Understanding Of Music Research Articles

Masterful words: musicianship and ethics in learning the ney

Unlike in some recent anthropological writings that show the insignificance of verbal or overt instruction in the process of skill acquisition, talk is, in vital ways, constitutive of the practice of ney (reed flute) learning that I discuss here. What is it about masterful speech that makes it such a compelling vehicle for musical education? To address this question, the article presents a number of key processes that sohbet (or conversation) is designed to facilitate in learners: new skills of hearing and musical understanding; extra‐musical sensibilities germane to becoming a skilled ney‐player; and communal affections between those participating in the listening act. It is argued that when all of these combine, certain ethical dispositions are fostered in learners’ moral selves, enabling new ways of relating to others and to the city.

Prelúdio nº 3 de Heitor Villa-Lobos: considerações sobre um processo interpretativo

Este trabalho apresenta uma interpretação da peça para violão solo Prelúdio nº 3, de Heitor Villa-Lobos. A análise fundamenta-se nos conceitos de performance historicamente informada (WALLS, 2002) e intuição informada (RINK, 2007). Portanto, apresenta-se aqui um estudo de caso onde a intuição e percepção musical do intérprete são reforçados por aspectos estéticos e estilísticos. Primeiramente, serão abordadas características harmônicas e de ornamentação (elementos estético-estilísticos); depois, adentra-se na análise da peça, baseada em parâmetros como plano formal, temporalidade e dinâmica (RINK, 2007), bem como de agrupamentos (JACKENDOFF; LERDAHL, 1983).

Musicology, Performance, Slavery: Intellectual Despotism and the Politics of Musical Understanding

This essay focuses on the uneasy relationship between scholarship and performance. I argue that this uneasiness stems from a still pervasive hierarchy, one that gives scholarship the power to regulate, even repress, what musicians themselves know and understand of music through the act of performing. This relation has far-reaching consequences that not only underscore basic epistemological formulations concerning the nature of both music and performance, but also govern what constitutes authoritative knowledge about the art. Indeed, in the modern research university, this relationship effectively accords epistemological legitimacy to every institutional identity that has something to say about music except that of the musician herself. If the musician and her activity figure in, they do so in subordinate positions, as objects to be studied, interviewed, prodded, or measured, or as vehicles for the application of disciplinary or research-based understanding. Such a situation enacts a power dynamic disturbingly similar to those operative in political structures founded on class difference, social inequality, and slavery. Indeed, I trace this dynamic back to Aristotle’s Politics, where his defence of slavery effectively separates the work of thought from that of the body so as to keep thought elevated and pure. The relevance of this separation to musical matters becomes explicit in Boethian music theory, where those who merely think about music become musical authorities, while those who make music (whether as composers or performers) remain largely ignorant of what they are doing. Excerpts from musicological literature past and present show that this division, what might be called “intellectual despotism,” continues to underwrite institutional music discourse in at least four salient ways: (1) by distorting music from a practice into an object to be observed; (2) by privileging listener-spectatorship and the experience of music had therein; (3) by promoting to sole epistemological authority those who speak to music through the mouthpieces of other disciplinary voices; and finally (4) by constructing musicians as benighted subjects who need to be “educated,” “informed,” or “civilized” by scholarship. The article concludes by outlining a program for undermining this politics, one that places musicians, as well as the knowledge embodied in music-making, at the foundation of musical understanding.

Beethoven’s Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74 and 95 by Nancy November (review)

EARLY AND LATE ROMANTICS Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74 and 95. By Nancy November. (Music in Context.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xiii, 282 p. ISBN 9781107035454 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9781107496798 (e-book), $76.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, tables, bibliography, index.Nancy November's Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74, and 95 is the first fulllength study of Beethoven's five middleperiod quartets since Gerald Abraham's 1942 monograph for Oxford's Musical Pilgrim series (Beethoven's Second-Period Quartets [London: Oxford University Press, 1942]). While the 71 years separating these two publications have yielded numerous and diverse studies of Beethoven's quartets- most notably Joseph Kerman's groundbreaking exegesis of the entire cycle (The Beethoven Quartets [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979])-scholars have tended to conceive of the middle-period quartets as transitional works, works that forecast but do not quite achieve the complexity and expressive depth of the last five quartets (plus the Grosse Fuge ), the beating heart of Beethoven's late period.Until recently, the literature has also had relatively little to say on these quartets' historical and cultural context. In part because of the string quartet's symbolic status as the epitome of abstract, absolute musical expression, the notion that these works ought to be studied in relation to the time and place of their composition long thought to be superfluous. The introductory essays in The Beethoven Quartet Companion, edited by Robert Winter and Robert Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), represented an important first step toward a more holistic approach. Such an approach, however, has been slow to emerge. Angus Watson's survey of the entire chamber music oeuvre (Beethoven's Chamber Music in Context [Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2010]) perhaps comes closest, but as a practical listening guide, it necessarily sacrifices depth for breadth.November's book addresses both of these scholarly lacunae, but it also does more than this. Drawing together reception history, music analysis, social and cultural backgrounds, historiography, performance practice, and sketch studies, it offers sophisticated and original perspectives both on individual quartets and on the five quartets as a group. It also contributes new insights to a growing literature that considers how our understanding of Beethoven's music has been mediated by ideological forces that emerged during his lifetime and have remained intrinsic to musical culture ever since.The book is divided into an introduction and eight chapters. The introduction and first two chapters establish the book's agenda and explore the middle-period quartets in broad outline, focusing on such issues as genre, function, canonicity, historiography, and performance. Each of the next five chapters is devoted to a single quartet. The final chapter weaves together a number of loose strands regarding the quartets' reception and offers some provocative concluding thoughts.November begins by critiquing three core paradigms in Beethoven studies: the division of his career into three style periods, the notion of heroic Beethoven, and the persistent analytical focus on the musical score, as opposed to the music's physicality, visual codes, and social meanings (p. 3). While all three critiques will be familiar to Beethoven scholars, they have particular resonance in the context of these five quartets, works that have often been understood in relation to Beethoven's middle-period symphonic style rather than on their own terms. She seeks to carve out some new aesthetic spaces (p. 2) for these works by considering each quartet alongside the contemporary theories, practices, and ideas that informed its design.In lieu of the traditional tripartite view of Beethoven's career, and crucially for her thesis, November posits a epoch (roughly 1800-1815) during which Beethoven was particularly engaged with, and sought further involvement with, theatrical works and theatrical concepts (p. …

Bill Dixon's Voice (Letter)

AbstractIn November 1966 composer and improviser Bill Dixon recorded a seventeen-minute-long “voice letter” to jazz writer Frank Kofsky. This letter may be analyzed as a critical intervention by Dixon, an attempt to change the context of interpretation around improvised music. But the voice letter may also be heard and analyzed as a kind of performance. As Dixon speaks, one can hear the rumbling and roar of the city as well as the staccato sounds of car and truck horns unfolding in dynamic counterpoint to his words. In this essay, I put the voice letter into dialogue with Dixon's personal history, his writings and interview statements, and some of his contemporaneous musical and multi-generic projects, especially his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn. I show how the letter maps Dixon's and Dunn's positions within a geography of intellectual circles, experimental artistic communities, and low-wage employment networks. By extension, I examine how the voice letter, as critical intervention and performance, points us to a nuanced understanding of black experimental music of the 1960s as a socially inflected, self-conscious and, ultimately, serious engagement with various modes of artistic production and thought, carried out under conditions of both precarity and inspiration.

Music Composition in the High School Curriculum

Student and teacher perceptions regarding composition instruction were investigated using case study techniques in two high school music programs: a general music program providing accelerated instruction to gifted musicians in small classes and a typical performance-based band program. Students in both programs participated in a composition instruction program. Qualitative data included student and teacher interviews, observation, and participant journals. Quantitative data included administration of a composition attitude survey and assessment of student compositions. Analysis of band director perceptions revealed themes identifying challenges to implementing composition instruction: performance culture traditions, time, class setting, teacher preparation, and lack of student fundamental musical knowledge. Teachers in both programs identified benefits as development of student potential, importance of exposure to composition, and increased musical understanding. In the band program, student attitude toward composition increased significantly from pre- to post-instruction, while the general music students, with previous composition experience, showed no change in attitude. Students from both programs identified time as a challenge to composition and also indicated frustration in their lack of fundamental music knowledge. Students identified enjoyment, improved musical understanding, personal expression, increased interest in music, and understanding composition process as benefits to composition experience.

Performing musicians’ understanding of the terms “mental practice” and “score analysis”.

Musicians commonly speak of mental practice and score analysis in referring to strategies widely used by performers. However, these terms may not be universally understood in the same way. To address this, 89 experienced musicians were surveyed as to their views and experiences concerning mental practice and score analysis, using a mixture of closed/rating scale and open-ended questions. They were asked what they understood by these terms and what information these strategies enabled them to obtain from the score. Results suggest that mental practice and score analysis are both considered useful, though mental practice more so. Content analysis identified the main characteristics of mental practice as: occurring away from the instrument; involving several types of imagery, often in real time; and focusing on performance preparation, particularly aspects of execution and realisation. During mental practice, the score tended to function more as a memory aid, an orientation guide, and as a point of reference for interpretation. Score analysis was considered more theoretical, though still relevant for performance preparation at a range of levels from exploratory to detailed. During score analysis, information primarily increased musical understanding of the piece, and related to both structural (e.g. form, harmony) and aesthetic (e.g. tempo, phrasing) aspects. The findings are discussed in terms of the current understanding of mental practice and score analysis in the literature, and the relationship between them. Mental practice and score analysis do have similarities, such as their benefit to performance preparation, and distinctions, for instance concerning their specific aims. However, they may be best considered as lying on a continuum of strategies for performance practice and enhancement, rather than as two distinct behaviors.

Musics of ‘The Other’: Creating musical identities and overcoming cultural boundaries in Australian music education

The binary opposition between ‘own music’ and ‘other's music’ is the ‘result of deep conditioning’ (Drummond, 2010, p. 118) and is almost impossible to overcome.By exploring the underlying constructs that influence students’ and teachers’ perceptions of minority cultures and their musics, this paper explores the notion of ‘the other’ in Australian music education. In particular, how the many factors which play a role in cultural identity serve to both promote and prevent musical understanding and appreciation. An examination of Australian multicultural policy and music curriculum documents in the state of Queensland provides a foundation for the discussion of data obtained from interviews with teachers from state and private primary schools in the capital Brisbane. The results reveal that while music educators are generally inquisitive about incorporating musics of ‘other’ cultures into their lessons, they are less comfortable with crossing cultural boundaries, and do not wish to threaten the position of Australia's own musical culture – ultimately highlighting a disconnect between policy, rhetoric and practice in the area of culturally diverse music education in classrooms today.

Making an Anthropological Case: Cognitive Dualism and the Acousmatic

AbstractThis paper examines Roger Scruton's acousmatic account of music, situating it in relation to the anthropology that accompanies it. It suggests that in order to adequately maintain the anthropology Scruton desires (a cognitive rather than an ontological dualism), and to take full account of the parallel he draws between musical and inter-personal understanding (through gesture), the materiality of music needs to be more fully into his account of musical understanding.

Tradition of Notation in the History of Turkish Music

Notation which is expressing of writing musical tones by using some type of special signs has changed into the many phases up to now which is widely used. Although different knowledge placed at the different sources about when and where the musical writings were came into existence. Notation in the tradition of Ottoman music era had become widespread from the beginning of 19th century. Within the traditional musical understanding as a method of education and transference, Notation was used mostly in the edvar books especially for explaining of theory of music. In opposition to implementation of traditional educational method (meşk), the books written for saving repertoire are the most important historical music resources from centuries they belong. It has a vital necessity for the musical observations and researches on recognizing and learning of different notations used in the history and reading the most important notation heritage of Turkish Music.

Music in the flesh: Embodied simulation in musical understanding.

The embodied paradigm, originally developed in the fields of theoretical biology (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) and linguistics (Lakoff& Johnson, 1999), holds human cognition, even in its highest level inferential processes, is rooted in sensorimotor processes link the agent to the world in which she is embedded. As Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2007) point out, studies show not only how perceptual and motor representations influence people's cognitive processing, but how sensorimotor representations are tied to symbolic information about the self and the (p. 543; see also Barsalou, 2003; Markman & Brendl, 2005). Recent attempts to apply this perspective to music cognition, whose first examples were the seminal works by Hatten (2004) and Zbikowski (2002), advocate the crucial role of the musicians' well the perceivers' bodies for musical understanding (Leman, 2007; Reybrouck, 2001, 2006). This standpoint holds a basic form of musical meaning's ascription is actionbased, radically entwined with the level of motor knowledge of the listener or performer (Schiavio, 2012). Traditional music psychology often employs computational models to investigate musical comprehension, where an agent's mind is seen a computer processes the musical signal thanks to species-specific brain mechanisms (Lyon & Shamma, 1996). In contrast, the embodied perspective assumes cognition depends on processes are intrinsically connected to the organism's body, thus being widely distributed beyond the boundaries of the brain (Shapiro, 2010).In this article, we emphasize the need of deepening such perspective by referring to the closely related notion of Embodied Simulation (ES) and have a close look at its main applications in the psychology of music. ES is a basic functional mechanism that exploits, not only but mainly, the intrinsic functional organization of the motor system (Gallese, 2011, p. 37). ES has been first introduced in the current debates on intersubjectivity to posit the basic skills of social cognition (understanding others' sensations and emotions) do not require any kind of explicit mindreading (Gallese, 2001, 2005). This position has been interpreted a nonpropositional, unconscious, form of mental simulation (Goldman, 2006), based on the unmediated processes underlining the mirror-neurons activity1 (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, Fogassi, 1996), which accounts for basic social interactions by means of a neurobiologically plausible and theoretically unitary (Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2011, p. 1).An application of this conceptual framework to the realm of music experience has been posited by Overy and Molnar-Szakacs (2009). They have suggested a representational equivalence between the perception of a given-musical-directed-motor act and its neural simulation, which would allow the listeners to experience a musical feedback as if (Damasio, 2003) they were actually performing the sound-producing action themselves. This action-simulation mechanism is consistent with the idea subjects can reenact their own motor experience through an automatic, unconscious, process in order to give sense with their own body to a musical surface. Two implications can be drawn from this assumption-(a) Perceiving music consists in the implicit knowledge of the sensorimotor contingencies2 of the heard sound-producing actions (Reybrouck, 2006).(b) The neurons recruited during this simulation are the same the ones involved while performing or listening to the related sound(s) of the same (chain of) goal-directed action(s) (Kohler et al., 2002; see also Bangert & Altenmuller, 2003; Chen, Penhune, & Zatorre, 2008; Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014).This view is supported by empirical studies concerning the activation of sensorimotor networks during the observation of musicians' performances or during passive listening (see D'Ausilio, 2007, 2009; Novembre, Ticini, Schutz-Bosbach, & Keller, 2014). …

Teachers’ beliefs regarding composition in elementary general music: Definitions, values, and impediments

The purpose of this research was to investigate teachers’ beliefs about compositional experiences in the elementary music classroom. Elementary music teachers ( N = 176) in Michigan completed a researcher-designed questionnaire, which included a combination of forced-choice and open-ended questions regarding how teachers define composition, why they believe engaging students in compositional experiences is valuable, and what factors motivate teachers to engage or not engage their students in compositional experiences. Results indicate that participants’ conceptions of composition vary widely. Many teachers believe composition involves creating, expression/communication, and replication; however, teachers varied in other beliefs about composition, including the necessity of notation and the level of complexity involved. Teachers who believe that composition is important in elementary general music feel it is valuable because it helps students develop and apply musical understanding and skills, gives students ownership of their music-making, helps develop creativity, and provides an opportunity for self-expression. Teachers identified numerous impediments to incorporating composition in the elementary music classroom, including time and logistics.

Musical Understandings, by Stephen Davies

Musical Understandings, by Stephen Davies

Voices, Violence and Meaning: Transformations of Speech Samples in Works by David Byrne, Brian Eno and Steve Reich

The incorporation of pre-recorded speaking voices in musical compositions such as Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain and Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has opened up new modes of musical understanding that are inextricably linked with the speakers in question. Incorporating concrete, recognisable sounds from the ‘real world’ into the symbolic web of a musical composition encourages subjective readings of the source material, for example, by demonstrating how stereotypical Western constructions of African culture can be detected in the treatment of male Afro-American voices. This article will argue that the technological dehumanising of the speaker also produces a particular kind of violence. In addition to such views of violence as directed against the speakers whose words have been erased, this article will conclude that one can also interpret such works as a response to the intricate relationship between sound and speech in music.

Report of the International Summer School of Musical Understanding. Philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific approaches (University of Sheffield, July 8–11, 2013).

An Approach to Musical Understanding: Aims of ISSMUMusic research is at the crossroads between different disciplines. Within this rubric, areas such as historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music composition, or psychology of music display an interesting overlap with fields like history, anthropology, computer science, and cognitive neuroscience. The main aim of International Summer School on Musical Understanding (ISSMU) was to openly face the challenges of the interplay between different areas of study. ISSMU offered attendees an informal setting in which they could collaborate with people from different disciplinary backgrounds and leading academics to debate complex questions such as-* Which phenomenological experiences are connected to musical engagement and how do these experiences vary with background and listening context?* Which faculties underlie musical understanding and how are these reflected in neuroscientific and psychological findings?* What is the role of the body for musical comprehension?* To what extent do emotions shape our understanding of music?Other goals of ISSMU were-* To enable attendees to become more familiar with current research, as well as research in progress;* To encourage the development of useful research skills;* To promote the creation of a network of research students, whose collaboration will help to strengthen and invigorate the field of Music Psychology.Structure of the ISSMUTwenty-five postgraduate students from a number of international institutions1 and with a great diversity of backgrounds participated in ISSMU. The Summer School consisted of lectures, workshops, and group work. On the first day a poster session was organized where attendees disseminated their research. Invited speakers and academic advisors gave lectures relating to musical understanding from various perspectives, considering the increasing interdisciplinarity of research, and emotional, multisensory, and neuropsychological aspects of musical experience. Further to the lectures, each external speaker held a workshop, which introduced students to skills and knowledge needed for research in certain fields. This included modeling the relationship between musical features and emotional responses, assessing the role of mirror neurons in language and music comprehension and, designing a music training intervention program. Additionally, students conducted experiments to investigate a research question related to the interests of the invited speakers. The group work culminated with each group presenting their research within an oral presentation.Lectures and WorkshopsISSMU began with a lecture from Nicola Dibben titled Interdisciplinary approaches to musical Dibben's research interests include cross-modal perception of music, emotional experience of music, the influence of background music on human behavior, musical listening and subjectivity, and contemporary popular music. Her lecture introduced the concept of interdisciplinarity and cited the work of Jantsch (1970) who argued for different disciplines to be coordinated and able to cooperate. To encourage attendees to consider how engagement with interdisciplinary research may be of benefit to them, the lecture concluded with a panel discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with this type of research. The discussion began with the invited speakers sharing their experiences of being involved with interdisciplinary research. Following this, a question and answer session was held that allowed attendees to seek advice from the panel about how to initiate collaborative research and work effectively with others. In sum, the lecture set the scene for ISSMU and inspired attendees to be more open-minded about interdisciplinary research benefitting their own research, other disciplines, and fields of study.Mirror Mechanism and SAME Model of Musical ExperienceThe central topic of the second and third presentations at the Summer School was the mirror mechanism and its possible role in musical understanding. …

In Harmony: A technology-based music education model to enhance musical understanding and general learning skills

This article reports on the practice and evaluation of a music education model, In Harmony, which utilizes new technologies and current theories of learning to mediate the music learning experience. In response to the needs of twenty-first century learners, the educational software programs Teach, Learn, Evaluate! and Impromptu served as central components of the program’s curriculum. Moreover, drawing on educational theories that value general learning skills as prerequisites to scholastic achievement, the In Harmony program provided a context in which students could improve their working memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility. The model was adopted internationally in Bloomington, IN and Jaffa, Israel, and featured individual tasks administered through computer software, as well as group music composition activities. By incorporating computer technology within the program’s design, and targeting the above-mentioned learning skills, we sought to strengthen the impact of the music lessons and deepen our understanding of the mechanisms linking music education and enhanced cognitive development. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the children’s working memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility, as well as qualitative analyses of data collected during the intervention, indicated that the In Harmony model and the educational software used successfully scaffold musical instruction, with beneficial outcomes in fostering working memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility.

Improvisational Practices in Elementary General Music Classrooms

Despite historic and ongoing support for the inclusion of improvisation in the elementary general music curriculum, music educators consistently report challenges with implementation of improvisational activities in their classes. This study was designed to examine (a) the extent to which improvisational activities were occurring in the participants’ elementary general music classrooms, (b) the nature of these improvisational activities, and (c) participants’ perceptions of the quality of their students’ improvisations. The most common improvisational activities reported by these teachers were question-and-answer singing, improvising on unpitched and pitched percussion instruments, and improvising rhythmic patterns using instruments. Analysis of their reflections on these activities revealed three broad themes: (a) process, practice, and experience, (b) sequencing, scaffolding, and modeling in instruction; and (c) collaboration, reflection, and creation. These teachers stated they were most interested in the quality of the improvisational process rather than with the product and indicated that sequencing was crucial in the instruction of improvisation. While some put less importance and priority on improvisation, the majority perceived it as necessary to the development of students’ musical skills, as an important way for students to show musical understanding, and as an empowering creative process that produces independent thinkers and musicians.

Musicality and the Limits of Meaning in Wordsworth and Kant

I argue that the difficulty Kant encounters in evaluating music in the third Critique is caused by his problematic attempt to separate sound (the physical phenomenon) from meaning. Analogously, Wordsworth attempts in the Preface to divide metrical pleasure and the feeling derived from the semantic meaning of poems. In both cases, this separation can be overcome by a radical, Romantic understanding of musicality, whereby music not only participates in meaning but becomes its grounds. While this remains latent in Kant, Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ can assert the centrality of listening to thinking, which has important implications for his poetics.

Composing and performing in the key stage 3 classroom: a study using multi-trait, multi-method analysis

‘Music is both a creative and a performing art’ (Hallam, 2006, p. 70). Many musicians and music educators maintain that composing and performing, although related, are essentially different aspects of musical activity. In the professional musical sphere, composition and performance are almost invariably separated; academic studies have treated them discretely; GCSE and ‘A’ level specifications assess them distinctly, and many music teachers assess them in the classroom as if they were separate disciplines. It is common practice for students in the lower secondary school in England to work in a more integrated way, however (Philpott, 2001; Major, 2008), composing, performing to the class, and appraising each others’ work. Recently produced assessment guidelines for secondary school music teachers in England (NAME, 2011) encourage this more integrated view, accepting the assumption made by Swanwick and Franca (1999, p. 12) that ‘musical understanding is a broad conceptual dimension’ by considering composing and performing as inter-linked ways of demonstrating and communicating musicality. This study sets out to investigate the links between composing and performing in the secondary school classroom, through peer-rating, teacher rating and students’ self-report attitudinal questionnaires, analysing these using a multi-trait, multi-method technique.Evidence for convergent validity was found between performing and composing in the classroom, suggesting that they are closely linked and may indeed be related parts of the same trait. This may have implications for the ways in which composing and performing are taught and assessed. A larger-scale study could be undertaken to investigate this further.

Exploring the influence of pitch proximity on listener’s melodic expectations.

Two studies, one correlational and one meta-analytic, were conducted to explore whether pitch proximity influences listeners' melodic expectations about pitch direction and tonality. Study 1 used a probe-tone task. Specifically, listeners heard fragments of tonal melodies ending on intervals of 1 or 2 semitones, and rated how well individual tones (the probe-tones) continued each fragment. Regression analyses showed that listeners expected probe-tones to be proximate in pitch to the last tone they heard in the fragments, but not to the penultimate one, as there was no evidence of expectations for a change in pitch direction. However, listeners expected probe-tones to be proximate to (at least one of) the other tones they had heard in the fragments, as there was evidence of expectations for a melodic movement toward the bulk of the fragments' pitch distribution. In addition, the most stable probe-tones in the key of the fragments were more expected than the least stable ones only when they were proximate to the tones presented in the fragments. The results of Study 1 were replicated and extended in Study 2, in which a meta-analysis of data reported in Schellenberg (1996, Experiment 1) was performed. These data had been collected using the same probe-tone task as in Study 1, but different melodic fragments; the fragments ended on intervals of 2 or 3 semitones. Together, the present findings suggest, first, that when small intervals occur in a melody, pitch proximity has only a global influence on expectations about pitch direction; and second, that pitch proximity constrains the influence of tonality on melodic expectation.Keywords: pitch proximity, pitch direction, tonality, conceptualization, statistical and heuristic learningPitch Proximity and Melodic ExpectationThe generation of expectations about what events will occur next in a musical piece and when these will appear has long been thought to be a critical aspect of music listening. Basi- cally, the idea is that expectations that prove to be correct facilitate music understanding, or vice versa, and that the in- terplay between expectations' negation and resolution regulates the emotional content of musical experience (Huron, 2006; Meyer, 1956; Narmour, 1990). During the last decades, this idea has stimulated a great deal of theoretical and empirical research, which has been particularly fruitful in the domain of pitch-related melodic expectation. Research in this domain re- vealed that to a large degree listener's expectations can be accounted for by three factors, namely, pitch proximity, pitch direction, and tonality (Bharucha, 1996; Carlsen, 1981; Huron, 2006; Larson, 2004; Lerdahl, 1996, 2001; Margulis, 2005; Meyer, 1956, 1973; Narmour, 1990; Schellenberg, 1997; Tem- perley, 2008). The present research further investigated these factors by exploring how and to what extent pitch proximity influences expectations about pitch direction and tonality.The influence of pitch proximity refers to the effect of distance in pitch between sequentially presented tones on the listener's expectations. It is understood as a gestalt-like audi- tory principle, perhaps the most basic one, regulating what tones listeners expect to occur next in a melody to be grouped with the tones heard previously (Larson, 1997; Margulis, 2005; Meyer, 1956; Narmour, 1990; see also Bregman, 1990). In line with this, there is strong evidence that listeners expect the next tone in a melody to be proximate in pitch to the last tone they heard; all things being equal, the nearer in pitch the ensuing tone is to the last one, the more highly it is expected (Carlsen, 1981; Cuddy & Lunney, 1995; Eerola, 2004; Krumhansl, 1995; Larson, 2004; Schellenberg, 1996). For example, given the melody shown in Figure 1, at the beginning of measure 4 (see the ? mark in the figure), the expectation for Bb4 would be stronger than the expectation for B4, because the former is nearer to A4 (the last tone in the melody) than the latter; the most expected tone would be A4, the unison. …