Single chords convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners.

Previous research on music and emotions has been able to pinpoint many structural features conveying emotions. Empirical research on vertical harmony’s emotional qualities, however, has been rare. The main studies in harmony and emotions usually concern the horizontal aspects of harmony, ignoring emotional qualities of chords as such. An empirical experiment was conducted where participants (N = 269) evaluated pre-chosen chords on a 9-item scale of given emotional dimensions. 14 different chords (major, minor, diminished, augmented triads and dominant, major and minor seventh chords with inversions) were played with two distinct timbres (piano and strings). The results suggest significant differences in emotion perception across chords. These were consistent with notions about musical conventions, while providing novel data on how seventh chords affect emotion perception. The inversions and timbre also contributed to the evaluations. Moreover, certain chords played on the strings scored moderately high on the dimension of ‘nostalgia/longing,’ which is usually held as a musical emotion rising only from extra-musical connotations and conditioning, not intrinsically from the structural features of the music. The role of background variables to the results was largely negligible, suggesting the capacity of vertical harmony to convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners

Beatings: A Web Application to Foster the Renaissance of the Art of Musical Temperaments

(Abstract to follow

Single chords convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners

Previous research on music and emotions has been able to pinpoint many structural features conveying emotions. Empirical research on vertical harmony’s emotional qualities, however, has been rare. The main studies in harmony and emotions usually concern the horizontal aspects of harmony, ignoring emotional qualities of chords as such. An empirical experiment was conducted where participants (N = 269) evaluated pre-chosen chords on a 9-item scale of given emotional dimensions. 14 different chords (major, minor, diminished, augmented triads and dominant, major and minor seventh chords with inversions) were played with two distinct timbres (piano and strings). The results suggest significant differences in emotion perception across chords. These were consistent with notions about musical conventions, while providing novel data on how seventh chords affect emotion perception. The inversions and timbre also contributed to the evaluations. Moreover, certain chords played on the strings scored moderately high on the dimension of ‘nostalgia/longing,’ which is usually held as a musical emotion rising only from extra-musical connotations and conditioning, not intrinsically from the structural features of the music. The role of background variables to the results was largely negligible, suggesting the capacity of vertical harmony to convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners

Spectral examination of Byzantine Chant archetype

In this article, a particular hypostasis of Byzantine chant was chosen to be spectrally examined, from the multitude of possible variants: a melodic structure accompanied by a simple bass drone called Ison, placed bellow the melody and sung by male choir. This model is referred to in this paper as Byzantine chant archetype and is further approached from the spectral listening perspective. Psychoacoustic analysis criteria were used, such as: holistic/analytic listening, sound fusion/fissioning, sensory consonance/dissonance, harmonic entropy, etc. The research is an attempt to demonstrate that Byzantine chant with Ison presents an ideal situation for sound fusion perception and holistic listening. The persistence of the fundamental pitch (Ison) over the melodic structure acts in favor of partials fusion of the two layers into one perceptual entity. Starting with Western medieval organum, polyphonic practice broke with the monolithic perceptual entity provided by the Ison by simply moving the bass line and later filling it in with chords resulting from the multipart structure. The perception mode shifted from sound fusion to sound fissioning. The way we hear the polyphonic texture is of an analytic nature (analytic listening mode). It appears that Western music culture developed a more analytic model of hearing while the Eastern one relied more on a holistic listening type

The sensation of groove is affected by the interaction of rhythmic and harmonic complexity

<div><p>The pleasurable desire to move to music, also known as groove, is modulated by rhythmic complexity. How the sensation of groove is influenced by other musical features, such as the harmonic complexity of individual chords, is less clear. To address this, we asked people with a range of musical experience to rate stimuli that varied in both rhythmic and harmonic complexity. Rhythm showed an inverted U-shaped relationship with ratings of pleasure and wanting to move, whereas medium and low complexity chords were rated similarly. Pleasure mediated the effect of harmony on wanting to move and high complexity chords attenuated the effect of rhythm on pleasure. We suggest that while rhythmic complexity is the primary driver, harmony, by altering emotional valence, modulates the attentional and temporal prediction processes that underlie rhythm perception. Investigation of the effects of musical training with both regression and group comparison showed that training increased the inverted U effect for harmony and rhythm, respectively. Taken together, this work provides important new information about how the prediction and entrainment processes involved in rhythm perception interact with musical pleasure.</p></div

A Computational Model of the Cognition of Tonality

Tonality is the organization of pitches, both simultaneously and across time, so that certain pitches and chords are heard as attracted, in varying degrees, to other pitches and chords. Most art music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and popular music to the present day, is heavily steeped in a musical language that makes use of tonality to define a ‘central’ most attractive pitch or chord called the tonic. It is widely thought that the feelings of expectancy and resolution induced by movements towards and away from the tonic allow composers to imbue tonal music with meaning and emotion. In this dissertation, I identify and model some of the innate processes by which feelings of tension, resolution, stability, and so forth, are induced by successions of pitches and chords, irrespective of their harmonic consonance. By innate, I mean processes that do not require the learning of a musical corpus—such processes are important because they provide explanations for why tonal music, and our cognition of it, take the specific forms they do. To do this, I introduce a novel family of mathematical methods—metrics applied to expectation tensors—for calculating the similarity of pitch collections. Importantly, such tensors can represent not just the notated pitches of tones, but also their spectral pitches (their harmonics). I then demonstrate how these techniques can be used to model participants’ ratings of the fits of tones in microtonal melodies, and the fits of all twelve chromatic pitches to an established key centre (Krumhansl’s probe tone data). The techniques can also be generalized to predict the tonics of any arbitrarily chosen scale—even scales with unfamiliar tunings. In summary, I demonstrate that psychoacoustic processes, which are innate and universal, play an important role in our cognition of tonality

PnP Maxtools: Autonomous Parameter Control in MaxMSP Utilizing MIR Algorithms

This research presents a new approach to computer automation through the implementation of novel real-time music information retrieval algorithms developed for this project. It documents the development of the PnP.Maxtools package, a set of open source objects designed within the popular programming environment MaxMSP. The package is a set of pre/post processing filters, objective and subjective timbral descriptors, audio effects, and other objects that are designed to be used together to compose music or improvise without the use of external controllers or hardware. The PnP.Maxtools package objects are designed to be used quickly and easily using a `plug and play\u27 style with as few initial arguments needed as possible. The PnP.Maxtools package is designed to take incoming audio from a microphone, analyze it, and use the analysis to control an audio effect on the incoming signal in real-time. In this way, the audio content has a real musical and analogous relationship with the resulting musical transformations while the control parameters become more multifaceted and better able to serve the needs of artists. The term Reflexive Automation is presented that describes this unsupervised relationship between the content of the sound being analyzed and the analogous and automatic control over a specific musical parameter. A set of compositions are also presented that demonstrate ideal usage of the object categories for creating reflexive systems and achieving fully autonomous control over musical parameters

Harmonic duality : from interval ratios and pitch distance to spectra and sensory dissonance

Dissonance curves are the starting point for an investigation into a psychoacoustically informed harmony. Its main hypothesis is that harmony consists of two independent but intertwined aspects operating simultaneously, namely proportionality and linear pitch distance. The former aspect is related to intervallic characters, the latter to ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘bright’ and ‘dark’, therefore to timbre. This research derives from the development of tools for algorithmic composition which extract pitch materials from sound signals, analyzing them according to their timbral and harmonic properties, putting them into motion through diverse rhythmic and textural procedures. The tools and the reflections derived from their use offer fertile ideas for the generation of instrumental scores, electroacoustic soundscapes and interactive live-electronic systems.LEI Universiteit LeidenResearch in and through artistic practic