Musical Melodies Research Articles

Audio application of the parametric array

‘‘HyperSonic Sound’’ is American Technology Corporation’s commercial application of the parametric array to produce broadband audio sound (Business Week, 12-2-96 issue, pp. 108–109). E. G. Norris demonstrated the device at the Penn State ASA Meeting [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 101, 3072(A) (1997)], but gave few technical details. An analysis of the device demonstrated is provided here. The primary fields are produced by sixty 40-kHz elements mounted on a ring, 4-cm i.d., 7-cm o.d., which produce an axial sound-pressure level of 140 dB at 30 cm. The values given imply a Rayleigh distance of about 1.2 m and a (primary) beamwidth of about 3°. Estimated by the absorption length for the primaries, the interaction region is about 9 m. Those who witnessed Norris’s demonstration can attest to the narrowness of the secondary sound (a synthesized musical melody) and apparent absence of sidelobes. However, the melody heard also exhibited distortion. Distortion may be predicted by recalling that when the primary wave is a modulated carrier, the secondary sound is (asymptotically) the second derivative of the modulation envelope squared. Prospects for reducing the distortion are discussed [see Yoneyama et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 73, 1532–1536 (1983)].

Rehearsal and Recognition of Braille Music Melodies by Skilled and Less Skilled Braille Decoders

Rehearsal and Recognition of Braille Music Melodies by Skilled and Less Skilled Braille Decoders

Pitch, periodicity, and auditory organization.

The perception of pitch forms the basis of musical melody and harmony. It is also among the most precise of all our human senses, and with imagination, this precision can be used experimentally to investigate the functioning of the auditory system. This tutorial presents auditory demonstrations from the zoo of pitch effects: pitch shifts, noise pitch, virtual pitch, dichotic pitch, and the pitches of things that are not there at all. It introduces models of auditory processing, derived from contemporary psychoacoustics and auditory physiology, and tests these models against the experimental effects. It concludes by describing the critical role played by pitch in the important human ability to disentangle overlapping sources of sound.

Pitch, periodicity, and the brain.

The perception of pitch forms the basis of musical melody and harmony. It is also the most precise of all our human senses. With imagination, this precision can be used experimentally to investigate the functioning of the auditory system. The Indianapolis tutorial will present auditory demonstrations from the zoo of pitch effects: pitch shifts, noise pitch, virtual pitch, dichotic pitch, and the pitches of things that are not there at all. The tutorial will introduce models of auditory processing, derived from contemporary psychoacoustics and auditory physiology, and will test these models against the experimental effects. It will conclude by describing the critical role played by pitch in the human ability to disentangle overlapping voices, as modeled by current work on artificial intelligence.

Time-of-day-induced priming effects on verbal and nonverbal dichotic tasks in male and female adult subjects.

Normal adults (32 males and 32 females) were tested for time-of-day related shifts in laterality and priming on two dichotic listening tasks using consonant-vowel combinations (CVs) and musical melodies. The predicted time-of-day effect on melodies was due to males showing low report in the morning, but not the afternoon, suggesting increased right hemisphere involvement in the afternoon. A time-of-day-induced priming effect on the laterality index for CVs differentiated males and females. Males tested morning-first were more lateralized than females, who in turn were more lateralized when tested afternoon-first. A time-of-day-induced priming effect on the laterality index for music indicated those tested afternoon-first showed an overall left ear advantage (LEA), whereas those tested morning-first showed an overall right ear advantage (REA). On raw music scores a sex-linked, time-of-day-induced priming effect was due to the prior presentation of CVs--that is, cognitive priming. Other priming effects on music were evident for order of stimulus presentation and order of ear attended. Implications for theory, research and pedagogy are discussed.

Musical characteristics of Enka

This paper presents an analysis of enka, a type of Japanese popular song. I shall attempt to elucidate the musical characteristics of enka by examining its musical scales, melodies, vocal techniques and rhythms. We shall see, however, that enka is a composite genre, not characterised by a single type of scale or rhythm. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to understand enka without reference to other types of Japanese popular song. Thus some discussion of such other genres will also be required.

Magnetic noise reduction technique for an AC motor driven by a PWM inverter

A technique for reducing magnetic noise from an AC motor driven by a pulsewidth modulation (PWM) inverter is proposed. In this technique, the meaningless magnetic noise is converted into selected information. The technique can be adopted independently of the inverter rated output power. The relationship between carrier waveform frequency in PWM control and harmonics contained in the motor current is first clarified by a harmonics analysis. Then a hardware circuit configuration and carrier frequency control software in a microcomputer are introduced. Using a musical melody as the selected information, the effect of this control is experimentally confirmed. It is shown that the desired sound can be obtained from the AC motor, and the motor voltage and motor current waveforms are not affected by such control. >

Canonical analysis concerning musical melodies and the listeners' emotions.

Following the research on the static parameters treated in the previous report, we have studied the relationship between the dynamic parameters extracted from the musical scores and the emotional responses to the stimulus obtained from the psychological hearing test by the use of the synthesized sound according to those scores. The dynamic parameters treated in this report are the difference of intervals calculated from the successive three notes, the chord, and the chord progression. The canonical analysis used in this study has revealed (1) that there exist high degree of correlations between the three note patterns with the difference of intervals of 2 and the emotional response of “legerity, ” and also those with the difference of intervals of 0 and “vigor” respectively, (2) that the chord of C, G and the chord progression of G→C are closely related with the emotional responses of “joy, ” “vigor” and “legelity” respectively, while the chord of Am, Dm and the chord progression of E7→Am, Dm→E7 are related with the opposite emotional responses, and (3) that the application of the AR model to the evaluated melodies and the use of AIC give the result that the optimal model order is approximately 7 in the quater note unit. These results are in agreement with our intuitions.

Multivariate analysis concerning the musical melodies and the listeners' emotions

Multivariate analysis concerning the musical melodies and the listeners' emotions

Multichannel audio monitor for detecting electrical signals

The multichannel audio monitor (MUCAM) permits the simultaneous auditory monitoring of concurrent trains of electrical signals generated by as many as eight different sources. The basic working principle of this device is the modulation of the amplitude of a given pure tone by the incoming signals of each input channel. The MUCAM thus converts a complex, multichannel, temporal signal sequence into a musical melody suitable for instant, subliminal pattern analysis by the human ear. Neurophysiological experiments requiring multi-electrode recordings have provided one useful application of the MUCAM.

‘Medieval’ Musics of Asia

The documentation of many aspects of early musical history is substantially fuller, and extends further backwards in time, in Asia than in Europe. This is so for the history of secular music in general, for the history of musical forms and melody types, as well as for the history of instruments, of playing techniques, and of ornamentation. Assyriologists, and musicologists with some knowledge of and competence in Assyriology, have recently demonstrated that the Babylonians were already familiar with the seven diatonic modes of the European tradition in the second millennium b.c., and there exists a Hurrian cuneiform tablet of 1400 b.c. bearing words and music of a hymn to the goddess Nikkal, wife of the Moon-God. The concern of this paper, however, is with South and East Asia, rather than with Western Asia and the Ancient Fertile Crescent, and in both East and South Asia numerous documentary sources carry us back to a point in time in musical history some five or six centuries earlier than equivalent European sources. From the standpoint of the historian of Western music, what is perhaps most astonishing is the existence of a substantial body of secular instrumental music of the eighth and early ninth centuries, surviving in score, in mensural tablatures, in documents in part themselves written in the ninth and tenth centuries, or now available in copies made not later than the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.

Pitch and duration in recognition of music-like structures.

To determine whether patterning of pitch or duration contributes most to the recognition of melodic structures, tone sequences resembling musical patterns or melodies were used in a recognition memory task. Nine categories of pattern complexity were produced by using three different levels of average information per tone in each of the two dimensions. These categories of tone sequences were presented to groups of Ss and their recognition performance measured. Only patterning of pitch was a significant factor in recognition. Performance was better with larger values of average information per tone, but behavior at maximum values of pitch information suggested that the relationship between performance and pattern information is nonmonotonic.

The hamograph a new amplitude rhythm control device for the production of electronic music

The Hamograph was designed and built to fulfill the need for a practical and relatively inexpensive means for controlling the rhythm and dynamic envelope of raw electronic sounds, as a tool for the electronic music composer. The machine consists of control loops of variable speed, which carry the rhythmic and envelope message in the form of conductive contours, read by a series of contacts of graduated resistance, which in turn modulate the signal voltage. Any type of sound may be subjected to such control which results in a wide variety of musical textures and melodies. Corrections can be made easily, and the number of splices required for a total electronic composition is materially reduced.

旋律了解度の規定因子について

1) From the point of view of information theory, perception of melody presupposes the transmission of the melody. As first explicitly expressed by Yuki, the factor of “movement” dominates in the primitive stage of melody perception, but the melody perception has gradually developed into the present form in which position, or the “hereness” and “thereness” of each point of moving tone plays a more important rôle than the factor of movement in building up the perception of melody.These “hereness” and “thereness” can be given by the sequence of discrete and more or less prolonged tones. The sequence of discrete, extended sounds may be decomposed into the following two: the sequence of pitch intervals and the sequence of time intervals during each of which a pitch is extended. As the first step of the information theory approach toward melody perception, only the sequence of pitch intervals is studied in this paper. Several experiments were conducted in which then normal code of melody transmission was distorted or disturbed by a sort of noise, and the effect of deteriorated transmission was measured in terms of melody intelligibility scale constructed analogically to the scale of sentence intelligibility.2) Preliminarily were analysed the frequencies of pitch intervals appearing in the most familiar musical melodies, for example, “Last rose of summer”, “Home, sweet home” and the like, with the finding that only ten pitch intervals appear with frequency greater than 1%. (See Table 1.)3) Why the familiar melodies are mainly constructed with so few pitch intervals as ten will be accounted for by the assumption that melodies must be quantized if they are to be communicated exactly. Further, it should be necessary for communication that the rules of quantization must be shared as the common code of information transmission by people under the same historical and social background of music. So it is expected that melody transmission would be deteriorated if the normal pitch intervals as the shared code are distorted, extended or compressed, uniformly. The result of the experiment clearly demonstrates this effect. (Fig. 6)4) It is a common observation that one can often guess the whole melody by listening only a part of it. An experiment was conducted to test how much the melody intelligibility increases as the length of presented melody increases. The result is shown in Fig. 7.5) The third experiment is concerned with how the transmission of a pitch interval is reduced when a disturbing vibrato overlaps the two successive tones by which an interval is defined. The result is shown in Fig. 8.6) Since the third experiment revealed that a disturbing vibrato reduces intelligibility of every elemental pitch interval, the effect of disturbing vibrato upon a melody intelligibility is examined in the last experiment. The result is shown in Fig. 9.

旋律に於けるアブラハム効果の實驗的研究

1. The only noted contribution which experimentally investigated the grasp of the musical melody is the study of Otto Abraham in 1923.He was in his experiment the intervals between each note in the melodies were not sung precisely by this subjects as every musical notation indicates, but they were modified variously according to a certain principle (Abraham effect).2. With his prominent auditory ability, he could execute the work, but the melody which he took up as a material for his study was but one, that is, “Deutschland über alles.” We haved re-examined the effect in regard to the Japanese people as well as to the melodies composed by them, employing the talkie film recording device for the purpose of the optical measurement of the pitches.3. “Kojo-no-Tsuki” which is a famous Japanese air and “Kono-michi” a children's song composed by K. Yamada, one of the most celebrated contemporary composers, were selected as the materials. The former was sung by heart eight times by three subjects, the later three times by three, both without any accompaniment.4. Our result, abstractred from the records of the two melodies by the abovementioned optical measurement method, are shown in Table 4 and 5. Intervals are shown in both tables with the unit of “cent” as Abraham did.5. Intervals No. 1, 13, 22, and 37 in the experiment (VI) (Table 4) are homoharmonic, nevertheless they are all in upward slop. On the contrary No. 8, 29, and 34 are in downward slope. Every minor second interval, No. 4, 5, 16, 17, 40, and 41, is remarkably diminished. Intervals No. 9 and 10 however enlarged in the opposite direction. So-called leap intervals No. 23, 47 and 28 are expanded obviously.6. Table 5 indicates results of the experiment of the melody “Kono michi.” Interval No. 5, the so-called leap interval, is clearly expanded. On the other hand No. 2. an octave, which seems to be a leap interval is not enlarged at all, it is quite reasonable on account of its disposition as a dead interval. And each minor second intervals, No. 21, 22, 28 and 29, is diminished as in the preceding experiment.7. Thus various modifications of intervals which are revealed in the melody when they are sung by heart was investigated by the optical measurement which has a wealth of the objectivity. And in the case on our people and the Japanese melodies too, the validity of Abraham effect was clearly demonstrated almost in all aspects.

Some configurational properties of short musical melodies.

Some configurational properties of short musical melodies.