The effects of rhythmic structure on tapping accuracy

Prior investigations of simple rhythms in familiar time signatures have shown the importance of several mechanisms; notably, those related to metricization and grouping. But there has been limited study of complex rhythms, including those in unfamiliar time signatures, such as are found outside mainstream Western music. Here, we investigate how the structures of 91 rhythms with nonisochronous onsets (mostly complex, several in unfamiliar time signatures) influence the accuracy, velocity, and timing of taps made by participants attempting to synchronize with these onsets. The onsets were piano-tone cues sounded at a well-formed subset of isochronous cymbal pulses; the latter occurring every 234 ms. We modelled tapping at both the rhythm level and the pulse level; the latter provides insight into how rhythmic structure makes some cues easier to tap and why incorrect (uncued) taps may occur. In our models, we use a wide variety of quantifications of rhythmic features, several of which are novel and many of which are indicative of underlying mechanisms, strategies, or heuristics. The results show that, for these tricky rhythms, taps are disrupted by unfamiliar period lengths and are guided by crude encodings of each rhythm: the density of rhythmic cues, their circular mean and variance, and recognizing common small patterns and the approximate positions of groups of cues. These lossy encodings are often counterproductive for discriminating between cued and uncued pulses and are quite different to mechanisms—such as metricization and emphasizing group boundaries—thought to guide tapping behaviours in learned and familiar rhythms

Perceived emotions of harmonic cadences

Harmonic cadences are chord progressions that play an important structural role in Western classical music – they demarcate musical phrases and contribute to the tonality. This study examines participants’ ratings of the perceived arousal and valence of a variety of harmonic cadences. Manipulations included the type of cadence (authentic, plagal, half, and deceptive), its mode (major or minor), its average pitch height (the transposition of the cadence), the presence of a single tetrad (a dissonant four-tone chord), and the mode (major or minor) of the cadence’s final chord. With the exception of average pitch height, the manipulations had only small effects on arousal. However, the perceived valence of major cadences was substantially higher than for minor cadences, and average pitch had a medium-sized positive effect. Plagal cadences, the inclusion of a tetrad, and ending on a minor chord all had weak negative effects for valence. The present findings are discussed in light of contemporary music theory and music psychology, as knowledge of how specific acoustic components and musical structures impact emotion perception in music is important for performance practice, and music-based therapies

Red-backed Fairy-wren

"Call begins with squeaks so high and weak that they would only be heard when very close, followed by a trill beginning with high squeaky notes, usually switching to lower, louder rattling sounds. Morcombe and Stewart." This piece is part of a project initiated by artist Alison Clouston and musician Boyd. It included the commissioning of musical bird 'calls' from 153 musicians: one for each of the birds recorded in the Bimblebox reserve in the period 2003-2013. The reserve is now under the threat of erasure by coal mining. Each contributor essayed an image of a specific bird, without necessarily using any recordings of the bird, rather primarily relying on ornithological text descriptions of it. The musical bird calls formed part of a touring exhibition/installation. The piece is also published online: http://burragorang.org/coalface2014/153-Musicians5.php (number 80 under "Treecreepers"). The piece was also part of an acousmatic performance accompanied by Sandy Evans (saxophone) as part of an austraLYSIS concert at the Sydney Conservatorium on 9th November 2014 (http://www.australysis.com/Resources/ConaLYSpgnotes2014HSv4.pdf)

XronoMorph : investigating paths through rhythmic space

XronoMorph is a musical loop generator that opens up two huge spaces of unusual and interesting polyphonic rhythms: perfectly balanced rhythms and well-formed rhythms. These are rhythms that would often be hard to create in alternative software applications or with traditional musical notation. In this chapter, I explain the algorithmic principles used to generate the loops and how these principles have been parameterized and visualized to facilitate the exploration of paths within these two rhythmic spaces

Linking sonic aesthetics with mathematical theories

Mathematics describes relationships between objects: collections of rules that determine how one or more object may be transformed into one or more other object, and the rich patterns that follow from these relationships. By a judicious mapping from mathematical structures to musical features, it becomes possible to imbue the latter with similarly rich structure and patterning – to link sonic aesthetics with mathematical theories. In the following section, I explore the application of mathematical techniques to mould the raw materials of music into interesting latent (as yet unrealized) structures. The focus will be on musical scales and metres, both periodic and nonperiodic. In the section after that, I explore some mathematically informed procedures that can produce musical realizations of these latent structures. These include musical canons, methods for generating self-similar and fractal-like forms, and the use of the Fourier transform to dynamically change pitch, timbre, and rhythm. At the risk of perpetuating the hegemonic ‘three-dimensional lattice’ of discrete pitches, times, and timbres (Wishart 1983), most of the examples use discrete events; despite that, many of the techniques described here are also applicable to smooth and dynamic changes of musical variable. In the third section, prior to the conclusion, I ground some of the abstractions by discussing a real-world musical realization

Resonances

In this performance, Jo Truman and Andy Milne collaborate on a structured improvisatory work exploring acoustic and electroacoustic sonic spaces. Jo Truman works with her voice within the acoustic setting of the grand piano and pianistically on the keyboard, as a musical conversation develops with Andy Milne working with electroacoustics. A component of the performance are Jo's drawings and paintings presented in slide format during the performance. The performance can be accessed via: https://youtu.be/mqvWf0Rph-

Evaluation of the learnability and playability of pitch layouts in new musical instruments

Certain properties of isomorphic layouts are proposed to offer benefits to learning and performances on a new musical instrument. However, there is little empirical investigation of the effects of these properties. This paper details an experiment that examines the effect of pitch adjacency and shear on the performances of simple melodies by 24 musically-trained participants after a short training period. In the adjacent layouts, pitches a major second apart are adjacent. In the unsheared layouts, major seconds are horizontally aligned but the pitch axis is slanted; in the sheared layouts, the pitch axis is vertical but major seconds are slanted. Qualitative user evaluations of each layout are collected post-experiment. Preliminary results are outlined in this paper, focusing on the themes of learnability and playability. Users show strong preferences towards layouts with adjacent major seconds, focusing on the potential for learning new pitch patterns. Users confirm advantages of both unsheared and sheared layouts, one in terms of similarity to traditional instrument settings, and the other to ergonomic benefits. A model of participants’ performance accuracy shows that sheared layouts are learned significantly faster. Results from this study will inform new music instrument/interface design in terms of features that increase user accessibility

Exploring the effects of pitch layout on learning a new musical instrument

Although isomorphic pitch layouts are proposed to afford various advantages for musicians playing new musical instruments, this paper details the first substantive set of empirical tests on how two fundamental aspects of isomorphic pitch layouts affect motor learning: shear, which makes the pitch axis vertical, and the adjacency (or nonadjacency) of pitches a major second apart. After receiving audio-visual training tasks for a scale and arpeggios, performance accuracies of 24 experienced musicians were assessed in immediate retention tasks (same as the training tasks, but without the audio-visual guidance) and in a transfer task (performance of a previously untrained nursery rhyme). Each participant performed the same tasks with three different pitch layouts and, in total, four different layouts were tested. Results show that, so long as the performance ceiling has not already been reached (due to ease of the task or repeated practice), adjacency strongly improves performance accuracy in the training and retention tasks. They also show that shearing the layout, to make the pitch axis vertical, worsens performance accuracy for the training tasks but, crucially, it strongly improves performance accuracy in the transfer task when the participant needs to perform a new, but related, task. These results can inform the design of pitch layouts in new musical instrument

Pitch, timbre, and rhythm

Pitch, timbre, and rhythm are fundamental building blocks of music and, in almost all cultures, music is created through the deliberate manipulation of one or more of these elements. Importantly, pitch, timbre, and rhythm are not objective features of the acoustic signal but subjective experiences within the listener’s mind. In this chapter, we will show how the psychological experiences of pitch, timbre, and rhythm are linked to physical characteristics of sound. As we shall see, these links are surprisingly complex

The need for composite models of music perception : consonance in tuning systems (familiar or unfamiliar) cannot be explained by a single predictor

In the article “Consonance preferences within an unconventional tuning system,” Friedman and colleagues (2021) examine consonance ratings of a large range of dyads and triads from the Bohlen-Pierce chromatic just (BPCJ) scale. The study is designed as a replication of a recent paper by Bowling, Purves, and Gill (2018), which proposes that perception of consonance in dyads, triads, and tetrads can be predicted by their harmonic similarity to human vocalisations. In this commentary, we would like to correct some interpretations regarding Friedman et al.’s (2021) discussion of our paper (Smit, Milne, Dean, & Weidemann, 2019), as well as express some concerns regarding the statistical methods used. We also propose a stronger emphasis on the use of, as named by Friedman et al., composite models as a range of recent evidence strongly suggests that no single acoustic measure can fully predict the complex experience of consonance