The arts and their functions

In asking the question ‘What is art?’, four major conceptions of a work of art can be considered: an object; an indicator of beauty; an indicator of craftsmanship or creativity; and a process of performance. This chapter contends that the two principal functions of the arts are re-creation and interpersonal coordination. Re-creation reflects the inherently narrative and symbolic function of the arts, as conveyed through storytelling, acting, narrative dance, and figurative forms of visual art. Interpersonal coordination—as seen in artforms such as dance and music—occurs in the three domains of time, physical space (dance), and tonal pitch space (music). A unified view of the arts reveals not only the cognitive similarities among artforms, but the widespread ability of artforms to combine with one another to form syntheses, as seen in songs with words and dances choreographed to music. A comparative analysis of the arts provides greater insight into each artform than is possible by looking at artforms in isolation.

Activation in the right inferior parietal lobule reflects the representation of musical structure beyond simple pitch discrimination

Pitch discrimination tasks typically engage the superior temporal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. It is currently unclear whether these regions are equally involved in the processing of incongruous notes in melodies, which requires the representation of musical structure (tonality) in addition to pitch discrimination. To this aim, 14 participants completed two tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, one in which they had to identify a pitch change in a series of non-melodic repeating tones and a second in which they had to identify an incongruous note in a tonal melody. In both tasks, the deviants activated the right superior temporal gyrus. A contrast between deviants in the melodic task and deviants in the non-melodic task (melodic > non-melodic) revealed additional activity in the right inferior parietal lobule. Activation in the inferior parietal lobule likely represents processes related to the maintenance of tonal pitch structure in working memory during pitch discrimination.

A chord distance metric based on the Tonal Pitch Space and a key-finding method for chord annotation sequences

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a growing field of research concerned about recovering and generating useful information about music in general. One classic problem of MIR is key-finding, which could be described as the activity of finding the most stable tone and mode of a determined musical piece or a fragment of it. This problem, however, is usually modeled for audio as an input, sometimes MIDI, but little attention seems to be given to approaches considering musical notations and musictheory. This paper will present a method of key-finding that has chord annotations as its only input. A new metric is proposed for calculating distances between tonal pitch spaces and chords, which will be later used to create a key-finding method for chord annotations sequences. We achieve a success rate from 77.85% up to 88.75% for the whole database, depending on whether or not and how some parameters of approximation are configured. We argue that musical-theoretical approaches independent of audio could still bring progress to the MIR area and definitely could be used as complementary techniques.

‘SUBTLE SHIFTS’: HOWARD SKEMPTON'S TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MODERNISM

ABSTRACTHoward Skempton's distinctive presence on the British musical scene, and his prolific compositional output since the mid-1960s, have presented commentators with certain challenges as they contemplate which labels to apply, and, for music analysts, which techniques to deploy. Skempton's own comments, in various interviews and essays down the years, remain the ideal starting point, suggest a range of contexts, some of which underpin this study. With reference to a few of his smaller vocal and keyboard compositions, the quality of constantly shifting rather than strictly fixed elements is explored. When pitch materials conform more or less exactly to tonal or modal tradition, rhythm is particularly important as a determinant of subtle shifting. But it is often the case that pitches identities themselves shift between functions best defined as tonal scale degrees at one extreme and post-tonal pitch classes at the other. The result is a very personal and unaggressive kind of modernism.

Outline of Music Semantics

We provide the outline of a semantics for music. We take music cognition to be continuous with normal auditory cognition, and thus to deliver inferences about “virtual sources” of the music. As a result, sound parameters that trigger inferences about sound sources in normal auditory cognition produce related ones in music. But music also triggers inferences on the basis of the movement of virtual sources in tonal pitch space, which has points of stability, points of instability, and relations of attraction among them. We sketch a framework that aggregates inferences from normal auditory cognition and tonal inferences, by way of a theory of musical truth: a source undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e. This framework can help revisit aspects of musical syntax: Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) grouping structure can be seen to reflect the mereology (“partology”) of events that are abstractly represented in the music. Finally, we argue that this “refentialist” approach to music semantics still has the potential to provide an account of diverse emotional effects in music.

The musical space: A sketch for a broader musicological-semiotical discussion

The subject of this paper is an examination of the analytical competences of musical semiotics and prolongation analysis applied to the organisation of the musical space in the music of the 20th century. By means of presenting one of the possible ways of organizing the musical space - the organisation of pitches and registers - one can derive the synthesis of Eero Tarasti's semiotics of the musical space and certain segments of prolongation analysis. Starting from the assumption that the organisation of the musical space is the key determinant of the music of the 20th century (Masnikosa, 2010: 242), I will argue that the musical space has its 'stronghold' in the works of European high modernism. By confronting Tarasti's model of the musical space with some segments of prolongation analysis (more precisely, with the theory of harmony by Olli Vâisâlâ and tonal pitch spaces by Fred Lerdahl, with the addition of the theory of musical forces by Steve Larson), I will try to show how the organisation of the musical space can be implied in the analysis of Iannis Xenakis's (1922-2001) work Metastaseis (1953/4).