Estudos de Orquestração: Um novo campo de investigações? Reflexões a partir do Projeto Actor

The recent boom in publications in orchestration has led researchers and artists to rethink this centuries-old practice. At the heart of this movement are new studies that problematize the issue of timbre. In this paper, I present and discuss the multidisciplinary and inter-institutional “Actor project”, with the aim of examining some assumptions of what we can call “Orchestration Studies”.El reciente aumento de publicaciones en torno a la orquestación ha llevado a investigadores y artistas a repensar esta práctica centenaria. En el corazón de este movimiento se encuentran nuevos estudios que problematizan el tema del timbre. En este artículo presento y analizo el proyecto multidisciplinario e interinstitucional “Actor”, con el objetivo de examinar algunos supuestos de lo que podemos llamar “Estudios de Orquestación”.O recente incremento de publicações em torno da orquestração tem levado pesquisadores e artistas a repensar essa prática multissecular. No centro desse movimento estão novos estudos que problematizam a questão do timbre. Neste artigo apresento e discuto o projeto multidisciplinar e interinstitucional “Actor”, com o objetivo de examinar alguns pressupostos do que podemos chamar de “Estudos de Orquestração”

Sonata Form Revisited: Towards a Cognitive Theory of Formal Interference

Among the most ubiquitous of forms in Western art music, sonata form has long gripped the imagination of music scholars, leading to perhaps the most innovative sonata theory to date by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in 2006. However, while their theory is fruitful for interpreting the musical structure of sonata form, it can only tell us so much about the specific cognitive mechanisms that underlie a listener’s experience as a work unfolds in real time. As such, this thesis seeks to reexamine Hepokoski and Darcy’s sonata theory through the lens of music cognition. Namely, I draw upon schema theory, cognitive dissonance theory, and gestalt theory to develop a theory of formal interference. To do so, I build on Hepokoski and Darcy’s notions of ‘norms’ and ‘deformations’ by proposing a third category, ‘deformational norms,’ to describe instances in which a deformation is cognitively perceived by a listener as a norm, accounting for ambiguities in sonata-form music of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. Although seemingly paradoxical, I argue that there is a sort of double dialogism taking place where the given formal event is both a deformational token in the context of a late-eighteenth-century Type 3 sonata and a normative token in the context of an early-nineteenth-century Type 3 sonata. Once a listener has constructed respective schemas for norms and deformational norms, I theorize that sonatas featuring both types engender an oscillation between these two contradictory schemas that results in cognitive dissonance. In Chapter 1, I lay the groundwork for this theory of formal interference and place it in dialogue with the extant literature on musical form and music cognition. Chapter 2 takes a much deeper dive into the cognitive dimensions of formal interference and provides numerous musical examples to illustrate how a listener cognitively distinguishes between deformations and deformational norms. Finally, Chapter 3 concludes this project with an extended analysis of the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata D.664 in A Major.Bachelor of Musi

Cognitive and neural mechanisms of the perceptual organization

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Psicología, leída el 21/11/2019Las operaciones de agrupamiento perceptivo son esenciales tanto para procesar escenas visuales como para reconocer objetos. Estas operaciones se han denominado como las leyes del agrupamiento perceptivo, siendo postuladas a principios del siglo pasado por Wertheimer (1923). Estas leyes hacen referencia a la proximidad, la semejanza, el destino común, el cierre o la buena continuación entre elementos. Así pues, estos factores han sido propuestos como aquellos que guían a nuestra percepción a organizar los elementos que dan lugar a la escena visual. Posteriormente, la investigación en este campo ha continuado desarrollándose, resultando en la formulación de nuevas leyes, como la región común o la conexión (véase Brooks, 2015, para una revisión)...Perceptual grouping operations are essential to process visual scenes as well as to recognize objects. These operations have been called the laws of perceptual grouping, being postulated at the beginning of the last century by Wertheimer (1923). These laws refer to proximity, similarity, common fate, closure or good continuation between elements, which has been proposed as factors that guide our perception to organize the elements that give rise to our visual scene. In recent years, subsequent developments in this field of research have allowed the study and formulation of new perceptual grouping laws, such as common region or connectedness (see Brooks, 2015, for a review)...Fac. de PsicologíaTRUEunpu

A Gestalt inference model for auditory scene segregation.

Our current understanding of how the brain segregates auditory scenes into meaningful objects is in line with a Gestaltism framework. These Gestalt principles suggest a theory of how different attributes of the soundscape are extracted then bound together into separate groups that reflect different objects or streams present in the scene. These cues are thought to reflect the underlying statistical structure of natural sounds in a similar way that statistics of natural images are closely linked to the principles that guide figure-ground segregation and object segmentation in vision. In the present study, we leverage inference in stochastic neural networks to learn emergent grouping cues directly from natural soundscapes including speech, music and sounds in nature. The model learns a hierarchy of local and global spectro-temporal attributes reminiscent of simultaneous and sequential Gestalt cues that underlie the organization of auditory scenes. These mappings operate at multiple time scales to analyze an incoming complex scene and are then fused using a Hebbian network that binds together coherent features into perceptually-segregated auditory objects. The proposed architecture successfully emulates a wide range of well established auditory scene segregation phenomena and quantifies the complimentary role of segregation and binding cues in driving auditory scene segregation