Understanding Of Music Research Articles

An artificial intelligence approach to musical grouping analysis

Work on modelling music cognition now seems to be at the stage where theories concerning the ongoing processes of musical understanding are required. This paper describes and critically assesses algorithms for two possible approaches to modelling how listeners process the ‘musical surface’ of discrete pitches to produce high level grouping structures in memory, being (i) syntactic processing using a grammar of chord function, and (ii) knowledgebased recognition of stereotypical phrase-level structures, using a system of frames (Minsky 1977). An integrated and resource limited system is described, which combines a parser of musical chord function with schema-based expectations concerning grouping structures. Major problems include describing how real-world knowledge of musical context is brought to bear on the listening experience, and integrating the processing of grouping structure within a broader theory of musical cognition.

The Score: An open letter to Sir William Glock on the occasion of his 80th birthday

ItWas, DearWilliam, distinctly chastening the other day to discover your signature inside a precious score which had been living and sleeping in the shadow of my piano for many years—so many, indeed, that I could have sworn it actually belonged to me. Since you arc one of those rare spirits for whom the lending of books and scores is inseparable from the delights of possessing them, you probably don't need my sorry example to remind you of how easily an au revoir can become an adieu. But now that the wanderer is safely back on your shelves, the frivolous thought that this is another sense in which I'll be wishing you many happy returns has been replaced by a more serious one; for as soon as I begin to ask myself how much else that I like to call my own—and I don't of course mean mere ‘belongings’—is in fact owed to you, there emerges an immeasurably greater question whose bearing on every one of us will surely be illuminated by the celebrations of your splendid birthday. The question is this: how much have we tended to take for granted, and how much have we forgotten or never investigated, about the nature and extent of your manifold contributions to musical life and understanding within and beyond this small island?

A Declarative Model of Atonal Analysis

Most computational models of musical understanding have focused on procedural aspects of analysis, suggesting techniques for parsing, comparing, and transforming various representations of a piece, or adapting discovery procedures of artificially intelligent (AI) inference systems, which plan and follow agendas and goals. Much contemporary AI research, however, also focuses on declarative aspects of knowledge, attempting to define data representations and relations that are commensurate with human cognition. Naturally, musical analysis has both procedural and declarative aspects: the declarative determines what the form of the analysis is, and the procedural determines how the analysis is obtained. However, a predominantly procedural analysis risks sacrificing the form of musical understanding to obtain efficiency or compatibility with a particular computer language. In this article I argue that, for a significant body of twentieth-century music, a declarative system models the structure of analytical understanding better than do existing procedural programs, and I present a functioning declarative system that infers complex musical structures from the elementary musical relations that it identifies.

Discerning Musical Development: Using Computers to Discover What We Know

Hardly a day goes by that we aren't exposed to music of some sort: on the radio, television, or stereo, in stores, churches, restaurants, subway stations. And even when there is no music actually playing, we are apt to produce our own, humming or singing to ourselves or simply listening internally to some tune I just can't get out of my head. We grow up listening to music, but, without more explicit musical training, do we actually grow in our ability to understand and express musical knowledge? Psychologists of music have been investigating the issue of whether exposure leads to better understanding. In the presence of formal music instruction, musical growth is generally easy to predict and easily measured. Musical development does not prove as readily apparent, however, in individuals who have not been explicitly trained. Although we might intuitively presume adults capable of demonstrating increased musical understanding beyond that of comparably untrained children, such a pattern has in fact been very difficult to confirm. Indeed, until now the general consensus has pointed to a leveling off of musical development beyond the age of seven or eight (Gardner, 1973; Winner, 1982). In order to demonstrate musical understanding, one must either be able to represent that information accurately (in notation or in performance) or demonstrate accurate musical discrimination in the perception of musical information. A number of studies have found musical development without musical training to be quite rapid in these areas in young children. For example, researchers in the areas of melodic perception (Dowling, 1982; Dowling & Harwood, 1986), performance of familiar and spontaneous song (Davidson, 1985; McKernon, 1979), and the representation of simple rhythms and familiar songs (Bamberger, 1980, 1982; Davidson & Scripp, in press) all report dramatic development with young children (ages six months to nine years old). Yet without formal musical training there is little to suggest that additional musical development occurs in adolescence or adulthood.

Beginning Harmony: the Post-Schenkerian Dilemma

It is now more than fifty years since the death of Heinrich Schenker. The academic debate over the legitimacy of his work is essentially over, and his theories are recognized by those who know them as the most important body of theoretical musical thought of this century. Schenkerian theory has profoundly changed graduate study in the theory of music on this continent in the last twenty-five years, yet it seems we are still very unsure how to incorporate it into our undergraduate curricula. Both theory textbooks and articles on the pedagogy of theory reflect the breadth of current views. Texts range from the staunchly traditional (Kostka & Payne 1984) through the subliminally linear (Aldwell & Schachter 1978) to the aggressively Schenkerian (Lester 1982), and recent articles by leading practitioners of Schenkerian analysis reach radically different conclusions about the undergraduate curriculum (Beach 1983, Rothgeb 1981). Curiously enough, even works owing a heavy debt to Schenker's theories seem almost embarrassed by the Ursatz. Der Freie Satz itself begins with a three-chapter discussion of the background stratum. Schenker considers the background an indispensable prerequisite to a work of art (Schenker 1978:3-4), and gives philosophic and technical justifications for his point of view. Oswald Jonas's presentation of Schenker's theory (Jonas 1982) reverses the order in which background and are discussed, but since his book antedates Schenker's, the difference is certainly understandable. What is curious is that Jonas' plan began a virtually unbroken pedagogical tradition, followed even by the most recent Schenkerian text (Forte & Gilbert 1982). Now, there are necessarily crucial differences between a theoretical treatise - or even an advanced text - and a text for beginning students. The one is aimed at mature musicians, the other at neophytes; the one presents a monistic theoretical disquisition, the other lays a broad foundation of musical understandings; the one can be highly abstract and technical, the other must necessarily be propadeutic. Nonetheless, the delay of a discussion of background may seriously undermine comprehension of the Schenkerian position. If Schenker was right in believing that his theories presented for the first time a genuine theory of language (Schenker 1978 vol.I:9) - that is, a precise way of defining what is, and what is not, - there is no reason for university instructors to continue our longstanding practice of lecturing to our students for two or three years about music without ever attempting to define tonality accurately, either for the students or for ourselves. Too often, we have simply hoped that students will eventually intuit what is meant by tonal harmony or tonal counterpoint from a mass of empirical data and unnecessarily restrictive rules, even when the rules are largely pedagogical conveniences far removed from actual compositional practice. But another approach is possible, if Schenker is right in proposing that the essence of music is not just in chord-tochord progressions, or in principles of voice-leading (most of which in any case derive from pretonal practice), but rather in a compositional coherence which can be achieved only through the Fundamental Structure in the background, and its transformations in the middleground and foreground (Schenker 1978 vol.1:6). A beautiful example of how background helps clarify the foreground, and vice versa is found in the opening measures of Beethoven's Op. 101 (see Example 1). At first glance, the excerpt seems to exemplify tonality without a Schenkerian Ursatz: there is no tonic chord directly supporting a reasonable candidate for Kopf ton. But if we accept the Schenkerian definition of tonality, and if we understand the degree to which the Ursatz is an abstraction, not always to be revealed by simply stripping away passing and neighbouring tones, then we can easily understand that the tonic chord of m. …

Music in Use: Responsive Music Listening in the Primary School

The author invites us to re-examine the case for ‘music appreciation’ teaching. In a two-year project, ‘Music in Use,’ conducted in Norwegian primary schools, Magne Espeland and his colleagues developed new principles and methods for encouraging children to listen to music of many different styles – including modern instrumental and orchestral music, pop and jazz. Working from the belief that response on the part of the listener is crucial in musical understanding, the project group involved the children with a variety of activities which, while primarily related to the music itself, engaged also with experiences in verbal, visual and kinetic expression.

Developmental Psychology and Music Education

The gulf between research in music psychology and practice in music education presents a perennial and pressing problem, and Psychology of Music provides an appropriate forum in which to tackle it but a brief analysis of the contents of the first ten years of the journal suggests that we still face an uphill task. Viewing this problem from a developmental perspective may enable researchers to organise their knowledge such that it is more readily amenable to practical application, and this article sets out the potential scope and aims of a developmental psychology of music. Some growing areas of research are described in each of the three main theoretical perspectives within the subject, namely cognitive psychology (development of melodic processing, singing, and children's representations of music); cognitive-developmental psychology ("music conservation", and the development of aesthetic sensitivity); and behavioural psychology (motiv- ation, affect, and classroom music learning). The developmental perspective should be able to make a direct contribution to issues in music education such as the relationship between formal and intuitive musical understanding, the place of composition, improvisation and non-traditional musics in the curriculum, and the role of assessment and evaluation.

Towards Tolerance and Taste: Preferences for World Musics

A multicultural imperative has emerged in American educational philosophy and practices of the last decade. Never before has there been such an emphasis on multicultural understanding in the school curriculum. The changing philosophy of education as expressed in the literature suggests that the melting-pot theory is outdated; instead, the various ethnic groups present a rich tapestry of American national culture while maintaining their distinct identity. In this article Dr Shehan examines the relationship between these developing educational attitudes and the music teacher's task in helping to expand students' musical understanding and taste.

New Voices and Old Theory

Theory follows we commonly say, ignoring the grain of contradiction implicit in that popular saw. In truth, the priority we like to accord to musical practice may be no more assured than that of the chicken over the egg. Musical theory and musical practice are not as weakly linked as popular wisdom would lead us to believe. If theory does in fact follow practice, then the prior existence of that new musical practice must testify to the concurrent operation of some new kind of musical understanding to which theory later merely gives formal expression. If some purely speculative theories may have held sway from time to time, the truly influential theories of the past were the more practical ones. These usually came into existence as descriptive systems, matured into prescriptive doctrines, and finally fell into disuse when they began to lag too far behind contemporary practice. Only after becoming outmoded, did they begin to look ever more speculative to a posterity that had forgotten their practical applications.

Imagination and Understanding in the Music Curriculum Tom Gamble

Music is unique in its power to involve the whole person, intellectually as well as emotionally and kinaesthetically. Our ultimate aim in music education, therefore, should be to develop musical imagination and understanding. We can achieve this by making composition and improvisation the central focus of the music curriculum, with listening activities carefully related to children's work. Musical experiences in the classroom should be adventurous, challenging, joyful yet serious, taking place in an atmosphere of warm, sympathetic, tolerant, and respectful relationships. In this environment, children are more likely to value music, and to develop sensitivity not only to music, but to other people. Schools too often underestimate children's potential. In music we can help all children to experience a sense of achievement, leading to greater self-respect.

Listening behaviour and musical preference in the age of ‘transmitted music’

The significance of the mass media in everyday musical life can scarcely be exaggerated. Music is nowadays, to a large degree, heard in technologically communicated form, i.e. as ‘transmitted music’ (Übertragungsmusik), not live (see especially Silbermann 1954, Eberhard 1962, Jungk 1971, Goslich 1971, Bornoff 1972, Blaukopf, Goslich and Scheib 1973, Schmidt 1975, Rösing 1978a, Brinkmann 1980, Hosokawa 1981). It can be assumed that young people and adults in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) consume, on average, a good three hours' worth of music a day, on radio, cassette recorder, television or records. The fact that music, by means of the technological transmission-chain, is available at all times and can be replayed at will, independent of the here-and-now of live performance, has far-reaching consequences for the listening behaviour, listening expectations, musical preferences and musical understanding of every individual. Two of these aspects, listening behaviour and musical preferences, will be examined in detail in what follows.

Georg Joseph Vogler and the "Second Theme" in Sonata Form: Some 18th-Century Perceptions of Musical Contrast

Since the middle of this century, students of 18th-century musical forms have been aware of the small but significant body of contemporaneous theoretical works that provide an alternative to the analytic techniques of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although few would give up more modem perceptions in favor of the often groping essays in formal analysis made by 18th-century theorists, the necessity for understanding their descriptions, and the assumptions that underlie them, has been widely accepted. These descriptions are not without problems for the music historian, however. The decades after 1730 saw the evolution of a new musical style, embodied most characteristically in the newly developing forms of the symphony and sonata, together with the rise of a new impulse to understand large forms in their entirety. The theorist was compelled to devise new ways of describing musical events, and a new vocabulary to express what he saw. It is not surprising, then, that many of the resulting analyses seem woefully inadequate after 200 years of accumulated experience. Often it is not even clear just what musical phenomena are being analyzed. Yet as these remarks have perhaps suggested, their inadequacies stem at least as much from difficulties of analytic technique and vocabulary as from inadequate musical understanding. The efforts of theorists during the middle part of the 18th century to overcome these difficulties led finally to the exhaustive and clear formulations published by Heinrich Christoph Koch between 1782 and 1793. Before the appearance of his three-volume Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, the theorists most helpful for the modern historian were often (and not surprisingly) those who were least conventional, who depended least upon traditional methods and styles of writing music theory. Among the most unconventional theorists of the 18th, or of any, century was the Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814). With an early interest in musical composition (but an undetermined amount of formal musical training) and a university education in humanities and theology, the young Vogler was preoccupied with a desire to understand the true harmonic basis of music; and upon formulating a theoretical system which satisfied him, he apparently felt an evangelistic compulsion to explain to the world both his principles and what he perceived as their direct relationship to musical practice,

Music and the Reed Organ in the Life of Mark Twain

The rural and small-town experiences of his youth, coupled with those of his years as a river pilot, formed a fertile resource on which he drew repeatedly; and it is significant that the farther he departed from this material, the less successful, from a literary point of view, his work became. Anyone who reads far in Twain's oeuvre will be struck by his frequent references to music, for he was an amateur musician of sorts and, within certain bounds, something of a critic. Possessed of a melodious tenor voice and proficient enough at the piano to play the music he liked, his interest in the art was lifelong. His love for music, like the material from which sprang his greatest literary works, derived from his youth: the spirituals, jubilees, chants, and folksongs learned from his uncle's slaves formed the basis of his musical understanding for the rest of his life. It was also during his youth that he must have made his acquaintance with the piano, for his family owned an instrument, and his sister Pamela gave lessons.' Oddly enough, in later life he keenly felt the contrast between his own literary works drawn from early sources and that of his contemporaries, to his disadvantage. He never felt quite at home with the literati of his day, and, when he essayed their more polished and genteel style the result, while not outright failure, nevertheless fell short of his best efforts. His attempts to gain upper-class acceptance for his work and to conform to what he considered socially acceptable levels was lifelong, and his efforts in the field of literature were paralleled by similar musical aspirations. It is significant that when he surveyed his supposed failure, he called forth the shade of the humble reed organ of his youth: Honestly, I never cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theater and the opera, they had no use for me and the melodeon.2 Twain's life (1835-1910) spanned the period that saw the rise and decline of the

Effect upon intensity and low frequencies due to a sound moat in the new Chapel/Recital Hall at the Interlochen Center for the Arts

Graphic results of a study of the application of music‐acoustical principles in the low frequencies of pipe ranks in the Aeolian‐Skinner Organ of the new Dendrinos Chapel/Recital Hall of the Interlochen Center for the Arts. The effect upon pitch and timbre as well as the intensity and frequency resulting from the sound moat under the stage of the new structure reveals a reassessment of physical features and psychological responses in musical understanding. However the direct acoustical estimations and provisions agree with earlier assumptions, especially J. F. Schouten's “subjective tones.”

Goal synthesis and goal pursuit in a musical transformation task for children between seven and twelve years of age

Abstract A diagnostic study of goal synthesis in children pursuing a musical task. Musical understanding is thought to comprise the capability of goal definition as well as goal pursuit. A difference is seen between two aspects of memory, viz. memory in the strict sense and memory in the wider sense. The first memory is an image store: it is under the developmental influence of memory in the wider sense embodying the sum total of conceptual knowledge about the world. The kind of goal definition a child is capable of is seen as a developmental indicator of the maturity of his memory in the wider sense. Two empirical data sources are used in this study: music‐structural data in the form of notation and procedural data in the form of problem solving protocols. On the basis of a small sample of cases studied in 1975 it is suggested that form age ten onward children are capable of sophisticated forms of goal definition. Further research with different children, and with the same children at an advanced age, is...

Music and the art of prosody

Prosodic structures in poetry are mirrored, to a great extent, in music. This essay suggests a teaching strategy that sets poems to song in order to stimulate interest in poetic structure and understanding of rhythm and musicality in performance.

The perception of musical rhythm and metre.

The occurrence of relatively long notes, and the repetition of melodic phrases are important cues to the metre, or regular beat, of a piece of music. A model of how people use this information to infer the metre of unaccompanied melodies is described here. The model is in the form of a computer program, and involves a definition of melodic repetition which encompasses repetitions that include certain kinds of variation. The program has been applied to the task of analysing the metric structure of the forty-eight fugue subjects of the Well-Tempered Clavier by J S Bach. The program is discussed in relation to other models both of musical understanding and of sequential concept learning.

Analysis and effect of design in differential sensitivity to musical frequencies and intensities in auditoria

A study of the application of music-acoustical principles including absorptive materials, reactive elements, baffles, mufflers, sound silencers, etc., in the Corson Auditorium of the Grand Traverse Performing Arts Center, The Interlochen Center for the Arts, Michigan, comparing especially the intensity and frequency, the pitch and timbre of pianos and other keyboard stringed instruments. The evoked responses to anechoic chamber design and the physiological as well as psychological attitudes of the subjects were utilized in these studies. Some measure of reassessment of physical features to psychological responses of musical understanding may be forthcoming. However, the results of these direct acoustical estimations and provisions agreed almost perfectly with earlier assumptions.

Effect of Repeated Listenings on Structural Discrimination and Affective Response

Knowledge of musical form and of the structural elements that make up that form is basic to musical understanding and, eventually, musical enjoyment.1 Nevertheless, the relationship between liking a specific piece of music and understanding its composition is not always apparent. Establishing such a relationship is important, for the more that is known about creating positive reactions to music, especially art music, the more likely will better teaching methods be developed to achieve these kinds of reactions. Certain educators have indicated that more effective ways of teaching discriminative listening are necessary to achieve greater sensitivity to the formal structural elements of music.2 Listening to music may occur with relatively little awareness of what is happening within the musical performance. However, listening discriminatively necessarily involves some degree of recognition, perception, or identification of musical stimuli by a process of distinguishing and sifting out certain stimulus characteristics. It is not always possible to make fine discriminations of music in one hearing.

Max Meyer and the Psychology of Music

ions. .. . Do not contradict [this] forecast . . . by pointing to the crowds which fill the metropolitan concert rooms. .. . How many pretending to enjoy the music succeed in this pretense because their neighbors pretend no less? The naked in a society of the naked knows that he is safest when making the least fuss about the nakedness of the others who like him pretend to be richly clothed in musical understanding. It is interesting to note that Meyer rejected a nativistic explanation of rhythm: During the nineteenth century there was among psychologists much metaphysical speculation about rhythm, which was supposed to be one of the properties of the human soul and to help to establish man's superiority over the animals. . . . Psychologists used to think that certain rhythms were inborn and others did not really deserve to have their existence asserted .... The practical, the onlyproblem for the modern musician consists in an answer to the question: How does one acquire skill in easily executing various groups by greatest emphasis on a single one of the elements. We can profit, for answering this question, from observation of the grouped motions acquired by infants. In his Psychology of the Other-One (1921, pp. 347ff.) Meyer had described his technique for teaching unusual rhythms to adults and his observations in North Africa of five-beat music determined by the movements of a processional dance. Meyer gave his The Musician's Arithmetic the subtitle: Drill Problems for an Introduction into the Scientific Study of Musical Composition, and warned prospective readers (p. 5), Since a drill course without a teacher is virtually an impossibility, the question is very pertinent: Where can the pupil who desires to learn from this text find a comThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.59 on Mon, 17 Oct 2016 04:48:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms