Fast Recognition using Bar-based Data Mapping for Gamelan Music Genre Classification

This research aims to develop a gamelan music genre classifier based on the musical mode system determined based on the dominant notes in a certain order. Only experts can discriminate the musical mode system of compositions. The Feed Forward Neural Networks method was used to classify gamelan compositions into three musical mode systems. The challenge is to recognize the musical mode system of compositions between the initial melody without having to analyze the entire melody using a small amount of data for the dataset. Instead of conducting a melodic extraction from audio signal data, the text-based skeletal melody data, which is a form of extracted melodic features, are used for the dataset. Unique corpuses are controlled based on the cardinality of the one-to-many relationship, and a data mapping technique based on the bars is used to increase the number of corpuses. The results show that the proposed method is suitable to solve the specified problems, where the accuracy in recognizing the class of unseen compositions between the initial melody achieves at 86.7%.

Imaginary Phrygians: Cognitive Consonance and the Assumed Phrygian Origin of Greek Ecstatic Cults and Music

While Greeks called the ecstatic musical mode ‘Phrygian’, there is no evidence of high-arousal musical performances in Phrygia, and the musical characteristics of this mode were distinctively Greek. The image of wide-ranging excited celebrations practised in Phrygia seems to have existed only in the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. This paper suggests that the uneasiness felt by some Greeks facing high-arousal cults was assuaged by attributing them foreign origin, which was often fictitious. By culturally dissociating themselves from the ecstatic practices, the Greeks resolved the cognitive inconsistency between their self-perception as citizens of the decorous civilized world and their surrender to the irresistible allure of high-arousal cults and music. These false attitudes allowed cognitive consonance and attained the status of indubitable truth. Upheld throughout antiquity, they persuaded many modern scholars, who still mistakenly consider the Phrygian musical mode as an Oriental borrowing.

Influence of Background Musical Emotions on Attention in Congenital Amusia

Congenital amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in amusia in conditions where emotion cues were not determined by musical mode or dissonance. Additionally, assumed links between musical abilities and visuo-spatial attention processes need further investigation in congenital amusics. Hence, we here test to what extent musical emotions can influence attentional performance. Fifteen congenital amusic adults and fifteen healthy controls matched for age and education were assessed in three attentional conditions: executive control (distractor inhibition), alerting, and orienting (spatial shift) while music expressing either joy, tenderness, sadness, or tension was presented. Visual target detection was in the normal range for both accuracy and response times in the amusic relative to the control participants. Moreover, in both groups, music exposure produced facilitating effects on selective attention that appeared to be driven by the arousal dimension of musical emotional content, with faster correct target detection during joyful compared to sad music. These findings corroborate the idea that pitch processing deficits related to congenital amusia do not impede other cognitive domains, particularly visual attention. Furthermore, our study uncovers an intact influence of music and its emotional content on the attentional abilities of amusic individuals. The results highlight the domain-selectivity of the pitch disorder in congenital amusia, which largely spares the development of visual attention and affective systems.

Archbishop Parker’s Psalter

Printed books of psalms in English verse were extremely popular in Elizabethan England. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, published his own metrical psalter in 1567. It includes eight deceptively simple musical settings by Tallis, one in each of the eight traditional modes. The third of these settings has become famous as the theme of a fantasia by Vaughan Williams. This chapter looks at Tallis’s eight “tunes” and the tradition of metrical psalms, as well as Elizabethan views on musical mode and expression. It also discusses the printer John Day, who published (sometimes with questionable accuracy) these and various other works by Tallis during the 1560s.

Classification of Mode Archetypes and Modern Problems of Music Education

Modern problems of musical education are connected with the search for new and more efficient approaches considering the challenges of our time. One of such challenges is unprecedented in history of culture music stream falling upon the modern human. The relict musical mode archetypes, on the basis of which the music of the peoples of the world has been formed for centuries, and which nourish the creativity of the professionals, could be considered as ecologically friendly “musical products”. In this article, following a number of the range of previous publications, the author offers a new classification of mode archetypes based on previously designed principle of asymmetry/symmetry supplemented with several novel approaches. This classification obviously cannot cover all existing mode archetypes of music of people of the world, but definitely addresses their considerable part. Several tables with index-based ordering the most common mode archetypes are considered to be especially significant result of this paper. The author hopes that this method of designation will contribute to the development of a methodology for the analysis of the behavior of mode archetypes in various melodic contexts. The “Solveig’s Song” by E. Grieg is regarded as one of the most famous melodies, in which the musical mode archetype of Norwegian folk music occupies an important place.

Ḥasho

THIS CHAPTER begins by explaining the emotion of huzn, sadness, as a religious aesthetic, then presents ḥasho within canonical liturgical practice. It also explains ḥasho as an emotion to which aesthetic value is inherent, and that understanding it as such sheds light on its conception as a musical mode. The aim is to inform a thinking in which music modality might better be understood through the aesthetic indexing of emotional value. Through a combined musical and ethnographic analysis of music theory on ḥasho and of its employment in the commemoration of the crucifixion, ḥasho emerges as more than a mode or a time; it is a social emotion that marks a spiritual space. Building on previous chapters, this final chapter demonstrates the intricate connections between music modality and modes of emotionality. In ḥasho, the two meet, intersecting through the aesthetic, in an experiential conception of modality that negotiates the complexities of feeling and judging, of sensing and sense making.