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M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E
A Publication of the
Society for Music Theory
Copyright (c) 1994 Society for Music Theory
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| Volume 0, Number 6 January, 1994 ISSN: 1067-3040 |
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All queries to: mto-editor@husc.harvard.edu
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AUTHOR: Parncutt, Richard
TITLE: Review of the 1993 Conference of the Society for
Music Perception and Cognition
KEYWORDS: perception, cognition, rhythm, meter, accent, tonality,
melody, expectancy
Parncutt Richard
McGill University
Faculty of Music
555 Sherbrooke St West, Montreal (Quebec),
Canada H3A 1E3
parncutt@music.mcgill.ca
Review of the 1993 Conference of the Society for
Music Perception and Cognition
ABSTRACT: The 1993 conference on music perception and
cognition in Philadelphia covered a wide range of
topics, including the perception and cognition of:
melodic accent, melodic cues to meter, accented rests,
meter extended through silence, expressive timing in
percussion music, tonality, finality of cadences,
modulation, key ambiguity, pitch salience in musical
passages, melodic contour, North Indian rags, tuning of
melodies, absolute pitch among non-musicians, and
melodic expectation and continuation. Many of these
issues have ramifications for the theory and analysis
of tonal and atonal music.
ACCOMPANYING FILES: none
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Introduction
[1] The Conference of the Society for Music Perception and
Cognition (SMPC) was held from June 16-19, 1993 at
International House, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
It was organized by Eugene Narmour of the Department of Music,
University of Pennsylvania. The Chair of the program committee
was Carol L. Krumhansl, Department of Psychology, Cornell
University, Ithaca NY.
[2] The conference was preceded by a larger conference
on the same subject: the 2nd International Conference
on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), held in Los
Angeles in February 1992. The next major conference in
the field will be the 3rd ICMPC in Liege, Belgium, from
23 - 27 July 1994. The SMPC conference in Philadelphia
was conceived on relatively small scale, but still
covered a wide range of current issues.
[3] It is impossible in the space of this review to
mention all the papers presented. I will concentrate
instead on those papers that I feel are of most
relevance to music theorists. For example, I do not
discuss papers on performance, computer applications,
and neuropsychology in this review.
Rhythm, Meter, and Accent
[4] Recent research in music perception has devoted a
great deal of attention to the perception of musical
pitch structures, melody, harmony, and tonality. A new
trend became evident at the conference in Philadelphia:
Temporal structure took over from pitch as the largest
category of contributed papers.
[5] David Huron (Waterloo) and Matthew Royal (Western
Ontario) addressed the issue of melodic accents arising
from changes in the direction of melodic contour and
from the size of melodic leaps. They compared syllabic
stresses in a corpus of gregorian chants with melodic
accent strengths as predicted by a number of
algorithmic models.
[6] Piet G. Vos (Nijmegen) and Arjan van Dijk
(University of Amsterdam) analyzed melodic cues to
meter in four compositions of J.S. Bach. Using the
technique of autocorrelation, they confirmed that
interval patterns (direction and approximate size of
intervals between successive tones) tend to repeat
themselves at temporal intervals corresponding to beat
and bar durations, but not at other intervals. The
technique of autocorrelation predicted measure length
with reasonable reliability, but was unable to
determine the position of the downbeat.
[7] Justin London (Carleton College) considered the
phenomenon of accented rests. Most music-perceptual
accounts consider only events that precede an accented
rest. London pointed out that it is necessary also to
look forward to future events, especially in cases
where the listener is already familiar with the style
of a given piece, or with the piece itself.
[8] Robert O. Gjerdingen (SUNY at Stony Brook)
investigated the perception of sinusoidally
amplitude-modulated signals with modulation frequencies
in the rhythmic range (say, 0.3 to 20 Hz). Such signals
are physically perfectly "smooth" and thus contain no
obvious physical "events" (or onsets). They may
nevertheless be perceived as a series of events,
occurring at specific temporal positions (phases)
relative to the peaks in the sinusoidal modulation.
[9] Eric F. Clarke and W. Luke Windsor (City, London)
played rhythmic passages followed by isolated probe
events, and asked listeners whether the isolated events
fell on or off the beat. They reported strong effects
of memory decay, tempo, and slowing of pulse sensations
in the absence of real-time reinforcement.
[10] Jeff Bilmes (MIT) modeled expressive timing in
percussive musical rhythms by a combination of tempo
variation and event time-shifting, illustrating his
presentation with recordings of real and synthesized
African percussion music incorporating specific
temporal manipulations.
Tonality
[11] Fred Lerdahl (Columbia) discussed the
establishment of a referential tonic center. According
to his theory of tonal pitch space, the tonic is the
center of the most compact region of pitch space that
may be represented by paths between superordinate
events within a prolongation region.
[12] Wendy Boettcher (California, Irvine) reported an
experimental study of the sense of completeness evoked
by various harmonic cadences. Results were in
qualitative agreement with music-theoretic notions of
completeness.
[13] William Forde Thompson (York University) and Lola
L. Cuddy (Queen's University) investigated the
perception of modulation (key change) in a set of
specially-prepared four-voice textures. Listeners were
musicians. Key-distance judgments were influenced not
only by music-theoretical estimates of key distance and
by the way modulations were approached, but also by the
presence or absence of expressive timing and dynamics.
[14] Frank C. Riddick (Colorado) analyzed the tonality
of Zemlinsky's Second String Quartet (Op. 15),
emphasizing the study of highly ambiguous tonal
passages can lead to a better understanding of tonality
perception in general.
[15] Caroline Palmer and Susan Hollerin (Ohio State)
investigated the perception of pitch in
harmonic/contrapuntal music. Their experimental
technique was to change the pitch of a note in a
passage and to ask listeners whether they heard the
change. Harmonically related pitch changes, and changes
occurring in the mid frequency range, were least
noticeable.
Melody
[16] Kathryn Vaughn (MIT) and Edward C. Carterette
(Southern California) explored perceptual relations
among North Indian rags by the technique of similarity
ratings and multi-dimensional scaling. Western
musicians were found to be sensitive to conventional
emotional meanings of rags -- even if they had no
previous knowledge of Indian music.
[17] James Carlsen and Marc Cassone (Washington)
presented melodies in which selected tones were
mistuned by 20 or 40 cents by comparison to equal
temperament, and investigated sensitivity to mistuning
as a function of scale-degree, tempo, and timbre. They
compared results with an analysis of recordings of
cello music.
[18] David Huron (Waterloo) applied the perceptual law
known as Fitt's law to both the perception of apparent
motion in human vision and to the fission and fusion of
auditory streams or melodies. He tested hypotheses
based on that law by analyzing a database of melodies
from ten different cultures.
[19] Sven Allback (University of Gothenburg) and Sven
Emtell (KTH, Stockholm) developed algorithmic models
for the analysis of pitch categories, meter, phrase
structure, and tonality, and applied them to some 5000
Swedish folk melodies. In a separate talk, Allback
applied Krumhansl's probe-tone method to Swedish folk
melodies, and obtained results very similar to those
obtained by Krumhansl, in spite of pronounced
variations in intonation -- suggesting that intonation
plays a secondary role in the establishing of a tonal
hierarchy.
[20] Daniel Levitin (Oregon) described an ingeniously
simple experiment to test the absolute-pitch ability of
non-musicians. He asked psychology students to list the
popular songs that they knew best. From the results, he
compiled a list of the best-known songs. In the
experiment proper, he asked individual participants to
sing a few bars of a given song, handing them the cover
of the corresponding CD to jog their memories. The
response of 24% of all subjects was within one semitone
of the correct key, and 67% of all subjects came within
2 semitones.
Expectancy
[21] Carol L. Krumhansl (Cornell) presented the results
of psychological tests of Narmour's
implication-realization model. In general, the model
was found to perform well (however, the model's
performance was not compared with that of other
possible models). Further psychological tests of the
expectation-realization model were reported by Mayumi
Adachi and James Carlsen (Washington), Robert Rawlins
(Clayton), and James Buhler (Pennsylvania).
[22] David H. Bradshaw (Washington) investigated the
perception of melodic continuation. The degree of
expectation of a given note was found to correlate
highly with the degree of surprise that follows the
actual perception of that note.
[23] Steve Larson (Indiana University) developed a
model that combined research on key determination with
research on melodic expectancy, taking both aspects
into account in the prediction of key and of melodic
continuation.
Presidential address
[24] In his presidential address, David Wessel (Center
for New Music and Technology, Berkeley) stressed the
importance of musical relevance in music perception
research. It is essential that researchers in all areas
of music, including perception and theory, have a
thorough (and, if possible, practical) understanding of
the musical background and ramifications of their work.
[25] Wessel also remarked on the remarkably small
number of currently filled, full-time university
positions in the field of music perception/cognition or
systematic musicology (less than 200 in North America)
by comparison to music theory (about 4000) and
historical musicology (about 3200). These figures
clearly do not well reflect the relative importance of
the three subject areas for students currently studying
music at university level -- that is, for musicians of
the 21st century. Nor do the figures correspond well
with the relative numbers of people in the three areas
that are currently available and well qualified to fill
post-secondary positions. Any university that manages
to offer a position in music perception in the near
future can count on receiving a large number of
applications from musically gifted, well published, and
internationally recognized scholars.
[26] Wessel suggested that the problem may be solved by
improving communication and encouraging collaboration
between the fields of music perception and music
theory. A promising strategy for the immediate future
will be to organize music perception conferences in
close spatial and temporal proximity to theory
conferences, to enable people to attend two conferences
in one trip.
Conclusion
[27] The papers presented in this and other recent
conferences in music perception reflect an encouraging
trend: Music-perceptual issues are not as music-
theoretically trivial as they used to be. Times have
changed since the first measurement of the mel scale!
Slowly but surely, the gap between music perception and
music theory is becoming smaller. Research in music
perception increasingly involves musically sophisticated
judgments about good music, and the results of music-
perceptual research are becoming increasingly relevant
to music theory and analysis.
[28] Researchers from both disciplines may benefit from
these developments by engaging in cross-disciplinary
collaboration. Admittedly, a synthesis of music
perception and music theory is still rather distant --
but the prospect is becoming increasingly feasible.
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