Sensitivity to musical emotion is influenced by tonal structure in congenital amusia

Emotional communication in music depends on multiple attributes including psychoacoustic features and tonal system information, the latter of which is unique to music. The present study investigated whether congenital amusia, a lifelong disorder of musical processing, impacts sensitivity to musical emotion elicited by timbre and tonal system information. Twenty-six amusics and 26 matched controls made tension judgments on Western (familiar) and Indian (unfamiliar) melodies played on piano and sitar. Like controls, amusics used timbre cues to judge musical tension in Western and Indian melodies. While controls assigned significantly lower tension ratings to Western melodies compared to Indian melodies, thus showing a tonal familiarity effect on tension ratings, amusics provided comparable tension ratings for Western and Indian melodies on both timbres. Furthermore, amusics rated Western melodies as more tense compared to controls, as they relied less on tonality cues than controls in rating tension for Western melodies. The implications of these findings in terms of emotional responses to music are discussed

Criação de música baseada na proporção áurea: abordagem teórica e prática à escala de 34 tons de igual temperamento

The sensory phenomena of music perception are considered to be highly non-linear. The golden ratio plays a key role in nonlinear dynamic systems and has been recognized as an aesthetic element in many places over time. This research develops the 34-note equal tempered scale (34-TET). A microtonal model based on the golden ratio, containing the harmonic musical intervals, and permitting a consistent approach that embraces the different temperaments throughout history, as well as other music cultures. These theoretical properties are practically exposed in two portfolios, including compositional samples of art music with European roots (from the Renaissance to the twentieth century), popular music (bossa nova, tango, swing), maqãm, and Indian music. The second portfolio, created within the scope of this thesis, contains the artistic work “The Asian Garden” combining the equal tempered scales of 34 and 12 notes (12-TET), and provides additional cultural references from China and Japan. The 34-TET scale offers an overall approach to just intonation scale more than twice as good as that of 12-TET, with all consonant intervals well below the differential threshold. If a maximum impurity value was accepted, not appreciably different from that agreed upon when the equal-tempered 12- tone scale was standardized (17.65 cents vs. 15.67 cents), then the 34-TET scale would become, additionally, a useful tool for approaching different cultures.Os fenómenos sensoriais de perceção musical são considerados substancialmente não lineares. A proporção áurea desempenha um papel fundamental em sistemas dinâmicos não lineares e tem sido reconhecida como um elemento estético em vários contextos ao longo do tempo. Esta investigação desenvolve a escala de 34 notas de temperamento igual (34- TET). Trata-se de um modelo microtonal baseado na proporção áurea, contendo os intervalos harmónicos musicais, e permitindo uma abordagem consistente que abrange os distintos temperamentos ao longo da história, assim como outras culturas musicais. Estas propriedades teóricas estão praticamente expostas em dois portefólios, incluindo exemplos de composição erudita com raízes europeias (desde o Renascimento ao século XX), música popular (bossa nova, tango, swing), maqãm e música indiana. O segundo portefólio contém o trabalho artístico “The Asian Garden,” criado no âmbito desta tese, que combina escalas de temperamento igual de 34 e de 12 notas (12-TET), e fornece referências culturais adicionais da China e Japão. A escala 34-TET oferece uma abordagem global à escala de entonação justa que é mais de duas vezes melhor do que a da escala 12-TET, com todos os intervalos consonantes consideravelmente abaixo do limiar diferencial. Se fosse aceite um valor máximo de impureza não muito diferente do valor acordado quando a escala de 12 tons igualmente temperados foi padronizada (17,65 cents em vez de 15,67 cents), a escala 34-TET tornar-se-ia, adicionalmente, uma ferramenta útil para a aproximação de culturas diferentes.Programa Doutoral em Músic

Music evoked emotions are different-more often aesthetic than utilitarian

We disagree with Juslin & Västfjäll's (J&V's) thesis that music-evoked emotions are indistinguishable from other emotions in both their nature and underlying mechanisms and that music just induces some emotions more frequently than others. Empirical evidence suggests that frequency differences reflect the specific nature of music-evoked emotions: aesthetic and reactive rather than utilitarian and proactive. Additional mechanisms and determinants are suggested as predictors of emotions triggered by musi

Emotion Recognition from Speech Signals and Perception of Music

This thesis deals with emotion recognition from speech signals. The feature extraction step shall be improved by looking at the perception of music. In music theory, different pitch intervals (consonant, dissonant) and chords are believed to invoke different feelings in listeners. The question is whether there is a similar mechanism between perception of music and perception of emotional speech. Our research will follow three stages. First, the relationship between speech and music at segmental and supra-segmental levels will be analyzed. Secondly, the encoding of emotions through music shall be investigated. In the third stage, a description of the most common features used for emotion recognition from speech will be provided. We will additionally derive new high-level musical features, which will lead us to an improvement of the recognition rate for the basic spoken emotions

The cognition of harmonic tonality in microtonal scales

Music is ubiquitous across all human cultures. It is hypothesised that the development of music and of language in human evolution is linked (Wallin et al., 2001), and music, in addition to language, is known to be communicative. One way music – particularly music employing the widely used system of tonality – communicates is through tension and resolution, or stability and instability, where instability is the need to resolve and stability its destination. Most tonal-harmonic music today exists in a Western tuning system and experimental research into the perception of harmonic tonality is conducted almost entirely in 12-TET. This project is the first empirical study of the cognition of harmonic tonality in microtonal scales. Through the employment of novel scales in an unfamiliar tuning system, effects of familiarity are weakened, allowing a more focussed investigation of other effects. Particularly, bottom-up models for the cognition of harmonic tonality are allowed a more careful investigation, providing valuable insight into the cognition of music otherwise beyond reach. This research also provides valuable information for hopeful composers of novel music in shaping their music to elicit a desired response, thus enabling expansion of the palette of possible musical expression. This project utilizes a common experimental paradigm for research into the cognition of tonality: participants are first played context-setting stimuli, after which a probe tone or chord is sounded and they are asked to rate how well the probe tone “fits” the context, or how stable it is given the context. A psychoacoustic feature – spectral pitch class similarity – is used to predict the perceived stability of pitch classes and triads of not only familiar scales (Experiment 1), but unfamiliar (Experiment 2), and novel scales (Experiments 3-5), where models of long-term statistical learning are available only for familiar scales. Through a series of 5 experiments the perceived stability of tones and triads in novel, microtonal scales is predicted, demonstrating the usefulness of our psychoacoustic model

Compositional trajectories [Medieval music]

Here, to illuminate a small set of issues in respect to style and compositional practice, we will approach the medieval composer via specific repertory, namely, some sacred chants and some two-voice polyphony. A persistent conviction of many relative newcomers to medieval music is that all chant sounds the same - melodically vague, un differentiable, hypnotic and slightly \u27New Age\u27 - and that it is governed by a universal, monolithic, standard medieval \u27theory of the modes\u27. Neither of these points is true, but one needs to gain a broad familiarity with some very large bodies of melodies, and the histories of their genres, to be able to come to grips with chant\u27s diversity in all its dimensions, and it is equally important to learn some individual melodies very well. The plainchant of the medieval Western church was, in fact, highly varied in musical language. There were different dialects, including Roman, Gallican, Mozarabic, Beneventan and Ambrosian, before and after the hegemonic rise of Gregorian chant circa 800. There are strong generic or functional fault lines within the Gregorian core itself (distinguishing prayer and reading tones, antiphonal psalmody, responsorial psalmody), and variant idioms emerged within the later Gregorian universe (e.g. the German chant tradition). On top of that, many different stylistic strands developed in all the newly composed, later medieval plainsong from the ninth century forward - melodies which over time far outdistanced the Gregorian core in sheer numbers

Compositional trajectories [Medieval music]

Here, to illuminate a small set of issues in respect to style and compositional practice, we will approach the medieval composer via specific repertory, namely, some sacred chants and some two-voice polyphony. A persistent conviction of many relative newcomers to medieval music is that all chant sounds the same - melodically vague, un differentiable, hypnotic and slightly \u27New Age\u27 - and that it is governed by a universal, monolithic, standard medieval \u27theory of the modes\u27. Neither of these points is true, but one needs to gain a broad familiarity with some very large bodies of melodies, and the histories of their genres, to be able to come to grips with chant\u27s diversity in all its dimensions, and it is equally important to learn some individual melodies very well. The plainchant of the medieval Western church was, in fact, highly varied in musical language. There were different dialects, including Roman, Gallican, Mozarabic, Beneventan and Ambrosian, before and after the hegemonic rise of Gregorian chant circa 800. There are strong generic or functional fault lines within the Gregorian core itself (distinguishing prayer and reading tones, antiphonal psalmody, responsorial psalmody), and variant idioms emerged within the later Gregorian universe (e.g. the German chant tradition). On top of that, many different stylistic strands developed in all the newly composed, later medieval plainsong from the ninth century forward - melodies which over time far outdistanced the Gregorian core in sheer numbers

Cross-modal and synaesthetic perception in music and vision

This thesis is concerned with the cross-modal and synaesthetic perception of musical and visual stimuli. Each of these types of perception has been researched separately, and a hypothesis is presented here that accounts for both cross-modal matching and the development of synaesthesia. This hypothesis claims that sensory information can be evaluated in another modality by using a scale of comparison in that modality. The first set of experiments examines normal subjects performing cross-modal matching with coloured circles and auditory stimuli that vary in complexity. It is shown that subjects use a variety of scales of comparison from both visual and auditory modalities to form matches. As the stimuli increase in complexity, the individual variation in cross-modal matching also increases. The second set of experiments examines matching performance using higher order stimuli, by having subjects evaluate fragments of melodies and complete melodies on affective and descriptive adjective scales. Melodies were also matched with landscape scenes to examine if subjects could form matches between two highly complex sets of stimuli. The final experiments examine synaesthetic associations with colour, evoked from music, letters, numbers, and other categorical information. Common features of synaesthesia from a population of synaesthetes are identified, and experiments performed to test the interference of the synaesthetic associations. Additional experiments are presented that explore the superior short-term memory of one synaesthete, and the role of his associations as a mnemonic device