Chapter 6

Question 1

What are the arguments for the classical cognitive science approach to music?

Answer 1

CLASSICAL MUSIC (Austro-German):

1. Formal structure
2. Formal structure that is content laden (meaningful representations)
3. Abstract though inside an agent > environment
4. Central control
5. Challenges which arise to the “classical” model

Question 2

How does the notion of formalism serve to link classical music and classical cognitive science?

Answer 2

Thinking = rule-governed manipulation of symbols; the laws of thought are equivalent to the formal rules that define a system of logic (classical cog-sci)

The mathematical nature of music; classical music is expected to have a hierarchically organized, well-formed structure ie. the sonata-allegro form, or physics of sound waves, or music analogous to language (classical music)

Question 3

How does the idea that musical form is essential to communicating musical meaning establish a parallel between classical music and classical cognitive science?

Answer 3

The intentional stance; if one assumes that an agent has certain intentional states and that lawful regularities (ie. the principle of rationality) govern relationships between the contents of these states, then one can use the contents to predict future behaviour (classical cog-sci)

Exploitation of certain musical forms; conventions such as the sonata-allegro form provide a structure that generates expectations, which are often presumed to be shared by the audience [parallel to the intentional stance] (classical music)

Question 4

How does the emphasis on Cartesian disembodiment provide a link between classical music and classical cognitive science?

Answer 4

sense-think-act cycle; with emphasis on the think, on representations and focus on multiple realizations and functionality rather than physical accounts (classical cog-sci)

composers carry their compositions around in their “heads”, and abstract thinking appears to be a pre-req for composing - you mentally plan a piece, not “cognitively-scaffold” it at your instrument (classical music)

Question 5

How does central control provide a link between classical music and classical cognitive science?

Answer 5

Planning is the problem of what to do next, and an account of the control system of a planning agent solve this problem - the control system describes the mechanism that determines the sequence in which operations will be performed, and this control system is usually central (classical cog-sci)

The composer writes his music down using musical notations, and the score brings it to life (one type of central control). The conductor also takes the role of interpreter and controls the orchestra (the other type of central control system) (classical music)

Question 6

What is the audience’s role in classical music?

Answer 6

NONE; bam. The audience doesn’t affect the existence of the piece, which is very much an aspect of classical cognitive science - methodological solipsism and disembodiment.

Question 7

How do modern reactions against classical music link it to classical cognitive science?

Answer 7

Just like classical cognitive science had reactions to it’s formalism, to its abstract nature, via embodied and connectionist, so does classical music.

Question 8

What is the classical approach to auditory perception?

Answer 8

Built on similar theories as those which conceptualize visual perception as building internal representations (think the underdetermination problem), auditory perception has hearing being viewed as a process for building internal representations of the world. Additionally, physical stimulation does not by itself determine the nature of auditory percepts, but rather, they are organized and grouped, and when listeners create mental representations of auditory input they must employ rules about what goes with what.

Question 9

What are some solutions to the the “building mental representations” theory of auditory perception (classical cognitive science)?

Answer 9

The tone probe method!! Appealing to geometric relations to match the relationships between musical pitches. This reveals hierarchical organization of musical notes, with most stable (tonic) to least stable (those notes that aren’t in the context’s scale).

Applying Chomskian linguistics to music.
» novel stimuli need recursive rules

Question 10

What is Krumhansl’s tonal hierarchy?

Answer 10

A classical representations between different musical keys; has a toroidal map derived from tonal hierarchies which provides one of the many examples of spatial representations that have been used to model regularities in the percept; is not merely a musical property but instead a psychologically impose organization of musical elements.

(stable = tonic
2nd stable = 3rd/5th
3rd stable = remaining notes in context’s scale
least stable = set of five notes that aren’t in the context’s scale)

Question 11

What is the generative theory of tonal music?

Answer 11

A classical model of how psychological hierarchies of music are derived; Chomskyan linguistics being applied to musical cognition; all musical thinkers agree that musical syntax is a thing.

> > systems for both language and music must be capable of dealing with novel stimuli which (arguably) requires the use of recursive rules
while language conveys propositional thought, music does not

The linguistic analogues assign structural description to a musical piece:

1. group structure (hierarchically organizes a piece into motives, phrases, and section)
2. metrical structure (related the events of a piece to hierarchically organized alternations of strong and weak beats)
3. time-span reduction (assigns pitches to hierarchy of structural importance that is related to grouping and metrical structures)
4. prolongational reduction (a hierarchy that “expresses harmonic and melodic tensions and relaxation, continuity and progression”

Question 12

What are well-formedness rule?

Answer 12

A description of how the different hierarchies (structural descriptions) are constructed, imposing constraints that prevent certain structures from being created.

The provide psychological principles for organization musical stimulus. Since a musical parsing cannot be deemed correct (merely more or less preferential) these rules are supplemented with a set of preference rules.

Question 13

What is Temperley’s (2000) theory?

Answer 13

A variant of the original generative theory of tonal music; one key difference between the two is the input representation - Temperly employs a piano-roll representation and assumes that the psychological reality of the piano-roll representation exists.

His model applies a variety of preference rule to accomplish the hierarchical organization of different aspects of a music piece presented in a piano-roll representation. He provides different preference rule systems for assigning metrical structure, melodic phrase structure, contrapuntal structure, pitch class representation, harmonic structure, and key structure.

One further difference is reflected in how the theory is refined; Temperley’s model can be realized as a working computer and can be easily examined and identify weakensss.

Question 14

What is a piano-roll representation?

Answer 14

a method of representing a musical stimulus or score for later computational analyses (Temperley, 2001). It can be conceived as a two-dimensional graph or display. The vertical axis is a digital representation of different notes: for instance, each row in the vertical axis can be associated with its own piano key (i.e. individual musical note). The horizontal axis is a continuous representation of time. When a note is played, a horizontal line is drawn on the piano-roll representation. The height of this line represents which note was being played, the beginning of the line represents the note’s onset, the length of the line represents the note’s duration, and the end of the line represents the note’s offset. Although the notation has been created to be used for computational and algorithmic studies of musical cognition, Temperley has argued that some evidence exists suggesting that such a representation might be used in human perception of music.

Question 15

What are two key assumptions made by classical researchers of musical cognition?

Answer 15

1. mental representations are used to impose an organization on music that is not physically present in music stimuli
2. these representations are classical in nature: they involve different rules that can be applied to symbolic media that have musical contents

Question 16

What are the parallels between Romanticism and connectionist cognitive science?

Answer 16

1. it is against symbolic formalism (abandons language/explicit rules and symbols)
2. focus on imaginary and sublime (inspired by the real world/the brain)
3. Emphasis on the individual (neural networks/virtuoso musicians)
4. Preservation of some of the old (symphonic form/representational distribution)

Question 17

How does symbolic formalism link connectionist and romanticism?

Answer 17

Both are against symbolic formalism!

Romanticism championed purely instrumental forms because it was not paired with words, and could therefore express something deeper than the word has been able to express (the sublime) (romanticism)

The ability of networks to accomplish classical tasks is evidence that cognitive science need not appeal to explicitly rules or symbols (cog-sci)

Question 18

How does an emphasis on the imaginary/sublime link romanticism to connectionist?

Answer 18

Nature was a common inspiration of Romanticism; to be sublime was to reflect a greatness that could not be completely understood.

Connectionism is sympathetic to this emphasis on the sublime/imaginary; in seeking biologically plausible and neuronally inspire models, connectionists took a small step towards embodiment, and were inspired by the brain. Furthermore, connectionists recognize that the mental properties caused by brains may be very difficult to articulate using a rigid set of rules and symbols - and that because of this (caused by nonlinearity in networks) that networks are similarly sublime.

Question 19

What is the deal with Schumann’s piano work Humoreske?

Answer 19

It contains parts for a right arm, a left arm, and a third arm which is meant to contain the melody - but which isn’t ever played, just emerges from the other two.

Question 20

How does the emphasis of the individual link connectionist and romanticism?

Answer 20

Composers began breaking away from the established system of musical patronage, and began to write music for its own sake, rather than commission. Reflected in musical virtuosos, those who were famous not only for their musical prowess, but also for a commercialization of their character that exploited Romanticist ideals.

Connectionism emphasises individual networks - no two networks can ever be quite the same due to how they’re initially set up, networks such as the Jets-Shark network, multilayered networks that convert English verbs from present to past, etc.

Question 21

How do both connectionism and romanticism stay true to some of the traditional principles?

Answer 21

Romantic composers adopted and adapted the old forms, particularly the symphonic form; Beethoven proved that the symphony has enormous expressive power.

Connectionists still use the idea of information processing, just based on a brain and not a computer. They don’t discard the need for representations, but look instead for different kinds, hence the distributed representation. They don’t dispense of symbolic accounts either, but propose that they are approximations to subsymbolic regularities.

Question 22

Why use neural networks to study musical cognition?

Answer 22

1. artificial neural networks can account for the learning of musical patterns via environmental exposure
2. the type of learning that they describe is biologically plausible
3. they provide a natural and biologically plausible account of contextual effects and pattern completion during perception
4. they are well suited to modelling similarity-based regularities that are important in theories of musical cognition
5. they can discover regularities that can elude more formal analysis.

Question 23

What is virtual pitch?

Answer 23

An example of pattern completion which replaces information that is mission from imperfect input patterns - virtual pitch is the perception of pitches that are mission their fundamental frequency.

Our perception of pitch is not hampered when the fundamental frequency is missing, likely due to cooperative interaction amongst neurons that detect the remaining harmonics. Hopfield networks are autoassociative networks that only have one set of processing units which are all interconnected - they can model virtual pitch because they complete the missing fundamental.

An example of how connectionism can be used to explain some of our own ease of understand missing information (non-brittle)

Question 24

How do connectionist models deal with noisy input in regards to music?

Answer 24

That an ANN can deal with noisy inputs allows it to cope with other domains of musical cognition, such as assigning rhythm and metre. Beats which are noise and imperfect in a real production of music cannot be identified by classical models which use ratio/integers, but connectionist models can correct for these problems (such as the aforementioned ability to deal with a missing fundamental).

Question 25

How does the biological plausibility argument hold to musical cognition and connectionism?

Answer 25

ANN are biologically inspired (and plausible!) so they derive some of their accounts of auditory and musical perception from the neural basis. For example, pace theory (that certain waves stimulate certain hairs in the cochlea) says that pitch is represented in hair mvmt along the basilar membrane - the implications of the place theory can be explored by using it to inspire spatial representations of musical inputs to connectionist networks.

Question 26

What are some examples of how both connectionist cognitive science and Romanticism capture regularities that are difficult to express in language/by using formal rules?

Answer 26

Human subjects can accurately classify short musical selections into different genres/styles in a short period of time. While there are no rules for this process, connectionist networks can do the same thing, in a way that seems to defy precise, formal definitions.

Melody representation can be accomplished by ANN that map (ie) transposed versions of the same musical segment onto a single output representation = neural network melody recognition; this has implications for other aspects of musical cognition, such as the representational format for musical memories.

Question 27

How are embodied cognitive science and modern music linked?

Answer 27

1. against central control (stigmergy/musical stigmergy)
2. focus on emergence (swarm intelligence/emergent musical phenomena)
3. against solipsism (focus on worldly interactions/world and audience contribute
4. synthetic emphasis (forward engineering/combine primitive musical elements)
5. importance of world (situatedness and embodiment/music as action and interaction)

Question 28

What is the “twelve-tone technique” or dodecaphony?

Answer 28

A method of ensuring atonality (a reaction against expected harmonic structure); a composer starts by listing all twelve possible notes in dome desired order (tone row), this is the basis for a melody. The composer begins to write the melody by using the first note in the tone row, for a desire duration, possibly with repetition - however, this note cannot be reused in the melody until the remaining notes have also been used in the order specified by the tone row. This ensures that the melody is atonal, because all of the notes that make up a chromatic scale have been included.

> > serialism
still mathematic
still ignored the audience

Question 29

How does modern music relinquish central control?

Answer 29

Cage’s silent piece 4’33”: consists of three parts, the entire score for each part reading TACET, which instructs the performer to remain silent. Or how he used dice rolls to determine the order of sounds in his 1951 piano piece “Music of Changes”. By balancing the materials he was controlling, Cage kept the stochastic nature of his compositional practices from from sounding random.
» the combination of well-considered building blocks to produce emergent behaviour is just like embodied cog sci (ie. synthetic psych)

Question 30

What are aural illusions?

Answer 30

How, during the course of listening, the perceptual system will habituate to some aspects of it (the repeated sound segment( and as a results new regularities will emerge.

Question 31

What is the deal with tape loops?

Answer 31

Tape loops allow a sound to be repeated over and over, and to be either gradually or suddenly changed in speed (distorted frequency); the results of phase-shifting loops (playing the simultaneously on different machines and playing them in unison until they slowly shift out of phase) he composed (Riley) his piece “It’s Gonna Rain”.

This tape loop experiment realized as a musical score is his “In C”; there are 53 bars of music written in the key of C major, and the entire score fits onto a single page - performers play each bar in sequence, however they repeat a bar as many times as they like before moving on to the next. When they reach the final bar, they repeat it until all of the other performers have reached it. Performs listen and react to In C as they perform is, which is a great parallel to stigmergy.

Question 32

What is Swarm Music?

Answer 32

An example of “swarm intelligence” in musical phenomena (emergence behaviour due to interactive of simple agents); there are one or more swarms of “particles” and each on is a musical event - the particle’s position defines a particular combination of parameters (pitch, duration, loudness). A swarm of particles is dynamic and is drawn to attractors that are placed in the space - thus the swarm can be converted into music.

It is neither unpleasant nor random, and can interact with human performers.

Question 33

What is the conduit metaphor?

Answer 33

Language provides containers that are packed with meanings and delivered to receivers, who unpack them to receive the intended meaning. This is the classical notion of communication. Similarly, music (in the classical sense) is a symbolic, intentional medium.

From an embodied argument, Hanslick said that music is sound and motion - that this sound and motion literally have bodily effects that are meaningful (no representations/symbols); embodied alternatives to musical meaning is attractive because the conduit metaphor breaks down when it considers modern music.

Question 34

How are classical/connectionist models consistent with the conduit metaphor? How are embodied models inconsistent with it?

Answer 34

They are consistent in that 1. music is intentional and content-bearing, and 2. the purpose of music is to communicate this content to audiences.

Embodied is inconsistent because is believes that the purpose of music is not to acquire abstract or affective content, but to instead directly, interactively, and physically experience music. Motion of the music is causal, not communicative.

Question 35

What studies support the view that seeing and hearing is critical to music?

Answer 35

Vines et al. (2006): looked at people who saw the music, who heard it, and who both saw and hear it; those in the both condition had a very different experience; the experience of tension was altered, added information, etc.

A more recent study using similar methods also looked at expressive style (restrained, standard, exaggerated); seeing affects the results. Which makes sense, as embodied cog sci is focused on the interactions between hearing and seeing, because cognition is a medium for acting and not planning (in this POV)

Question 36

What are digital music instruments?

Answer 36

A musical instrument that involves a computer and in which the generation of sound is separate from the control interface that chooses sounds.
» allows for novel relationships between gesture and sound
» allows for issues of “principles of good design” (id and evaluate possible interfaces between actions and instruments)

Question 37

What is the acoustic paradigm?

Answer 37

Adheres to the traditional view of classical music; separates composer, performer, and audience into three distinct roles.

Software components of these digital music instruments should not be viewed necessarily as instruments, but as behavioural objects (an entity that can act as a medium for interaction between people through its dissemination and evolution, can develop interactively with individuals in processes of creative musical development, and can interact with other behavioural objects to produce musical output); these digital music instruments can affect musical thought = scaffold musical cognition.