Musical form ≈ Musical form
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Perceptual fusion of musical notes by native Amazonians suggests universal representations of musical intervals Open
Music perception is plausibly constrained by universal perceptual mechanisms adapted to natural sounds. Such constraints could arise from our dependence on harmonic frequency spectra for segregating concurrent sounds, but evidence has been…
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The human language system, including its inferior frontal component in “Broca’s area,” does not support music perception Open
Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of …
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Coloured hearing, colour music, colour organs, and the search for perceptually meaningful correspondences between colour and sound Open
There has long been interest in the nature of the relationship(s) between hue and pitch or, in other words, between colour and musical/pure tones, stretching back at least as far as Newton, Goethe, Helmholtz, and beyond. In this narrative …
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The Syntax of Jazz Harmony: Diatonic Tonality, Phrase Structure, and Form Open
The regularities underlying the structure building of chord sequences, harmonic phrases, and combinations of phrases constitute a central research problem in music theory. This article proposes a formalization of Jazz harmony with a genera…
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The human language system, including its inferior frontal component in ‘Broca’s area’, does not support music perception Open
Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of …
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The Role of the Baldwin Effect in the Evolution of Human Musicality Open
From the biological perspective human musicality is the term referred to as a set of abilities which enable the recognition and production of music. Since music is a complex phenomenon which consists of features that represent different st…
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An Expressive Bodily Movement Repertoire for Marimba Performance, Revealed through Observers' Laban Effort-Shape Analyses, and Allied Musical Features: Two Case Studies Open
Musicians' expressive bodily movements can influence observers' perception of performance. Furthermore, individual differences in observers' music and motor expertise can shape how they perceive and respond to music performance. However, f…
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Musical Borrowing or Curious Coincidence? Open
Studies of allusion, modeling, paraphrase, quotation, and other forms of musical borrowing hinge on the claim that the composer of one piece of music has used material or ideas from another. What evidence can be presented to support or ref…
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Kinematic Analysis of Pianists' Expressive Performances of Romantic Excerpts: Applications for Enhanced Pedagogical Approaches Open
Established pedagogical theories for classical piano usually do not consider the essential relationship between the musical structure, whole body movements, and expression. Research focusing on musicians' expression has shown that body mov…
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Evaluating Hierarchical Structure in Music Annotations Open
Music exhibits structure at multiple scales, ranging from motifs to large-scale functional components. When inferring the structure of a piece, different listeners may attend to different temporal scales, which can result in disagreements …
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Finding Occurrences of Melodic Segments in Folk Songs Employing Symbolic Similarity Measures Open
Much research has been devoted to the classification of folk songs, revealing that variants are recognised based on salient melodic segments, such as phrases and motifs, while other musical material in a melody might vary considerably. In …
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Depth and the Uncertainty of Statistical Knowledge on Musical Creativity Fluctuate Over a Composer's Lifetime Open
Brain models music as a hierarchy of dynamical systems that encode probability distributions and complexity (i.e., entropy and uncertainty). Through musical experience over lifetime, a human is intrinsically motivated in optimizing the int…
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An energy-based generative sequence model for testing sensory theories of Western harmony Open
The relationship between sensory consonance and Western harmony is an important topic in music theory and psychology. We introduce new methods for analysing this relationship, and apply them to large corpora representing three prominent ge…
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Computer-Generated Stylistic Compositions with Long-Term Repetitive and Phrasal Structure Open
This article describes and evaluates an algorithm called Racchmaninof-Jun2015, referred to hereafter as Racchmaninof, which generates passages of music in a specifiable style. For generating all four parts of a Bach hymn (one of two target…
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A Transformational Approach to Gesture in Shō Performance Open
Through an analysis of contemporary shō performance practice, this article explores the relationship between instrumental gesture and modal theory in contemporary gagaku. I demonstrate that the idiosyncratic arrangement of the pipes on the…
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Reframing Generated Rhythms and the Metric Matrix as Projections of Higher-Dimensional Lattices in Scott Joplin’s Music Open
Generated rhythms and the metric matrix can both be modelled by time-domain equivalents to projections of higher-dimensional lattices. Scott Joplin’s music is a case study for how these structures can illuminate both musical and philosophi…
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Music and Language Open
This review presents a highly selective survey of connections between music and language. I begin by considering some fundamental differences between music and language and some nonspecific similarities that may arise out of more general c…
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A Bevy of Biases Open
This article is in response to and in broad support of Philip Ewell’s keynote talk, “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame,” given at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, and essay, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame”…
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Song Form and the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop Music Open
Song form in North American hip-hop music has evolved along the genre’s journey from its origins as a live musical practice, through its commercial ascent in the 1980s and 1990s, to its dominance of mainstream popular music in the 21st cen…
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Probe Tone Paradigm Reveals Less Differentiated Tonal Hierarchy in Rock Music Open
Krumhansl and Kessler’s (1982) pioneering experiments on tonal hierarchies in Western music have long been considered the gold standard for researchers interested in the mental representation of musical pitch structure. The current experim…
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Mixture Strategies Open
This article presents a framework to approach musical hybridity, which is understood generally as any combination of musical identities. The framework focuses on the concepts of mixture strategies— perceptible processes of interaction and …
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Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process? Open
Theories of tonal music take for granted that all keys of the same mode (i.e., all major and all minor keys) are employed by composers in essentially the same way; however, newer analytical and cognitive research challenges this view by po…
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Unveiling the Hierarchical Structure of Music by Multi-Resolution Community Detection Open
Human perception of musical structure is supposed to depend on the generation of hierarchies, which is inherently related to the actual organisation of sounds in music. Musical structures are indeed best retained by listeners when they for…
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Time‐Space Experience in Works for Solo Cello by Lachenmann, Xenakis and Ferneyhough: a Performance‐Sensitive Approach to Morphosyntactic Musical Analysis Open
The present article aims to develop an approach to musical meaning that integrates performative dimensions systematically into a broadened concept of analysis, connecting particularly to recent research into the temporal qualities of music…
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The spatiality of sounds. From sound-source localization to musical spaces Open
The proliferation of and interest in concepts of musical space make the question of why composers, philosophers, and musicologists have used spatial concepts for music – which is typically considered a temporal and ephemeral art form – a r…
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“So Complete in Beautiful Deformity”: Unexpected Beginnings and Rotated Riffs in Meshuggah’s<i>obZen</i> Open
The music of Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah is known for combining a rigid ".fn_meter(4,4)."-based hypermetrical song structure with riffs having a variety of durational spans. These looping riffs fall in and out of alignment with th…
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Gesture in Karnatak Music: Pedagogy and Musical Structure in South India Open
This thesis presents an examination of gesture in Karnatak music, the art music of South India. The topic is approached from two perspectives; the first considers Karnatak music structure from a gestural perspective, looking both at the mu…
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Annotating Musical Theatre Plots on Narrative Structure and Emotional Content Open
Although theoretical models of the structure of narrative arising from systematic analysis of corpora are available for domains such as Russian folk tales, there are no such sources for the plot lines of musical theatre. The present paper …
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Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure Open
The ability to anticipate rhythmic and melodic structures in music is considered a fundamental human trait, present across all cultures and predating linguistic comprehension in human development. Yet, it remains unclear the extent to whic…
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Segmenting and Predicting Musical Phrase Structure Exploits Neural Gain Modulation and Phase Precession Open
Music, like spoken language, is often characterized by hierarchically organized structure. Previous experiments have shown neural tracking of notes and beats, but little work touches on the more abstract question: how does the brain establ…