Tonal Ambiguity Research Articles

Kishōtenketsu as Leitmotif

Final Fantasy VII (1997) is perhaps best known for its compelling story and memorable soundtrack. Like many of the other games within the franchise, storytelling within FF7 is heavily rooted in the Kishōtenketsu storytelling format. This four-part structure favors character development over conflict and establishes strong psychological connections between the characters. Nobuo Uematsu’s penchant for leitmotivic scoring strengthens these bonds further, creating a tripartite connection between story, music, and the audience. And while his compositional styles draw heavily from Western traditions found in film and opera throughout much of his oeuvre, it is apparent that Kishōtenketsu bears tremendous influence on his treatment of FF7’s score, especially as it pertains to the game’s main theme. This article addresses the musico-dramatic influences that Kishōtenketsu has on Uematsu’s compositional strategies regarding FF7’s main theme, its various transformations, and their strategic deployment over the course of the game. After discussing FF7 through the principles of Kishōtenketsu, I provide a thorough leitmotivic analysis of the self-titled “Main Theme to Final Fantasy VII,” identifying the Tarnhelm progression within its opening phrase as Cloud’s leitmotif. I suggest that the harmonic and tonal ambiguity inherent within the infamous progression symbolizes Cloud’s own struggles with identity and memory. Uematsu musically depicts the entire game’s story arc within the “Main Theme” through his use of musical allusion to other characters, as well as his subtle approach to harmonic and motivic development. As Cloud’s leitmotif is only found in a handful of the main theme’s transformations, I conduct leitmotivic analyses on these themes, emphasizing their strategic deployment within scenes that depict his struggles with his trauma. Moreover, these different transformations are all paired together at key moments in the game, suggesting a wider leitmotivic network surrounding the “Main Theme.” Ultimately, the symbiotic relationship between Uematsu’s leitmotivic language and the story’s Kishōtenketsu structure help us to identify new symbolic meaning within the game, its story, and the soundtrack.

매장에서 사용되는 배경음악의 트렌드 변화 연구 - 스타벅스 배경음악을 중심으로 -

The purpose of this study is to analyze the musical characteristics of Starbucks' background music, which is considered one of the most successful examples of emotional marketing, to reveal musical factors that have a positive effect on customers and to find out the trend change of background music used in a shop through differences from existing studies. For the analysis, the researcher visited the Starbucks store and collected 91 songs to be used as samples, and based on previous studies, musical elements such as tonality, tempo, genre, instrumentation, lyrics, and release year were set up as analysis items. Based on analysis of each item, playlist created by Starbucks had a high proportion of the latest pop song which is in tonal ambiguity and faster than medium tempo and a music with and lyrics. These results are contrary to the existing background music theory, which is known to have a positive effect on customers, such as major, slow tempo, and lyricsless music. They are also different from previous studies on Starbucks background music, which mainly consists of old pop song and jazz music. Therefore, it was seen that there had been a change in background music of Starbucks' store, which is believed to reflect the purpose of customers' store visits, age groups, and musical tastes due to a shift in generations. This study is meaningful because it is the first attempt to specifically analyze the characteristics of Starbucks' background music through various musical elements and examine changes in the trend of background music based on this. The musical elements used in the analysis will also present a new theoretical standard for background music research.

Narrating the Uncanny: The Music of Les Revenants

Abstract This article explores the narrative function of music in the French TV drama Les Revenants and its connection to the literary tradition of the fantastic. It argues that the music enacts the narrative device of hesitation to provide generic, timbral, tonal, semantic, and temporal ambiguity and, in doing so, gives voice to the show's characteristic fantastical presentation of the Freudian uncanny.

Tonality or Atonality in Bartók’s Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 2? From Folk Modalities to a Twelve-tone Language

Abstract External political circumstances as well as Bartók’s personal activities in the early 1920s were decisive in contributing to the expansion of the basic principles of his musical language. Bartók’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano (1922) may be considered a focal point in his evolution toward ultramodernism. Concomitant with this tendency, both Sonatas for Violin and Piano of this period have become paradigmatic of the controversial notion set forth by certain scholars regarding the existence of an atonal Bartók idiom. Within the ultramodernist style of the Second Sonata, the essence of Eastern-European folk music is still very much in evidence. The intention of this article is to show how Bartók’s move toward synthesis of varied folk and art-music elements in this work produces a sense of an organic connection between atonality and tonality. The close connection between these two principles was suggested by Bartók in an essay of 1920. I intend to show how both contradictory principles are conjoined within a highly complex polymodal idiom based on the tendency toward equalization of the twelve tones. Within the stanzaic structure of the Romanian “long song,” stylistic elements of recitation, improvisation, and declamation are essential in the gradual unfolding between these two contrasting concepts of pitch organization. Despite tonal ambiguity on both local and large-scale levels, the sense of polymodal tonality is ultimately established as primary.

Information-theoretic Modeling of Perceived Musical Complexity

What makes a piece of music appear complex to a listener? This research extends previous work by Eerola (2016), examining information content generated by a computational model of auditory expectation (IDyOM) based on statistical learning and probabilistic prediction as an empirical definition of perceived musical complexity. We systematically manipulated the melody, rhythm, and harmony of short polyphonic musical excerpts using the model to ensure that these manipulations systematically varied information content in the intended direction. Complexity ratings collected from 28 participants were found to positively correlate most strongly with melodic and harmonic information content, which corresponded to descriptive musical features such as the proportion of out-of-key notes and tonal ambiguity. When individual differences were considered, these explained more variance than the manipulated predictors. Musical background was not a significant predictor of complexity ratings. The results support information content, as implemented by IDyOM, as an information-theoretic measure of complexity as well as extending IDyOM's range of applications to perceived complexity.

Tonal Ambiguity in Popular Music’s Axis Progressions

The harmonic progression of aFCG (Am–F–C–G) and its transpositions constitute one rotation of what I callAxis progressions, namely progressions that begin with one of these four chords and cycle through the others in order, hence the Axis-a, -F, -C, and -G, respectively. Of these four progressions, the a-form and C-form, and to a lesser extent, the F-form, have become staples of mainstream popular songs from the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. The a-form is especially noteworthy for being both extremely widespread and tonally ambiguous, in that the perception of its tonality may waver between the major and Aeolian modes. Not only does the progression conflate aspects of the two modes, but it may also vary the degree to which those modes are expressed and their proportion within the progression, resulting in a vast array of possible tonal settings. This article posits that tonality in these settings depends primarily on the melodic content of the progression. A methodology for melodic analysis is then presented and applied to a number of examples of Axis-a (as well as some Axis-F) progressions, to demonstrate how diverse its settings can be.

‘Listen to the Leaves’: Derek Mahon’s Evolving Ecologies

INew York Time, previously Hudson Letter (1996), opens in Winter, and poetic speaker is awoken amid snow and ice in York City to combined but competing strains of the first bird and first truck.1 These garbage trucks, which will later discharge their discarded cargoes onto refuse barges (NCP, 167) of fourth section, Waterfront, of sequence, are twinned with early-morning avian chorus outside beleaguered speaker's apartment window. The discordant sonority of metropolis's daybreak exposes tonal ambiguity of longer poetic sequence at same time as it addresses, in cursory fashion, dynamics of human and nonhuman ecological crisis. Derek Mahon initiates his sequence, and this day, with an incongruous but all too frequent urban duet, which aggregates natural and fabricated, and sentient and inanimate, all of which are measure of his response to crisis of industrial (or postindustrial) modernity, with useless rubbish, garbage, or waste functioning as a secular memento mori of empire of transient that is consumer culture.2 In a concise ironic gesture, Mahon disallows muse-like possibilities of unseen birdsong by using mechanical, utilitarian functions of disposal vehicle. Not only does this reference, among many others across New York Time, partake of a preoccupation with waste, but it neatly holds in one line a matter of urgency within contemporary environmentalist criticism: uneven, competing claims of environment and of global capital.New York Time, then, abounds with junked residues, neon skylines, clamorous streetscapes, and informational gluttony of postmodernity: News-time / in global village-Ethiopian drought,/ famine, whole nations, races, evicted even yet . . . / images forming which will be screened tonight / on CNN and The McNeil-Lekrer News Hour (NCP, 165). All of these are symptoms of industrialism and indiscriminate urbanization that both repel and fascinate Mahon's humanism and his aestheticism. This city is portrayed in terms of modern life as excess, as waste, as consisting of leftovers of Western humanity's appetites, yet poetic art is molded from its raw, remaindered materials. Mahon is both observer and participant in this historical pageant of consumerism but is chiefly concerned with tracking velocity of ruination and dereliction in such a cultural economy. From an ecocritical perspective, then, hubris tic modernity is worryingly devoid of a responsible historical consciousness; its forms and contents, conceived as unaging or everreplaceable monuments of triumphant capital, are exposed as transient objects on a conveyor of junked consumables.The catholicity of Mahon's cultural approach has, as we have already alluded to, always been an acknowledged facet of his work and, it seems, informs his broad ecological vision. And Hugh Haughton encapsulates chafing dynamics of locality and internationalism, with reference to Mahon's eco-conscientiousness, that condition his longer-term writing career:If he started out as a poet in resistance to his home place, he went on to become a uniquely compelling poet of other places without abandoning notion of poetry as a form of resistance.... Though in love with aesthetic, and gifted with an ear for intellectual cantabile, there is always an edge of political anger, and cultural critique in his work, born of a sense of damage that has become increasingly ecological.3Haughton is unafraid to impress political edges of Mahon's poetry, which is a step that is not always taken in critical readings of his work. Yet, ecological sensibility of his oeuvre, though expressed in different ways and with different landscapes and objects to fore at various stages, cannot be figured in any other way than in political terms. Equally, Haughton's suggestion that Mahon's poetic, and biographical, peregrinations have taken Mahon beyond bounds of Belfast and Ireland to international and cosmopolitan geographies, without blunting this political strain within his work, is crucial to appreciating gravity of his assumption of ecological advocacy in his later work. …

Conversations within and between two early lieder of Schubert

Biographical background and musical analysis reveal a remarkable relationship between Franz Schubert’s early lieder ‘An die Geliebte’ and ‘An die Nachtigall’. In ‘An die Geliebte’, tonal ambiguity underscores the indeterminate nature of its narrative, permitting multiple coexistent and contrasting expressive meanings while favouring an ironic interpretation and an intriguing subtext. In ‘An die Nachtigall’, whose introduction and first phrase are similar to the opening of ‘An die Geliebte’, multiple expressive meanings also may be discerned, including an ironic interpretation that emerges when the song is considered in the context of its predecessor. Proceeding from a prior discussion of these lieder by Susan Youens, this essay will reveal unsuspected layers of meaning and a contextual process that unfolds in these unassuming yet engaging songs of Schubert, which uniquely converse with one another and frame an important episode in the composer’s life.

“Listen to the Leaves”: Derek Mahon's Evolving Ecologies

“Listen to the Leaves”:Derek Mahon’s Evolving Ecologies Eóin Flannery (bio) I “New York Time,” previously “The Hudson Letter” (1996), opens in “Winter,” and the poetic speaker is awoken amid snow and ice in New York City to the combined but competing strains of “the first bird and the first garbage truck.”1 These “garbage trucks,” which will later discharge their discarded cargoes onto the “refuse barges” (NCP, 167) of the fourth section, “Waterfront,” of the sequence, are twinned with the early-morning avian chorus outside the beleaguered speaker’s apartment window. The discordant sonority of the metropolis’s daybreak exposes the tonal ambiguity of the longer poetic sequence at the same time as it addresses, in cursory fashion, the dynamics of the human and nonhuman ecological crisis. Derek Mahon initiates his sequence, and this day, with an incongruous but all too frequent urban duet, which aggregates the natural and the fabricated, and the sentient and the inanimate, all of which are “a measure of his response to the crisis of industrial (or postindustrial) modernity, with useless rubbish, garbage, or waste functioning as a secular memento mori of the empire of the transient that is consumer culture.”2 In a concise ironic gesture, Mahon disallows the muse-like possibilities of the unseen birdsong by using the mechanical, utilitarian functions of the disposal vehicle. Not only does this reference, among many others across “New York Time,” partake of a preoccupation with waste, but it neatly holds in one line a matter of urgency within contemporary environmentalist criticism: the uneven, competing claims of the environment and of global capital. “New York Time,” then, abounds with the junked residues, the neon skylines, the clamorous streetscapes, and the informational gluttony of postmodernity: “News-time / in the global village—Ethiopian drought, / famine, [End Page 377] whole nations, races, evicted even yet . . . / the images forming which will be screened tonight / on CNN and The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour” (NCP, 165). All of these are symptoms of industrialism and indiscriminate urbanization that both repel and fascinate Mahon’s humanism and his aestheticism. This city is portrayed in terms of modern life as excess, as waste, as consisting of the leftovers of Western humanity’s appetites, yet poetic art is molded from its raw, remaindered materials. Mahon is both observer and participant in this historical pageant of consumerism but is chiefly concerned with tracking the velocity of ruination and dereliction in such a cultural economy. From an ecocritical perspective, then, hubristic modernity is worryingly devoid of a responsible historical consciousness; its forms and contents, conceived as unaging or ever-replaceable monuments of triumphant capital, are exposed as transient objects on a conveyor of junked consumables. The catholicity of Mahon’s cultural approach has, as we have already alluded to, always been an acknowledged facet of his work and, it seems, informs his broad ecological vision. And Hugh Haughton encapsulates the chafing dynamics of locality and internationalism, with reference to Mahon’s eco-conscientiousness, that condition his longer-term writing career: If he started out as a poet in resistance to his home place, he went on to become a uniquely compelling poet of other places without abandoning the notion of poetry as a form of resistance. . . . Though in love with the aesthetic, and gifted with an ear for intellectual cantabile, there is always an edge of political anger, and cultural critique in his work, born of a sense of damage that has become increasingly ecological.3 Haughton is unafraid to impress the political edges of Mahon’s poetry, which is a step that is not always taken in critical readings of his work. Yet, the ecological sensibility of his oeuvre, though expressed in different ways and with different landscapes and objects to the fore at various stages, cannot be figured in any other way than in political terms. Equally, Haughton’s suggestion that Mahon’s poetic, and biographical, peregrinations have taken Mahon beyond the bounds of Belfast and Ireland to international and cosmopolitan geographies, without blunting this political strain within his work, is crucial to appreciating the gravity of his assumption of ecological advocacy in his later work.4 Though, as we have said, and as...

Distribuciones tonales en la música del renacimiento, un análisis comparativo

In this study we use the tone counting technique, the tonal hierarchies and the key-finding algorithm in order to quantitatively assess the similarity between the musical language of the Renaissance and the posterior tonal language. The results show that there is a huge correspondence between tonal distributions in both languages, and between these and the tonal hierarchies found by Krumhansl and Kessler (1982). This suggests that the differences are fewer than usually believed, and that in the Renaissance there is a tonal hierarchy similar to that of tonal system. Moreover, some problematic cases show that modal language favors tonal ambiguity. Finally, empirical evidence is provided to the notion that, in the Renaissance, the system tends progressively in time, to two poles: tonal major and minor.

Minor mode cuing: Do composers signal minor mode sooner than major mode?

Western-enculturated listeners use different tonal schemas when listening to versus minor mode (e.g., C. L. Krumhansl and E. J. Kessler, 1982, Tracing the dynamic changes in perceived tonal organization in a spatial representation of musical keys, Psychological Review, Vol. 89, pp. 334-368). To avoid possible tonal ambiguity, one might expect composers to attempt to disambiguate or clarify the mode soon after a work begins. The mode is the most common tonal schema in Western music, so listeners might expect that an unknown work will be in the mode. This suggests that composers might tend to cue listeners sooner when presenting works in the (rarer) minor mode. In this article, we report on 2 studies that test the hypothesis that mode-defining pitches occur earlier for minor-mode works. Surprisingly, the studies do not support this hypothesis: in fact, mode-defining scale tones (mediant and submediant) appear significantly later in notated music than in scrambled versions of the same scores, regardless of the mode. Repercussions of the results are discussed.Keywords: minor mode cuing, tonality, key induction, Humdrum Toolkit, expectationSince about the 17th century, Western music has been dominated by the major/minor system in which two tonal schemas predominate. Throughout the history of the major/minor system, the mode has been more common than the minor mode. Depending on the musical genre, between two thirds and three-quarters of works are written in the mode. For example, in the Barlow and Morgenstern (1948) Dictionary of Musical Themes, 73% of nearly 10,000 thematic passages are designated by the authors as in the mode with the remaining 27% in the minor mode.Huron (2006) reviewed a number of empirical observations suggesting that listeners tend to assume that a newly encountered musical passage will be in the mode. That is, the mode appears to be a listening mode for Western-enculturated listeners. Given the predominance of the mode, this perceptual default is consistent with statistical learning, and more specifically consistent with Bayesian inference. If listeners do indeed tend to assume a major mode default, then the switch to minor-mode listening is probably cued by one or more tonal patterns that fail to conform to the mode. Such disconfirming stimuli are widely regarded as important events for activating appropriate perceptual schemata (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thagard, 1986).How listeners infer the tonality of a passage has attracted considerable research attention over recent decades (Brown, 1988; Brown & Butler, 1981; Cohen, 1977, 1991; Cuddy, Cohen, & Mewhort, 1981; Cuddy & Lyons, 1981; Hebert, Peretz, & Gagnon, 1995; Huron & Parncutt, 1993; Krumhansl, 1990a; Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982; Leman, 1995; Smith & Schmuckler, 2004). For monophonic passages, tonality might be inferred through the recognition of mode-defining chroma distributions, through distinctive interval patterns, via chroma-dyad distributions, or through some combination of these or other pitch-related mental representations. Successful key-inference algorithms have been devised using a variety of techniques (Aarden, 2003; Bellman, 2005; Holtzman, 1977; Krumhansl & Schmuckler, 1986; Sapp, 2008; Schmuckler & Tomovski, 1997, 2000; Takeuchi, 1994; Temperley, 2007). However, reliable key inference by machine does not necessarily mean that listeners use an equivalent mental process. The Krumhansl-Butler debate of the 1980s and 1990s (Butler, 1989, 1990; Cross, 1997; Krumhansl, 1990b, 2000; Van Egmond & Butler, 1997) can be interpreted in several ways. However, one interpretation is that the debate arose from disagreement about whether the mental representation for tonal sequences is predominantly pitch related (Krumhansl) or predominantly interval related (Butler). See Huron (2006) for an extended discussion. …

Ordered Step Motives in Jazz Standards

The focus of this study is the melodic motive. It uses a tool called the Ordered Step Motive (OSM) to investigate the way linear motives give shape to jazz compositions that have frequently changing tonal centers, nonfunctional chord connections, no clear global tonics, or structurally open, circular forms. This study contributes to the written body of theoretical knowledge about jazz composition by engaging with current scholarship on tonal ambiguity, circular form, and motivic associations between melody and harmonic organization. This study also invites further research into the relationship between common riffs and underlying structure in jazz composition, which may reveal crucial differences between standards written by Broadway and Tin-Pan-Alley composers and those written by practicing jazz musicians.

Ambiguity

This article is an homage to the late music theorist Steve Larson, who passed away quite unexpectedly last year. Among his many talents (and he had many) was a remarkable ability to createambigrams, which are constructed using ambiguous figures that can be interpreted in two different ways. An ambigram can be read the same way in two different orientations (often right-side-up and upside-down, but other orientation pairs are sometimes used). This article takes the notion of ambiguity at the heart of the ambigram concept and examines it in music. In addition to paying tribute to Steve Larson's delightful mind, the paper explores how metric and tonal ambiguity affect music analysis and pedagogy—two disciplines that were important to Steve throughout his career.

A Tonal Revolution in Fifths and Semitones: Aaron Copland’sQuiet City

Tonal ambiguity in Aaron Copland’sQuiet City, a feature frequently noted by critics, results from a radical reorganization of the constituent elements of tonality. Many sections of the work eschew triads and, in lieu of tonal progressions and key centers, the work shifts between referential collections and emphasizes pitches through salience. This paper creates a perfect fifth/semitoneTonnetzto model two ofQuiet City’smost notable features: motives built from pentatonic subsets and semitonal shifts. TheTonnetzreveals isomorphisms between melodic motives and characteristic shifts between pitch-class collections, and it shows that climactic sections feature dramatic reversals of motion. Pattern completion—a voice-leading technique in which a missing note from a collection established as normative sounds conspicuously—articulates points of arrival and confirms central pitches. This analysis shows thatQuiet Citytransforms the relations among the constituent elements of tonality in order to further explore the potential of the tonal system, an avowed aesthetic goal of Copland’s.

Mystic Excess: Extravagance and Indecorum in Richard Crashaw

This essay, a re-evaluation and partial justification of the traditionally controversial eccentricities of Richard Crashaw's poetry, examines the function of ‘excess’ in his work. ‘Excess’ is taken to mean both stylistic extravagance and transgression of the normal boundaries of decorum. The first section characterises Crashaw's stylistic extravagance, partly in terms of ‘revisional flux’, and explores Pseudo-Dionysian semiotics and the notion of ‘incongruity’. The second section introduces George Bataille's theory to explain the extravagance in erotic and mystical terms. The third section moves on to ‘indecorum’ of several kinds, including the use of financial and appetitive, or sensual, imagery. The final section offers observations about Crashaw's tonal ambiguity, use of irony, and combination of wit with seriousness.

Lerdahl and Jackendoff's Grouping Structure Rules in the Performance of a Hindemith Sonata

In the last decades, musical cognitive psychology has intervened to build a bridge towards the comprehension of musical structures. The present paper studies the behavior of several students and music professionals in relation to grouping structure and it does so through the performance analysis of the first movement of Hindemith's sonata for flute and piano, according to the rules formulated by Lerdahl and Jackendoff, movement chosen because of its tonal ambiguity. The participants of this experiment are three medium level female Conservatory students. They performed the aforementioned piece after studying it for a whole trimester. The performance of the same piece by three professional musicians was also analyzed, using the appropriate commercial recordings for this purpose. This analysis includes the choice of group limits used in performance by both professionals and students and the comparison of both groups' results. Differences were observed in the placement of said limits by the different groups but all of them respected the set of rules formulated by Lerdahl and Jackendoff.

Of Time and Eternity

This essay discusses tonal ambiguity in the chorale melody “Das alte Jahr” and suggests a poetic interpretation of Bach's chorale. Expressive elements such as the passus duriusculus, the sospiro, and pervasive chromaticism are woven into a radical tonal plan that reflects a multifaceted perspective on time suggested by the change of year. In particular, the chromatic fourth becomes a tonality-defining element that contrasts the essentially diatonic melody. I suggest that the tonal and motivic balances in the piece reflect the duality of regret for the past and hope for the future, as well as a cyclic harmonic plan that reflects the yearly cycle and the notion of spiritual transformation.

Narrative Techniques and the Oral Tradition in The Scarlet Letter

Tonal ambiguity is but one enigma in Custom-House. Except for the now classic definition of the romance, the intent of The Scarlet Letter Introductory has troubled critics, and the tendency has been to ignore the remainder-primarily, it would seem, because Hawthorne himself encourages such a dismissal.2 In the second edition preface he remarks: sketch might, perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss to the public, or detriment to the book . (i). But if the personal essay format surrounding the theory of the romance adds little to our understanding of The Scarlet Letter itself, it promises much concerning Hawthorne's sensitivity to an assumed audience. In the Custom-House sketch he speaks directly to his reader in a familiar, at times jocular, manner as if