Week 11: Music Flashcards
Music is poor at…
Music is excellent at…
Music is poor at narrative
Music is excellent at enhancing the emotional meaning of a narrative
Coordination in tonal pitch space
Musical textures (music only)
Coordination in time: entrainment (dance and music)
There are 3 domains in which interpersonal coordination can occur in human behaviour
1) Space (dance)
2) Time (dance and music)
3) Tonal pitch space (music
The 4 T’s of Music
1) Tonality: scales
2) Timing: rhythm
3) Texture: combining parts
4) Text (connected to narration)
All connected to each other except Texture and Text
Vocal Emotion:
Affective Prosody
Pitch (low to high): High pitch
Loudness (soft to loud): Loud
Tempo (slow to fast): Fast
Affective prosody is shared b/w music and speech.
It preceded both of them evolutionarily.
Vocal Emotion:
Linguistic Prosody
Low pitch at end of sentence=final statement (end of story)
High pitch at end of sentence=uncertainty (more to the story)
Grammelot
Babble speak –no actual words/language but sounds like it
- Rhythm, pitch, etc. convey meaning
- Actors with different dialects can understand each other on stage and so can audience
A joint prosodic precursor of music and speech
Prosody –[scale structure] –Tonality =music
Prosody –[words] –Language =speech
Tonality
The word “scala” in Latin means ladder.
A musical scale is a ladder made up of pitch steps.
Unlike real ladders, musical scales do not have equal step sizes.
There are typically 2 different step sizes.
Tonality is the defining feature of music.
Tonality is an art-specific
Discreteness
A scale takes a continuous space and converts it into a set of discrete levels.
It digitizes pitch space.
These discrete levels are referred to as pitch classes.
Melodies
Scales establish a set of pitches that get combined to form melodies.
This process of creating melodies using scaled pitches is called tonality.
Scale Types
Different scales are made up of different combinations of step sizes.
Emotional Meanings
Different scale types have different emotional connotations.
MAWA: This mechanism of conveying emotion is domain-specific to music.
Tonality is a different means of conveying emotion than prosody.
Singing and prosody are different processes.
The “musicality” of speech
Proto-music
MAWA: Discreteness, but no scales
Speech as atonal music (lacking tone): Proto-music
The speech-to-song-illusion vs Autotuning Speech
Repeat speech enough times it will sound like a musical melody
Adjusting the pitches to make speech sound more music-like
Text
Songs (with words) are a combination of music and language.
In some cases, text is set to music. In other cases, music is set to text.
The music for a song is composed to be emotionally congruent with the words.
There are several unique features of singing compared to speaking (2)
1) Vocables =nonsense syllables (lalala, dodada)
2) Melisma when singing words=multiple pitches per syllable
o Celion Dion “All By Myself” –Se-e-el-lf
Musical Narration
Music:
=>words (songs)
=>dramas (background music)
=>dance (ballet music)
Underscore
The background music in films is called underscore.
The music is usually composed to be emotionally congruent with the narrative.
Group Chorusing
A group speaking as if with one voice
Vocal synchrony stimulates prosocial behaviours.
MAWA: Humans have the most diverse chorusing types of any species.
Musical texture
texture refers to different manners of combining musical parts both in time and in pitch space
Melodic unison
The musical texture in which
1) The musical parts are identical
2) They are synchronized in time (the same onsets)
MAWA: Melodic unison is uniquely human.
Animals have monotone unison (toads/crickets).
Group Speech
=unison speaking
=speaking with one voice
Group speech is metric, but not tonal
- Unison but no scale
Creating textures
1) Unison: same pitches and synchronized in time
2) Separating music parts in pitch space, but not time (harmonizing)
o Synchronous (singing/starting at the same time) but different pitches
3) Separating musical parts in time, but not pitch space (canon/round)
o All singing same melody, but starting at different times
4) Having separations in both pitch space and time (polyphony)
o Seen in animals as well as humans
