Asymmetry in scales enhances learning of new musical structures

Despite the remarkable variability music displays across cultures, certain recurrent musical features motivate the hypothesis that fundamental cognitive principles constrain the way music is produced. One such feature concerns the structure of musical scales. The vast majority of musical cultures use scales that are not uniformly symmetric—that is, scales that contain notes spread unevenly across the octave. Here we present evidence that the structure of musical scales has a substantial impact on how listeners learn new musical systems. Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that nonuniformity facilitates the processing of melodies. Novel melodic stimuli were composed based on artificial grammars using scales with different levels of symmetry. Experiment 1 tested the acquisition of tonal hierarchies and melodic regularities on three different 12-tone equal-tempered scales using a finite-state grammar. Experiments 2 and 3 used more flexible Markov-chain grammars and were designed to generalize the effect to 14-tone and 16-tone equal-tempered scales. The results showed that performance was significantly enhanced by scale structures that specified the tonal space by providing unique intervallic relations between notes. These results suggest that the learning of novel musical systems is modulated by the symmetry of scales, which in turn may explain the prevalence of nonuniform scales across musical cultures.

Lexical and Prosodic Pitch Modifications in Cantonese Infant-directed Speech

The functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) remain a question: do they specifically serve to facilitate language learning via enhanced phonemic contrasts (the hyperarticulation hypothesis) or primarily to improve communication via prosodic exaggeration (the prosodic hypothesis)? The study of lexical tones provides a unique opportunity to shed light on this, as lexical tones are phonemically contrastive, yet their primary cue, pitch, is also a prosodic cue. This study investigated Cantonese IDS and found increased intra-talker variation of lexical tones, which more likely posed a challenge to rather than facilitated phonetic learning. Although tonal space was expanded which could facilitate phonetic learning, its expansion was a function of overall intonational modifications. Similar findings were observed in speech to pets who should not benefit from larger phonemic distinction. We conclude that lexical-tone adjustments in IDS mainly serve to broadly enhance communication rather than specifically increase phonemic contrast for learners.

When Octatonic and Hexatonic Collide

Following the rise of Deleuze in chapter 6, the chapter passes through famous remarks by Deleuze concerning cybernetics and acceleration, focusing on the futuristic projects of Alexander Skryabin, who wanted to speed up time through his music and, in particular, through his harmony. While other works set the hexatonic and the octatonic in a diatonic flux, the first as an energy-discharging mechanism, the second as a storage capacity, Skryabin’s Sonata No. 10, Op. 70, recently explored by Vasilis Kallis (2015), is unique in juxtaposing hexatonic composition with the octatonically rotating model as clearly segregated areas. The chapter asks: To what extent can the flow between these cycles carry our tonal desire? To what extent does our diatonic engagement fluctuate between distinct sections? How do these different types of tonal “space” impact on our perception of “time”? How can drive analysis meaningfully integrate with Funktionstheorie?

Det tonale rum

The article adresses the question of ‘what is music?’ It is argued that a conceptualization of tonal space must take its starting point in the intersection of space and time: music is suspended in time, but time and therefore music can not be thought without space. In 20th century music a linear time is mainly found, in which the compositions are developed continuously from start to finish. But with composers such as Stravinsky, Varese, and Satie, time is dissociated and a non-linear time is crystallized in the compositions. In this way, a continuous development is no longer central to their compositions, but discontinuities, planes, fragments, and chord breakings, where time is slowed down or suddenly released. However, it is argued that this does not mean that the music becomes space or may be understood as space, but rather that the connection between the different fragments of a composition is not determined until it interacts with the listener’s concept of time in a space of mental experience. The space of music thus becomes a mental-tonal space.

Variation in the tonal space of Yangliu Lalo, an endangered language of Yunnan, China

Endangered tone languages are not often studied within quantitative variationist approaches, but such approaches can provide valuable insights for language description and documentation in the Tibeto-Burman area. This study examines tone variation within Yangliu Lalo (Central Ngwi), a minority language community in China that is currently shifting to Southwestern Mandarin. Yangliu Lalo’s Tone 4, the rising-falling High tone, is lowering and flattening among young people, especially females, who also tend to use Lalo less frequently. Tonal range in elicited speech is shown to be decreasing as use of Lalo decreases. Concurrently, the standard deviation of the pitch of individual tones also decreases, while at the same time speakers with a narrow tonal range also show greater articulatory precision for each tone. Tonal range and standard deviation of pitch are both parameters of tonal space, the arrangement of, and relationship between, tones within the tonal system. The results from our apparent-time study suggest that tonal space provides a new avenue of sociolinguistic inquiry for tone languages.

Neo-Riemannian Theory at the Movies

This chapter is dedicated to explaining the methodology of neo-Riemannian theory (NRT) and analysis. The historical background of NRT is introduced, and an inventory of transformations, including the well-known neo-Riemannian operators (L, P, and R) is laid out in a user-friendly manner. Important issues for NRT, including harmonic combinatoriality, parsimony, tonal agnosticism, and spatiality, are all introduced and connected to the analysis of film music. Special attention is given to the associative content of triadic relationships, with two progressions of particular interest to film composers—T6 and S—explored in depth. A pair of step-by-step model analyses from Waltz with Bashir and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm are presented as straightforward and difficult cases for neo-Riemannian techniques, respectively. The chapter concludes with the introduction of tonal space visualizations, such as the Tonnetz and transformation networks, and demonstrations through analysis of themes from The Da Vinci Code and Scott of the Antarctic.

The French Path

This article examines the contributions of pre-Rameauvian French writers in theorizing the early major-minor system, starting with an important document of early major-minor theory: theMéthode claire, certaine et facile pour apprendre à chanter la musique(1683, 6/1707) by the singing master and viol player Jean Rousseau (1644–1699). Rousseau’sMéthode clairewas the first continental treatise to entirely replace eight- and twelve-tonality systems with their major-minor successor. Not only do its pedagogical precepts for solmization open a fascinating window onto early major-minor theory, but the theoretical reorientation it proposes reverberated through subsequent French treatises: in the innovative ways in which French writers strove to theorize growing tonal resources, in their privileging of certain scale types, in the orderings they imposed on the major-minor tonalities, and in their attempts to systematize key signatures. The article thus illuminates the pioneering efforts of a generation of theorists that includes Denis Delair, François Campion, and Monsieur de Saint-Lambert to adapt received notions of tonal space to a new, major-minor context.

To become one with the instrument: The unfolding of a musical topography

The present article advances the notion of musical topography to describe the engagement between a practitioner and the musical instrument, emphasizing its developmental character. From the point of view of semiotic anthropology, it is suggested that the development of such a practical engagement is guided by expressivity, and that the instrument appears not only as an extension of the body, but participates in the generation of a unitary field, where bodily motion, the instrument and the tonal space are intertwined. The development of lived musical practice draws its force from a situated tradition that consists of normative, structural and stylistic elements, and of a constellation of genres and values shaped and reshaped by generations of practitioners. Finally, it is emphasized that the notion of musical topography brings back to musical praxis its long neglected imaginative dimension.