The Expectancy Dynamics of Anti-Tonal Twelve-Tone Rows: A Commentary and Reanalysis of von Hippel & Huron (2020)

This commentary provides two methodological expansions of von Hippel and Huron's (2020) empirical report on (anti-)tonality in twelve-tone rows by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. First, motivated by the theoretical importance of equality between all pitch classes in twelve-tone music, a full replication of their findings of "anti-tonality" in rows by Schoenberg and Webern is offered using a revised tonal fit measure which is not biased towards row-initial and row-final sub-segments. Second, motivated by a long-standing debate in music cognition research between distributional and sequential/dynamic tonality concepts, information-theoretic measures of entropy and information content are estimated by a computational model and pitted against distributional tonal fit measures. Whereas Schoenberg's rows are characterized by low distributional tonal fit, but do not strongly capitalize on tonal expectancy dynamics, Berg's rows exhibit tonal traits in terms of low unexpectedness, and Webern's rows achieve anti-tonal traits by combining high uncertainty and low unexpectedness through prominent use of the semitone interval. This analysis offers a complementary–and arguably more nuanced–picture of dodecaphonic compositional practice

A Call for Hypothesis-Driven, Multi-Level Analysis in Research on Emotional Word Painting in Music: Commentary on Sun & Cuthbert (2018)

This commentary discusses Sun and Cuthbert's (2018) exploratory analysis of emotional word painting in a corpus of English-language popular and folk songs. The authors are complimented for their application of computational tools to an impressively large sample of a somewhat understudied musical genre, and for their detailed level of analysis mapping musical features to the semantic content of individual words. This work, however, suffers from a lack of a priori predictions which causes multiple comparison issues leading to a dramatic reduction in statistical power. The selection of musical features and analytical strategies also seems arbitrary at times due to the absence of motivating hypotheses. It is argued that the ethological literature on affective vocal communication in animals might offer an avenue for future hypothesis-driven research on this topic

Editors' Note

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Systematic musicology meets historical musicology: Quantitative indices of non-linear changes in durational variability of European art music

Background. Research has used the normalised Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) to examine relationships between musical rhythm and durational variability in composers’ native languages (Patel & Daniele, 2003a, 2003b; Huron & Ollen, 2003). Syllable-timed languages like Italian and French have low nPVI while stress-timed languages like German have higher nPVI. Recent analyses of historical developments have ascribed linearly increasing nPVI in Austro-German, but not Italian music to waning Italian and increasing German influence on Austro-German music after the Baroque (Daniele & Patel, 2013). This is, however, a post-hoc hypothesis (VanHandel, 2005), and since we cannot perform controlled experiments on historical data, replication with more sensitive methods and new repertoires is required. Turning to French music, we hypothesise both an initial increase and a subsequent decrease in nPVI, based on documented increasing German influence on French music after the Baroque and reported decreasing nPVI in French vocal music composed in 1840-1900 (VanHandel, 2005). This prediction necessitates polynomial modelling.Aims. We aim to replicate, refine and extend previous findings by including French composers and investigating the advantage of more sophisticated analytical strategies to detect non-linear historical developments.Methods. Mean nPVIs were computed for 34 French composers (midpoint years: 1700-1941); previous data (Daniele & Patel, 2013) were available for 21 Austro-German (1672-1929) and 15 Italian composers (1613-1928). Polynomial modelling was used to predict mean nPVI from midpoint years.Results. A 2nd-order polynomial outperformed a linear function for French composers, Adj. R2 = .284, F(2, 31) = 7.559, p < .002; adding another parameter did not improve this fit significantly, F(1, 30) = 2.012, p = .17. Linear analyses showed non-significantly decreasing nPVI specifically for composers born after 1820, r(21) = -.34, p = .11; a preceding increase in nPVI was revealed, r(9) =.73, p = .01, which was identical in terms of effect size to that previously found for Austro-German composers. Previous findings for Austro-German (linear increase, Adj. R2 = .489, F(1, 19) = 20.138, p < .001) and Italian composers (no change) were replicated.Conclusions. Using musical nPVI analysis, we provide quantitative support for music-historical accounts of an Italian-dominated Baroque (composer birth years 1600-1750), a Classical Era (1750- 1820) with Austro-German centres of gravity (e.g. Mannheim, Vienna), and a Romantic Era (1820- 1900) with greater national and stylistic independence

Editor’s Note

No abstract available