Musical Structure Research Articles

Sound feedback control model for live electronic performance in the Ecos Study

Through the Ecos Study we investigate possibilities for musical structuring based on theories of emergence, finding a fertile territory for experimentations within Agostino Di Scipio's paradigm of Audible Ecosystems. The inclusion of the acoustic environment as an active component of the musical system led us to rethink classical techniques of sound synthesis and modelling, some traditional models of electroacoustic performance, and to criticize the very role of interactions in a qualitative perspective. A positive feedback control model has been developed aiming at understanding the behaviour and the structure of the ecosystem supporting the implementation of the Spatial Instrument, a core element implemented through MAX/MSP patch and that offers a logical rationale for organizing speakers and microphones in the acoustic space. We introduce the underlying theoretical debate and present the feedback control mechanism as the basis from which the Spatial Instrument is developed.

Sketching music together: Mixed groups exploring melodic similarity and contrast using a digital tabletop

In this article, we investigate whether and how a purposely built digital tabletop musical instrument (DTMI) can help groups of novices and casual users to explore music composition. Working together in small groups around the DTMI, our participants explored how the musical concepts of melodic similarity and contrast can convey narrative through musical structure. We build on our previous work that investigated a one-to-one learner–tutor scenario and expanded it to groups of peers. Similarly to our previous study, we adopted an exploratory and primarily qualitative approach, involving 24 participants divided into eight groups of three each, sampled from the general population via flyers and word of mouth. We structured the sessions as a series of open-ended discussions of the notions of similarity and contrast, starting from a general point of view, leading up to the task of inventing a short story and composing a melody to describe it. Although the two studies may appear superficially similar, the group element represents a fundamental difference, as we found. The combination of technology and group setting was instrumental in helping less experienced participants discuss music with more experienced participants by using a simplified yet expressive representation of music that could be used to discuss complex aspects of melody and composition.

Two artists and two mélodies

André Caplet (1878-1925) set just two of Baudelaire’s poems: La Cloche fêlée [‘The Cracked Bell’] and La Mort des pauvres [‘The Death of the Poor’]. These mélodies were composed in 1922, just three years before the artist’s death. For a composer with a tendency to shy away from setting poetry of the French giants of literature, the questions of how and why Caplet chose to translate Baudelaire’s poetry into the mélodie are intriguing. This exploration of La Cloche fêlée and La Mort des pauvres considers the ways in which Caplet reflects the poetic imagery of Baudelaire’s texts within musical structures. Caplet’s compositional language is distinctive, and his artistic approach to musically illuminating poetic meaning is perceptive and sensitive. Through viewing the creative intersection of these two artists, this article offers an interpretation that presents a perspective on Caplet’s musical character and reveals insight into his connection to Baudelaire’s poetic language.

Individual differences in perception of the speech-to-song illusion are linked to musical aptitude but not musical training.

In the speech-to-song illusion, certain spoken phrases are perceived as sung after repetition. One possible explanation for this increase in musicality is that, as phrases are repeated, lexical activation dies off, enabling listeners to focus on the melodic and rhythmic characteristics of stimuli and assess them for the presence of musical structure. Here we tested the idea that perception of the illusion requires implicit assessment of melodic and rhythmic structure by presenting individuals with phrases that tend to be perceived as song when repeated, as well as phrases that tend to continue to be perceived as speech when repeated, measuring the strength of the illusion as the rating difference between these two stimulus categories after repetition. Illusion strength varied widely and stably between listeners, with large individual differences and high split-half reliability, suggesting that not all listeners are equally able to detect musical structure in speech. Although variability in illusion strength was unrelated to degree of musical training, participants who perceived the illusion more strongly were proficient in several musical skills, including beat perception, tonality perception, and selective attention to pitch. These findings support models of the speech-to-song illusion in which experience of the illusion is based on detection of musical characteristics latent in spoken phrases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Reassessing Syntax-Related ERP Components Using Popular Music Chord Sequences

Electroencephalographic responses to unexpected musical events allow researchers to test listeners’ internal models of syntax. One major challenge is dissociating cognitive syntactic violations—based on the abstract identity of a particular musical structure—from unexpected acoustic features. Despite careful controls in past studies, recent work by Bigand, Delbe, Poulin-Carronnat, Leman, and Tillmann (2014) has argued that ERP findings attributed to cognitive surprisal cannot be unequivocally separated from sensory surprisal. Here we report a novel EEG paradigm that uses three auditory short-term memory models and one cognitive model to predict surprisal as indexed by several ERP components (ERAN, N5, P600, and P3a), directly comparing sensory and cognitive contributions. Our paradigm parameterizes a large set of stimuli rather than using categorically “high” and “low” surprisal conditions, addressing issues with past work in which participants may learn where to expect violations and may be biased by local context. The cognitive model (Harrison & Pearce, 2018) predicted higher P3a amplitudes, as did Leman’s (2000) model, indicating both sensory and cognitive contributions to expectation violation. However, no model predicted ERAN, N5, or P600 amplitudes, raising questions about whether traditional interpretations of these ERP components generalize to broader collections of stimuli or rather are limited to less naturalistic stimuli.

“This audio has potential”

“This audio has potential”

Rebonds: Structural Affordances, Negotiation, and Creation

This paper presents a comparative recording analysis of the seminal work for solo percussion Rebonds (Iannis Xenakis, 1989), in order to demonstrate how performances of a musical work can reveal—or even create—aspects of musical structure that score-centered analysis cannot illuminate. In doing so I engage with the following questions. What does a pluralistic, dynamic conception of structure look like for Rebonds? How do interpretive decisions recast performers as agents of musical structure? When performances diverge from the score in the omission of notes, the softening of accents, the insertion of dramatic tempo changes, or the altering of entire passages, do conventions that arise out of those performance practices become part of the structural fabric of the work? Are these conventions thus part of the Rebonds “text”?

Music Lessons for the Study of Affect.

Some accounts of the evolution of music suggest that it emerged from emotionally expressive vocalizations and serves as a necessary counterweight to the cognitive elaboration of language. Thus, emotional expression appears to be intrinsic to the creation and perception of music, and music ought to serve as a model for affect itself. Because music exists as patterns of changes in sound over time, affect should also be seen in patterns of changing feelings. Psychologists have given relatively little attention to these patterns. Results from statistical approaches to the analysis of affect dynamics have so far been modest. Two of the most significant treatments of temporal patterns in affect—sentics and vitality affects have remained outside mainstream emotion research. Analysis of musical structure suggests three phenomena relevant to the temporal form of emotion: affect contours, volitional affects, and affect transitions. I discuss some implications for research on affect and for exploring the evolutionary origins of music and emotions.

Mind the body: Materiality and physicality in a composer’s thinking process

This exploratory case study investigated the grounds of the material and physical aspects of compositional thinking, viewing musical composing as organizing the world of sounds. The data tracks one compositional process, including the full body of the manuscripts and verbal data accounting those manuscripts. The results present a composer, who wishes to create music that has performative power, that is, expressivities that have the capacity to move the mind of the listener. The composer is inspired by the materiality of sound and musical instruments, but on the other hand constrained and challenged by the corporal affordances of performers and their instruments as well as by the (im)practicalities and intelligibility of notational practices. Five different aspects of materiality were identified: (1) visual images and representations, (2) the score as the material object of composition, (3) the material and physical affordances of musical instruments, performers that play them, and sounds that are produced by them, (4) physical reactions entailing embodied intuitive knowledge of the composer, and (5) metaphoric processes, where the composer, when shaping timbres and musical structures, “pushes,” even “forces” sounds to “move” and sound in a way that is meaningful and transpires to the listener as music that moves the mind.

Space oddity: musical syntax is mapped onto visual space

Increasing evidence has uncovered associations between the cognition of abstract schemas and spatial perception. Here we examine such associations for Western musical syntax, tonality. Spatial metaphors are ubiquitous when describing tonality: stable, closural tones are considered to be spatially central and, as gravitational foci, spatially lower. We investigated whether listeners, musicians and nonmusicians, indeed associate tonal relationships with visuospatial dimensions, including spatial height, centrality, laterality, and size, implicitly or explicitly, and whether such mappings are consistent with established metaphors. In the explicit paradigm, participants heard a tonality-establishing prime followed by a probe tone and coupled each probe with a subjectively appropriate location (Exp.1) or size (Exp.4). The implicit paradigm used a version of the Implicit Association Test to examine associations of tonal stability with vertical position (Exp.2), lateral position (Exp3) and size (Exp.5). Tonal stability was indeed associated with perceived physical space: the spatial distances between the locations associated with different scale-degrees significantly correlated with the tonal stability differences between these scale-degrees. However, inconsistently with musical discourse, stable tones were associated with leftward (instead of central) and higher (instead of lower) spatial positions. We speculate that these mappings are influenced by emotion, embodying the “good is up” metaphor, and by the spatial structure of music keyboards. Taken together, the results demonstrate a new type of cross-modal correspondence and a hitherto under-researched connotative function of musical structure. Importantly, the results suggest that the spatial mappings of an abstract domain may be independent of the spatial metaphors used to describe that domain.

Using machine learning analysis to interpret the relationship between music emotion and lyric features.

Melody and lyrics, reflecting two unique human cognitive abilities, are usually combined in music to convey emotions. Although psychologists and computer scientists have made considerable progress in revealing the association between musical structure and the perceived emotions of music, the features of lyrics are relatively less discussed. Using linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) technology to extract lyric features in 2,372 Chinese songs, this study investigated the effects of LIWC-based lyric features on the perceived arousal and valence of music. First, correlation analysis shows that, for example, the perceived arousal of music was positively correlated with the total number of lyric words and the mean number of words per sentence and was negatively correlated with the proportion of words related to the past and insight. The perceived valence of music was negatively correlated with the proportion of negative emotion words. Second, we used audio and lyric features as inputs to construct music emotion recognition (MER) models. The performance of random forest regressions reveals that, for the recognition models of perceived valence, adding lyric features can significantly improve the prediction effect of the model using audio features only; for the recognition models of perceived arousal, lyric features are almost useless. Finally, by calculating the feature importance to interpret the MER models, we observed that the audio features played a decisive role in the recognition models of both perceived arousal and perceived valence. Unlike the uselessness of the lyric features in the arousal recognition model, several lyric features, such as the usage frequency of words related to sadness, positive emotions, and tentativeness, played important roles in the valence recognition model.

Musical instrument familiarity affects statistical learning of tone sequences

Most listeners have an implicit understanding of the rules that govern how music unfolds over time. This knowledge is acquired in part through statistical learning, a robust learning mechanism that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment. However, it is presently unclear how this prior musical knowledge might facilitate or interfere with the learning of novel tone sequences that do not conform to familiar musical rules. In the present experiment, participants listened to novel, statistically structured tone sequences composed of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. Between participants, the tone sequences either had the timbre of artificial, computerized instruments or familiar instruments (piano or violin). Knowledge of the statistical regularities was measured as by a two-alternative forced choice recognition task, requiring discrimination between novel sequences that followed versus violated the statistical structure, assessed at three time points (immediately post-training, as well as one day and one week post-training). Compared to artificial instruments, training on familiar instruments resulted in reduced accuracy. Moreover, sequences from familiar instruments – but not artificial instruments – were more likely to be judged as grammatical when they contained intervals that approximated those commonly used in Western music, even though this cue was non-informative. Overall, these results demonstrate that instrument familiarity can interfere with the learning of novel statistical regularities, presumably through biasing memory representations to be aligned with Western musical structures. These results demonstrate that real-world experience influences statistical learning in a non-linguistic domain, supporting the view that statistical learning involves the continuous updating of existing representations, rather than the establishment of entirely novel ones.

Steady state-evoked potentials of subjective beat perception in musical rhythms.

Synchronization of movement to music is a seemingly universal human capacity that depends on sustained beat perception. Previous research has suggested that listener's conscious perception of the musical structure (e.g., beat and meter) might be reflected in neural responses that follow the frequency of the beat. However, the extent to which these neural responses directly reflect concurrent, listener-reported perception of musical beat versus stimulus-driven activity is understudied. We investigated whether steady state-evoked potentials (SSEPs), measured using electroencephalography (EEG), reflect conscious perception of beat by holding the stimulus constant while contextually manipulating listeners' perception and measuring perceptual responses on every trial. Listeners with minimal music training heard a musical excerpt that strongly supported one of two beat patterns (context phase), followed by a rhythm consistent with either beat pattern (ambiguous phase). During the final phase, listeners indicated whether or not a superimposed drum matched the perceived beat (probe phase). Participants were more likely to indicate that the probe matched the music when that probe matched the original context, suggesting an ability to maintain the beat percept through the ambiguous phase. Likewise, we observed that the spectral amplitude during the ambiguous phase was higher at frequencies that matched the beat of the preceding context. Exploratory analyses investigated whether EEG amplitude at the beat-related SSEPs (steady state-evoked potentials) predicted performance on the beat induction task on a single-trial basis, but were inconclusive. Our findings substantiate the claim that auditory SSEPs reflect conscious perception of musical beat and not just stimulus features.

The Musical Force of the Magnetic Field: On the Latest Creative Phase in the Works of Jasna Veličković

Since 2008, Jasna Veličković has been experimenting with and researching within the sound world of the magnetic field—the omnipresent, yet usually completely silent elements in human life. Her journey into the unknown started with an exploration of the sound produced by manipulating coils as parts of complex sound systems, including classical instruments as sound sources. A purely serendipitous event in 2013 led her to the discovery that magnets can also produce sounds when applied to coils in certain ways. This discovery ultimately resulted in the invention of the Velicon, the instrument which she has been composing for and performing on ever since. The investigations of the musical force of the magnetic field also led to the introduction of other seemingly silent objects as sound sources. In this article, I aim to investigate these works both from the diachronic and the synchronic perspective. The key questions will include: (1) mapping Jasna Veličković’s referential worlds—an intricate encounter between music and science/technology, (artistic) experimentation, and electronic music—viewed from the composer’s personal, Serbian, and ‘global’ perspective; (2) the nature of Veličković’s creative process with regard to the reconfiguration of the relationship between composing, experimenting, and improvising; (3) the ramifications of Veličković’s way of breaking loose from the conventional composer-performer-listener chain; and (4) analytical remarks on the prospects of musical structure within the magnetic sound.

Alternative Facts in Musicology and Vechnaya Pamyat' in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5

The assertions, refutations, and counter-refutations concerning two core pieces of Richard Taruskin’s studies on Russian music—Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5—provide a starting point for discussion about the possibilities, limits, and obligations of musicological interpretation. Moreover, an important aspect of the discussion is the phenomenon of “alternative facts,” both in publication and in pedagogy, and possibly in music itself.
 Taruskin argues against the logical fallacies of overly specific or overly simplistic interpretations, but hesitates to fully interpret certain music himself, thereby participating in the web of alternative facts. Taruskin refutes popular myths about biographical meanings in Tchaikovsky’s symphony, but in so doing, also seems to reject a tragic reading of any kind. He explains away various musical structures and extroversive references, but fails to explore why those elements are in fact present.
 As for Shostakovich’s symphony, Taruskin notes its saturation with musical topics, but ignores their allusive specificity, downplaying their significance altogether for what he calls their transferability. Yet Taruskin himself identifies an allusion to a specific Orthodox hymn, and therefrom draws specific conclusions. His evidence for calling the passage a “literal imitation” is actually flawed, but a truly literal quotation of this very hymn may be present throughout the entire symphony, and may act as a sort of species of alternative fact itself. In any case, something that specific, and its placement in the symphonic structure, deserve notice and demand specificity of interpretation.

Computer Assisted Chord Detection Using Deep Learning and YOLOV4 Neural Network Model

Music symbol recognition is an important part of Optical Music Recognition (OMR), Chord recognition is one of the most important research contents in the field of music information retrieval. It plays an important role in information processing, music structure analysis, and recommendation systems. Aiming at the problem of low chord recognition accuracy in the OMR recognition model, the article proposes a chord recognition method based on the YOLOV4 neural network model. First, the YOLOV4 network model is used to train single-voice scores to obtain the best training model. Then, the scores containing chords are trained through neural network fine-tuning technology. The experimental results show that the method recognizes the chords with great results, the model was tested on the test set generated by MuseScore. The experimental results show that the accuracy of note recognition is high, which can reach the accuracy of duration value of 0.96 which is higher than the accuracy of note recognition of other score recognition models.

Locating stylistics in the discipline of English studies: a case study analysis of A.E. Housman’s ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’

Abstract Literary stylistics, whose subject matter is literary language, straddles the disciplines of literary criticism and linguistics, as Henry Widdowson pointed out 45 years ago. Since then, developments in discourse analysis and multimodal studies have had the potential to expand the map of the interactions between different disciplines. This case study performs a traditional stylistic analysis of the poem ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’ from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but also demonstrates the potential for a multimodal perspective on stylistics by relating it to a musical analysis of Vaughan-Williams’ setting of the poem. It begins with a linguistic analysis of phonology, graphology and punctuation, lexis, phrase structure, clause structure and clausal semantics. It proceeds to a discourse analysis of pragmatics and discourse structure. And it ends by relating the linguistic and discoursal analysis to the music through music criticism. By way of conclusion, it suggests that both linguistic analysis and appreciation of musical structure and mood are useful ways into Spitzer’s philological circle, by which linguistic analysis and musical appreciation can pave the way for literary appreciation.

Psychological and emotional complex of piano accompanist as a reflection of the PROFESSION EVOLUTION

Background. The article studies the accompanist culture as an artistic phenomenon. The accompanist art development processes at the given stage are distinguished by an intensive search for renewal of the content and means of musical expression, coupled with discoveries in composition practices, which puts forward new performance requirements. Scientific novelty is pre-determined by the tasks of detecting the historical origin of the organization of the “backgroundrelief” type in musical structures, specifying the stages of their development. Tracing back the origins of the art of accompanying allows us to reveal a variety of relationship models between the solo singing and accompanying function, which co-exist in various forms in modern artistic practices, thereby depicting the main professional qualities and skills of a piano accompanist. The purpose of this article is to discover the genesis of the types of accompanist art, their historical development, as well as to determine the components that form the basis of the professional activity of the accompanist and to identify major personal qualities characteristic to this profession. It should be noted that the issue of accompanist art is currently only passing the way of scientific comprehension, and we can distinguish a certain historical dynamics: from methodological developments to comprehending the role of an accompanist as an equal member of the ensemble, teacher and creator of original interpretations of compositions. Results of the research. The phenomenon of accompanist art is considered in the paper in terms of its connection with the general history of music. The history of accompaniment and the work of an accompanist should be recognized and studied, since the nature and role of the accompaniment depend on the era, nationality of music and its style. Concertmastering is one of those professions where the duties and modes of action are not clearly expressed, leaving the professional with the right to choose. A striking distinctive feature is the individual path of improvement and the final “bar” of mastery, determined by the traits of the character and personal aspirations of each accompanist. The article discusses the issue of the specific musical and psychological abilities of a concertmaster, which ensure compliance with professional requirements. Conclusions. The development of a theoretical concept of accompanist art will allow this profession to acquire the necessary completeness of permanent features and will open up new prospects for further study of methodological, practical and artistic aspects.

Unsupervised Detection of Music Boundaries by Time Series Structure Features

Locating boundaries between coherent and/or repetitive segments of a time series is a challenging problem pervading many scientific domains. In this paper we propose an unsupervised method for boundary detection, combining three basic principles: novelty, homogeneity, and repetition. In particular, the method uses what we call structure features, a representation encapsulating both local and global properties of a time series. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in detecting music structure boundaries, a task that has received much attention in recent years and for which exist several benchmark datasets and publicly available annotations. We find our method to significantly outperform the best accuracies published so far. Importantly, our boundary approach is generic, thus being applicable to a wide range of time series beyond the music and audio domains.

Animal Signals, Music and Emotional Well-Being.

Simple SummaryAnimal signals can convey information about the animal’s state, but these signals can also be used to influence the behavior of others through emotional contagion. Music can influence the emotional state of human listeners and has also been used therapeutically with a variety of captive species including pets. However, the successful use of music to influence the well-being of animals must be based on an understanding of the natural communication signals of the species including the frequency range and tempos of its own communication signals. Furthermore, different types of music can induce different emotional states. In this paper, I review work using music to influence animal emotion, physiology and behavior, and I outline a theory of emotional induction that predicts what types of music stimuli are likely to influence different emotions and behavior. I will illustrate this with some examples of animal-based music. The use of music to influence the emotional well-being of our pets, farm animals and in zoological parks depends on our understanding the communication system of other species and the variety of emotional states that can be induced through different types of music. My goal is to help those managing animal facilities or advising pet owners to be more aware of the issues involved in using music with animals, as well as provide advice to researchers investigating effects of music on animals.Playing music or natural sounds to animals in human care is thought to have beneficial effects. An analysis of published papers on the use of human-based music with animals demonstrates a variety of different results even within the same species. These mixed results suggest the value of tailoring music to the sensory systems of the species involved and in selecting musical structures that are likely to produce the desired effects. I provide a conceptual framework based on the combined knowledge of the natural communication system of a species coupled with musical structures known to differentially influence emotional states, e.g., calming an agitated animal versus stimulating a lethargic animal. This new concept of animal-based music, which is based on understanding animal communication, will lead to more consistent and specific effects of music. Knowledge and appropriate use of animal-based music are important in future research and applications if we are to improve the well-being of animals that are dependent upon human care for their survival.