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.

Plateau Loops and Hybrid Tonics in Recent Pop Music

This paper investigates harmonic progressions built around two major chords and one minor chord, all related by step. In many pop/rock songs, these chords can be analyzed as Aeolian progressions—VI, VII, and i—(Moore 1992; Biamonte 2010; Richards 2017a). Recent songs by Bon Iver, The Chainsmokers, and others, however, use chord loops where the harmonies can be interpreted as IV, V, and vi, which I call the plateau loop for its plateau-like activity: a constant hovering above Roman numeral I or i tonic chords, while retaining an overall consistent pitch-based topography. I interrogate the tonality of these songs, advancing the notion of a hybrid tonic. Hybrid tonics occur when a song or song section lacks a salient Ionian or (less often) Aeolian tonic on which both the harmony and melody concur. Instead, IV or (less often) VI or vi chords can function rhetorically as tonic, especially when the chords sound simultaneously with a melodic ".fn_scaledegree(1)." and occur in a metrically strong position, or initiate a plateau loop. The paper defines plateau loops and hybrid tonics, and explains the theoretical framework that supports them, consulting work by Harrison (1994), Nobile (2016), and Doll (2017) that decouples scale degree from harmonic function. Song examples by The Chainsmokers, Bon Iver, Jónsi, Astrid S., and M83 show how hybrid tonicity operates in varying degrees of prominence in popular music, and can also be contextualized with Spicer’s (2017) theory of fragile, emergent, and absent tonics. By building on prior scholarship, this paper aims to stimulate further inquiry into how tonal structures of recent popular music subtly differentiate themselves from conventions of common-practice tonality.

Speech Companions: Evaluating the Effects of Musically Modulated Auditory Feedback on the Voice

Changing the way one hears one’s own voice, for instance by adding delay or shifting the pitch in real-time, can alter vocal qualities such as speed, pitch contour, or articulation. We created new types of auditory feedback called Speech Companions that generate live musical accompaniment to the spoken voice. Our system generates harmonized chorus effects layered on top of the speaker’s voice that change chord at each pseudo-beat detected in the spoken voice. The harmonization variations follow predeter-mined chord progressions. For the purpose of this study we generated two versions: one following a major chord progression and the other one following a minor chord progression. We conducted an evaluation of the effects of the feedback on speakers and we present initial findings assessing how different musical modulations might potentially affect the emotions and mental state of the speaker as well as semantic content of speech, and musical vocal parameters.

Musical Harmony in Electric Hearing

A cochlear implant (CI) restores hearing for profoundly deaf patients by transmitting sound to an array of electrodes that stimulates the inner ear. The small number of frequency bands and limited transmission of temporal fine structure affects the music perception. The present work investigates the pleasantness of chords and chord sequences in adults using such electric hearing. In the first task, participants compared chord types according to their perceived pleasantness. Normal-hearing listeners judged the major chord and the minor chord as the most pleasant ones compared to other chord types. CI users appraised the major chord as more consonant than other chord types. The second task used four-chord sequences, half of which ended on an authentic V-I cadence. In the other presentations, the final tonic was replaced either by a transposed major chord or by a dissonant chord. The participants had to judge whether the ending was conclusive. While normal-hearing listeners preferred authentic cadences, all but one CI user assessed the modified cadences as similarly satisfying. The results indicate that CI users appreciated consonance of isolated chords to a certain extent similar to normal-hearing listeners. Nevertheless, the majority of CI users fail to register the musical syntax in the harmonic progression of cadences.

Neural Discrimination of Nonprototypical Chords in Music Experts and Laymen: An MEG Study

At the level of the auditory cortex, musicians discriminate pitch changes more accurately than nonmusicians. However, it is not agreed upon how sound familiarity and musical expertise interact in the formation of pitch-change discrimination skills, that is, whether musicians possess musical pitch discrimination abilities that are generally more accurate than in nonmusicians or, alternatively, whether they may be distinguished from nonmusicians particularly with respect to the discrimination of nonprototypical sounds that do not play a reference role in Western tonal music. To resolve this, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the change-related magnetic mismatch response (MMNm) in musicians and nonmusicians to two nonprototypical chords, a “dissonant” chord containing a highly unpleasant interval and a “mistuned” chord including a mistuned pitch, and a minor chord, all inserted in a context of major chords. Major and minor are the most frequently used chords in Western tonal music which both musicians and nonmusicians are most familiar with, whereas the other chords are more rarely encountered in tonal music. The MMNm was stronger in musicians than in nonmusicians in response to the dissonant and mistuned chords, whereas no group difference was found in the MMNm strength to minor chords. Correspondingly, the length of musical training correlated with the MMNm strength for the dissonant and mistuned chords only. Our findings provide evidence for superior automatic discrimination of nonprototypical chords in musicians. Most likely, this results from a highly sophisticated auditory system in musicians allowing a more efficient discrimination of chords deviating from the conventional categories of tonal music.