Music Psychologists Research Articles

Conditions de possibilités d’une rhétorique formelle perçue

Conditions of Possibility of a Perceived Formal Rhetoric. Musical form has been considered by composers and music theorists, at least since the end of the XVIIIth century, as a main aspect of musical composition. Some theoretical views of musical forms, even its perceptive reality, are challenged by music psychologists. However, other data suggest that a representation in memory of large-scale structures is possible. This article proposes to assess, through a review of the form theories and the experimental psychology literature, two fundamental questions on the perception of form : Which musical dimensions and types of representation in memory support the perception of form ? We propose a new conception of musical form which able to include, with Western tonal musical architectures, some other expressions of musical form.

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Emotion induction through music: A review of the musical mood induction procedure

This article reviews research showing that music can alter peoples’ moods and emotions. The so called “musical mood induction procedure” (MMIP) relies on music to produce changes in experienced affective processes. The fact that music can have this effect on subjective experience has been utilized to study the effect of mood on cognitive processes and behavior by a large number of researchers in social, clinical, and personality psychology. This extensive body of literature, while little known among music psychologists, is likely to further help music psychologists understand affective responses to music. With this in mind, the present article aims at providing an extensive review of the methodology behind a number of studies using the MMIP. The effectiveness of music as a mood-inducing stimulus is discussed in terms of self-reports, physiological, and behavioral indices. The discussion focuses on how findings from the MMIP literature may extend into current research and debate on the complex interplay of music and emotional responses.

Self and Desire: A Preliminary Exploration of Why Students Start and Continue with Music Learning

This paper investigates theories concerned with why students start and continue with their music learning. In particular, rather than focusing on the conventional nature versus nurture debate which has heavily dominated much of the writing on music learning in recent years, the current paper explores the social constructionist approach to consider the role of the student's sense of self in building a musical identity. Working within this framework, it becomes evident that data which has previously been regarded as only demonstrating the role of others in the development of musical skills has been interpreted too simplistically. The data collected for this study demonstrates that what many young learners do in their social relationships with others, and with their engagement in music-making itself, is to develop the self in such a manner that music becomes an essential construct for their personal identities: they are musicians, and as such they see the 'self' in relation to music. Thus, it is believed that the current paper presents an important departure, and lays down a challenge to music educators, psychologists and other researchers to explore how self and personal desire interact in the development of musical skills.

The Retransition as Sign: Listener-Orientated Approaches to Tonal Closure in Haydn's Sonata-Form Movements

Music psychologists interested in the perception of tonal closure might do worse than investigate the Classical retransition as a sign of impending resolution. Haydn tends to attract more than his fair share of ‘listener-orientated’ approaches, perhaps on account of his attested sensitivity to his audience's cognitive ‘processing limits’. His well-known remark to Griesinger that, isolated at Eszterháza, he ‘could make experiments, observe what elicited or weakened an impression, and thus correct, add, delete, take risks’ conveys the impression of an artist clearly in touch with his public. And yet this most playful of composers exploited this rapport to mislead his listeners, making aesthetic capital out of systematic disinformation.

Music Psychology and Music Theory: Problems and Prospects

Music theorists and music psychologists may benefit from increasing awareness of each others' discipline. However, it is necessary to delimit the common ground shared by the disciplines and, at the same time, to clarify basic differences between the two approaches. Toward this end, this article begins with a schematic history of the psychology of music from the point of view of how it has been influenced by music theory. Following this is a brief characterization of the goals, methods, and theoretical commitments of experimental psychology. The article then reports a recent program of research that reflects the direct influence of music theory on psychological experimentation. The experiments test predictions of the bottom-up component of Eugene Narmour's 1990 implication-realization model for melodic expectancy. It is shown that five principles underlie this component leading to the development of an experimentally testable, quantitative formulation. The principles are validated across three different musical styles and listeners varying in music training and experience. Implications for the psychological studies of music are discussed.

A neural network model of recoding for musical stimuli

According to music psychologists, listeners internalize characteristic patterns of rhythm, pitch, harmony, and so forth, which are then used to recode and organize sequentially presented musical stimuli. In a previous paper, a connectionist model was proposed for performing the recoding task in music [Large etal., Proc. of the 13th Conf. of the Cog. Sci. Soc. (1991)]. A compressor network recursively recodes musical patterns into fixed-width neural vectors. A reconstructor network decodes the vectors produced by the compressor into facsimiles of the original musical patterns. These mechanisms are trained simultaneously by linking their training sets together using an auto-associative form of backpropagation. It has been shown that the reconstructions produced by the network agree both with empirical data from studies of improvisational music performance, and with reductionist theories of mental representation for music [F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff, AGenerativeTheoryofTonalMusic (MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1983)]. Here, the behavior of the neural network is analyzed from a dynamical systems perspective. The analysis helps explain how the model computes reductions of the musical surface, while minimizing loss of information. It also provides insight into the generalization capabilities of this architecture.

Intercorrelations Among Musical Aptitude Profile and Seashore Measures of Musical Talents Subtests

IN 1919 THE FIRST standardized group aptitude test, the Seashore Measures of Musical Talent} was published. This battery, in its latest revised form (Seashore, 1960), is comprised of six subtests which measure basic auditory sensory discrimination. According to the test author (Seashore, 1938), everything that is rendered as music or heard as music may be expressed in terms of the concepts of the sound Pitch, Loudness, Rhythm, Time, Timbre} and Tonal Memory are tested by requiring subjects to compare a pair or short series of tones which are produced on a beat-frequency oscillator (except on the Tonal Memory subtest). Because these subtests are supposedly void of the interaction of melody, rhythm, and expression, music psychologists (Mursell, 1937) have described and condemned the battery as being atomistic and unmusically-oriented. Specifically, the omnibus group, antagonists of the Seashore approach, believe that musicality consists of more than just the ability to discriminate audio-acoustical differences in the sound wave. Further, these music psychologists, many of whom are European (Lowery, 1940; and Mainwaring, 1947), argue that aptitude is not compnsed of separate abilities, but rather, that it is one general ability. They contend that a instrument should be used as the medium for stating music test items and that the content of each item should, in and of itself, have musical meaning. The comparatively new Musical Aptitude Profile (Gordon, 1965) has been described as an eclectic test because both preference and nonpreference subtests constitute the test battery and also because, while the content of the test items is and is performed by professional musicians, the battery does, nevertheless, provide for the evaluation of seven postulated dimensions of aptitude. The dimensions measured by this standardized group test are classiSed into three main divisions: Tonal Imagery, Rhythm Imagery, and Musical Sensitivity. Two separate subtests are provided for each of the nonpreference tests: Melody and Harmony for Tonal Imagery, and Tempo and Meter for

A Study in the Correlation of Music Theory Grades with the Seashore Measures of Musical Talents and the Aliferis Music Achievement Test

HE PROBLEM of the diagnosis of musical talent has occupied music psychologists for years. One of the great pioneers in the field was C. E. Seashore, who developed a series of tests designed to measure what he believed to be the fundamental components of musicality: the abilities to hear differences of pitch, loudness, timbre, time, rhythm, and tones in pairs of nonmelodic tonal sequences.l The Seashore tests have been used extensively, often along with other tests, in the prognosis of success in music. It is obvious that the acuity of the successful musician's ear is only one of the things that have helped to determine that success, and other tests have been developed to try to discover other aspects of talent that can be tested objectively. One of the more recent tests that have been developed in the attempt to measure musical components other than the ones tested by Seashore is the Aliferis Music Achievement Test. Aliferis developed his test while he was teaching at the University of Minnesota. In this test, musical items involving melody, harmony, and rhythm are played on the piano, and the student must select the musical notation that corresponds with what he hears. This test, as the title implies,