a set of rules formulated for this purpose, but the repentistas improvise their verses on a practical basis, such as the poetic rhythm incorporated. The improvisation places the repentista in relation to aesthetic models, such as the rhythm of the poetry, the melodic patterns and the singing rules, at the same time it puts him into a dialogue with the other singer and with the expectations and reactions of the audience. The improvisation, therefore, is not only the poetic vibrant v.8 n.1 joão miguel sautchuk creation, but also the unfolding of a game of interaction between the poets and the other participants in the singing situation.

Comparative Pattern Analysis of Cretan Folk Songs

This paper reports on data mining of Cretan folk songs for distinctive patterns. A pattern is distinctive if it occurs with higher probability in a corpus as compared to an anticorpus. A small set of transcribed Cretan folk songs was encoded, organized using a knowledge base of classes, and mined using distinctive pattern discovery methods. In this exploratory study several highly distinctive melodic patterns emerge, indicating the ability of distinctive patterns to describe subgroups of folk songs.

Hearing the silences (as well as the music) in Michael Haneke’s films

Abstract The infrequency of music in Michael Haneke’s films is frequently mentioned by critics, but usually only in passing. That Haneke often denies his audiences the comfort of suturing or conventional musical structures demands closer scrutiny. I explore the openings of representative examples: Caché (2005) and Funny Games (1997, remade in 2007). The structured silences of Caché have the most unnerving power: the absence of any harmonious, rhythmic, or melodic pattern communicates the devastating inconclusiveness that is, in the film, connected with the fallout from colonial tragedy. The sparing use of music in both versions of Funny Games is no less confrontational: the opening collision of operatic and thrashpunk music establishes Haneke’s intent to radically reframe the horror genre. I explore how these soundtracks are crucial for establishing that the films are “interrogative texts” (to apply Catherine Belsey’s term), films that self-consciously raise unsettling questions as opposed to offering the spectator the formulaic security of classic realism. Ultimately, I argue that the soundtracks of Haneke’s films also call attention to the processes of their construction and manipulation so as to be, in the director’s words, “more honest.”

Identifying violin performers by their expressive trends

Understanding the way performers use expressive resources of a given instrument to communicate with the audience is a challenging problem in the sound and music computing field. Working directly with commercial recordings is a good opportunity for tackling this implicit knowledge and studying well-known performers. The huge amount of information to be analyzed suggests the use of automatic techniques, which have to deal with imprecise analysis and manage the information in a broader perspective. This work presents a new approach, Trend-based modeling, for identifying professional performers in commercial recordings. Concretely, starting from automatically extracted descriptors provided by state-of-the-art tools, our approach performs a qualitative analysis of the detected trends for a given set of melodic patterns. The feasibility of our approach is shown for a dataset of monophonic violin recordings from 23 well-known performers.

Intonational meaning in institutional settings: the role of syntagmatic relations

This paper addresses the power of intonation to convey interpersonal or attitudinal meaning. Speakers have been shown to accommodate to each other in the course of conversation, and this convergence may be perceived as a sign of empathy. Accommodation often involves paradigmatic choices—choosing the same words, gestures, regional accent or melodic pattern, but this paper suggests that affective meaning can also be conveyed syntagmatically through the relationship between prosodic features in successive utterances. The paper also addresses the use of prosody in situations of conflict, particularly in institutional settings. The requirement of the more powerful participant to exercise control may conflict with the expression of empathy. Situations are described where divergent rather than convergent behaviour is more successful both in keeping control and in maintaining rapport.

A study of melodic patterns in shomyo of the Kosho branch of the Jodo Shinshu sect

A study of melodic patterns in shomyo of the Kosho branch of the Jodo Shinshu sect

A Study of Melodic Patterns in Vocal Styles Accompanied by the Shamisen

A Study of Melodic Patterns in Vocal Styles Accompanied by the Shamisen