Comparing Word Affect and Tone Affect: Comment on Sun and Cuthbert 2017

In the article "Emotion Painting: Lyric, affect, and musical relationships in a large lead-sheet corpus", Sun and Cuthbert (2017) explored the correlations between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Several musical features did indeed turn out to be highly correlated with the affect of the lyrics. However, correlations between other features, particularly mode-related musical features and lyric affect, were either insignificant or even contradicted previous research. In the current commentary, it is argued that the difference between the musical features that show significant correlations and those that do not is that the former have a local musical effect whereas the latter tend to affect the mood of a whole phrase or piece, and that the way Sun and Cuthbert estimate lyric affect for sentences or song may not be appropriate. Furthermore, a few remarks are made about the way Sun and Cuthbert treat multi-syllable words and about some basic assumptions concerning the relation between music and lyrics in a song. Nevertheless, the authors are praised for their innovative and interesting work, while several alternative and additional analyses (for example with scale-degree qualia and syncopations) are proposed

Development of the African American Gospel Piano Style (1926-1960): A Socio-Musical Analysis of Arizona Dranes and Thomas A. Dorsey

DEVELOPMENT OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN GOSPEL PIANO STYLE(1926-1960): A SOCIO-MUSICAL ANALYSIS OFARIZONA DRANES AND THOMAS A. DORSEYIdella Lulamae Johnson, PhDUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2009African-American gospel music has long been recognized as a vocal music, and its piano accompaniment has also been an indispensable and important component in shaping and defining the genre. This dissertation traces and examines the historical and stylistic development of the gospel piano style from 1926 to 1960. Arizona Dranes and Thomas A. Dorsey are highlighted as two of the earliest and formidable practitioners who aided in codifying and promulgating the gospel piano style. The four primary areas of investigation include: 1) explicating the musical development of the piano style from 1926 to 1960 through the pianistic styles of twenty-three gospel pianists; 2) providing biographical information on over twenty-five gospel pianists; 3) examining the sacred versus secular dichotomy through musical similarities and differences that exist between the gospel piano style and other popular, African-American piano styles; and 4) presenting an ethnographic exploration of the musical and sociohistorical roles of gospel pianists. Each area of inquiry is informed by methods in Ethnomusicology and Musicology, and augmented by methodologies in African-American Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology. Wilson's work on conceptual approaches to African and African-American music-making (1974, 1984, 1992), and Gates' work on Signifying (1988) provide the major theoretical framework for the musical analysis.Fifty-five recordings of various gospel pianists, representing nine sub-styles, are transcribed and analyzed in order to define and delineate established practices, techniques, idiomatic harmonic movement, and shared motives, riffs, and "fill-ins" -- all which are important in establishing a stylistic and performance canon for the gospel piano style. Eleven motivic techniques that are endemic and idiomatic to the foundation and development of the gospel piano style are identified. The gospel piano style is grouped into three historical periods. Dranes and Dorsey define the first period with twenty-six musical characteristics, thirteen musical characteristics define the second period, and ten musical characteristics define the third

WHY WE SING ALONG: MEASURABLE TRAITS OF SUCCESSFUL CONGREGATIONAL SONGS

Songwriters have been creating music for the church for hundreds of years. The songs have gone through many stylistic changes from generation to generation, yet, each song has generated congregational participation. What measurable, traceable qualities of congregational songs exist from one generation to the next? This document explores the history and development of Congregational Christian Song (CCS), to discover and document the similarities between seemingly contrasting styles of music. The songs analyzed in this study were chosen because of their wide popularity and broad dissemination among non-denominational churches in the United States. While not an exhaustive study, this paper reviews over 200 songs spanning 300 years of CCS. The findings of the study are that songs that have proven to be successful in eliciting participation all contain five common elements. These elements encourage congregations to participate in singing when an anticipation cue is triggered and then realized. The anticipation/reward theory used in this study is based on David Huron’s ITPRA (Imagination-Tension-Prediction-Reaction-Appraisal) Theory of Expectation. This thesis is designed to aid songwriters and music theorists to quickly identify whether a CCS can be measured as successful (i.e., predictable)

The Chaplin Craze: Charlie Chaplin and the Emergence of Mass-Amusement Culture

This thesis explores the relationship between Charlie Chaplin’s early career and films (1914-1916) and the emergent mass-amusement culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America. It combines empirical research into massamusement history with close readings of Chaplin’s early films in order to illuminate the close and previously minimally explored relationship between Chaplin’s filmmaking and popularity on the one hand, and the broader early twentieth-century history of mass-amusement culture on the other. The thesis approaches its subject through the specific phenomenon of amusement ‘crazes’. It takes three selectively illustrative examples – roller skating, popular dance forms and moving pictures – through which to explore the specific debates and controversies these amusements generated and the social and cultural aspirations and concerns that drove them. This cultural-historical research is used to re-read Chaplin films, enabling topical allusions and cultural subtexts to come newly into focus. It also provides the context for a fresh interpretation of Chaplin’s sensational rise to fame in the mid-1910s as a cultural phenomenon symptomatic of a wider landscape of contemporary frenetic and popular crazes. The thesis challenges two principal assumptions that underlie prevailing critical approaches to Chaplin’s early career, unquestioningly grounded, as they are, in the privileged status conventionally ascribed to his later, and better-known feature films. These assumptions are: (1) that Chaplin’s early films are chiefly of interest for the ways in which they teleologically anticipate later developments in his filmmaking; and (2) that Chaplin’s distinctive qualities and cultural value are always to be understood in qualitative contrast to the dominant imperatives of contemporary slapstick and the larger mass-amusement culture to which slapstick belonged. The thesis questions the accuracy and efficacy of critical approaches based on these assumptions, and argues, instead, for a more symbiotic, mutually dynamising relationship between early Chaplin and his cultural moment and milieu