Auditory Scene Analysis & Music Form

Auditory Scene Analysis

• Auditory grouping processes include concurrent, sequential, and segmental grouping.
• Auditory fusion is the organization of the acoustic surface into musical events.
• Auditory streaming is connecting events into musical streams.
• Auditory segmentation involves chunking event streams into musical units.

Processing Event Structure

• Segmental grouping means chunking streams into units.
• Relations among event attributes processed over time encode and organize musical material.
• Accumulating mental structure represents the momentary perceptual comprehension of musical form.
• Event structures are formed based on abstract knowledge structures an individual possesses.

Form-Bearing Dimensions

• Form is the structure/organization through which meaning, ideas, or content can be carried across.
• Form or structure is important in music.
• Quick representation of changing and dynamic information aids understanding.
• Comparing incoming information with stored knowledge (memory) assists in making sense of abstract information.
• Relative information is more important than absolute information.
• Creating form or structure in music enables comparison and relating of sonic information.
• Bearing form means being useful in creating a clear structure in a piece of music.
• A dimension bears form if value configurations can be encoded, organized, recognized, and compared.
• Excellent form bearers include pitch, rhythm, and potentially timbre.
• A dimension's ability to bear form depends on:
  • Affording a large number of perceivable configurations
  • Maintaining perceptual invariance amid changes
  • Offering potential for transformation/development

Abstract Knowledge Structures

• Structure arises from perceived qualities of musical events anchored to a learned system of relations.
• They include form-bearing and other kinds of information not directly related to form, like dynamic levels.
• Knowledge structures include systems of relations among musical categories and abstract archetypical patterns/idioms.
• Experience in a musical culture builds up these structures.
• Good form-bearers contribute to abstract knowledge structures.
• Values along a dimension can be discretized, kept to a small number of distinct categories, and have well-defined or ordered relations among categories.
• Relations involve asymmetrical interval structures, focal values, hierarchical ordering of stability, distinctive intervals, and predispositions for certain sequential relations.

Scale

• A scale is a series of notes ordered by pitch used as the basis for melody and harmony.
• Many scale types can be made within the octave.
• Western cultures commonly use 12 notes.
• Arabic music uses ~24 discrete notes.
• The divisions within an octave, or the element of well-defined categories, exist within all musical cultures, though no fixed number applies.
• Symmetrical scales:
  • The relation of every note with its neighbor is always the same.
  • The start/end points do not matter
  • Chromatic scale has all half steps; the whole tone scales all whole steps
• Asymmetrical scales, such as diatonic scales, combine whole and half step intervals.
• Scales with asymmetrical interval structures are preferred.
• Using the probe-tone technique, Carol Krumhansl and Roger Shepard found ratings represent how listeners evaluate the stability/hierarchical importance of a tone in a tonal context.
  • The higher the fit rating, the higher importance/stability is.
• Balzano (1980) states that the properties of scale structure are completeness and coherence.
• Completeness - all various interval sizes can be created with combinations of the notes within a scale
  • The smallest number of pitches that provide all of the possible intervals is 7
• Coherence - any interval of n distance is more than any interval of n-1 distance
• Major scale and its intervals are completeness.
• Major scale and its intervals are coherent.
• The incoherence example Scale for tuning the lyre in ancient Greece. a. Db to E is 1 note away (within the notes present in this scale) and ​​its interval is 3 steps/semitones b. B to D b is 2 notes away and ​​its interval is only 2 steps/semitones c. The lack of coherence because 1 note away here is sometimes bigger than 2 notes away.
• The pentatonic scale is completeness is missing minor 2nd, augmented 4th and major 7th
• The Pentatonic scale is a has coherence is, 1 note ~ 3 notes away and 5 notes aways

Pitch Relations

• Sensory consonance includes intervals of unison and fifth and are consonant.
• Sensory consonance includes intervals of seconds and sevenths and are dissonant.
• Psychoacoustical reactions occur due to tone combinations.
• Expertise in particular musical traditions is not necessary.
• (Krumhansl, 1979) concludes tonal context has a strong role.
• Factors of pitch height, pitch chroma, and diatonicism enter into play in perception of pitch relations in such a context.

A Generative Theory of Tonal Music

• Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1983) propose a model of tonal music as a system for organizing pitches with a hierarchy of relations.
• Pieces in major/minor keys exemplify Western tonal music.
• Lerdahl & Jackendoff's (1983) schematic diagram covers musical processing.
• Time-span segmentation in segmental grouping is based on duration, contrast, silences, articulation, and similarity in patterning.
• Elements used in sequential grouping are important in segmental grouping too.
• Deliège (1987) tested the following rules of grouping preference in time span segmentation:
  • Proximity (slur or rest, attack point, register)
  • Similarity (dynamics, articulation, length, timbre)

Event Structure

• According to A Generative Theory of Tonal Music
• Perceptual encoding of musical events and patterns occurs within the context of an evoked system of relations.
• Grouping principles are based on inherent ASA processes and learned knowledge.
• Perception of invariance and transformation of musical patterns leads to recognition.
• Mental representation of musical form involves establishing associative/hierarchical relations.
• This is achieved by building up an organization.
• Time span reduction includes hierarchical relations.
  • Deutsch (1980) found this affected memorization and reproduction.
• Prolongational reduction shows hierarchical patterns of tension and relaxation.
• Prolongational dominance determines event structure, where dominant events are relaxing and subordinate events are tense.
• Tension resolves to relaxation with musical phrases/segments ending on "relaxing" events, creating a tree structure.

Timbre Semantics

• Semantics concerns the meaning of things in language, and timbre semantics focuses on the linguistic meaning of timbre.
• It analyzes how people use language to describe timbre.
• Studying timbre semantics helps psychologists infer how humans represent timbre cognitively.
• Musicians can use it to communicate with and understand one another.
• Two aspects to consider are learned categories of sounds and variations within those categories.
• Describing sounds involves describing the sound's perception, recognition of the situation, and the sound impression.
• Ways to describe sounds:
  • Wake & Asahi (1998): Describing the perception of the sound itself using onomatopoeia. Describing the recognition of the sounding situation using references to the object that made the sound, action that produced the sound, and other contextual information. Describing the sound impression using metaphors and similes
  • Embodied theory of timbre (Wallmark, 2014): Demonstrates conceptual representations grounded in perception and action
  • Cross-modality (e.g., Zacharakis, 2024, 2025): Conceptual metaphors of timbre and auditory semantics may originate in universal neural processes beyond auditory cognition. Extramusical, intramusical, musicogenic.

Learning and Musical Knowledge

• Explicit learning - Active, effortful process leading to acquisition of motor skills, perceptual skill, involves domain-specific processes acting on musical input and domain-general processes of attention and executive function.
• Implicit learning - Passive, exposure to a cultural environment linking perception and action leads to a tacit understanding of music.
• This leads to enculturation and building up musical schemata as implicit knowledge structures.
• Measuring infant perception using heart rate, high-amplitude sucking (HAS) behavior, head-turning response, looking time, EEG, Cortisol measurement.
• These techniques can be used to study behaviors including novelty detection, preference, and habituation-dishabituation paradigm.
• Trainor & Heinmiller (1998) found 6-month-old infants tested for their preference to consonance/dissonance. Head-turning used to measure time spent looking at a speaker. The speaker played consonant intervals on one side and dissonant ones on the other.
• Kirschner & Tomasello (2010) paired 4-year-olds during musical/non-musical tasks, later assessing their cooperative/helping behavior. Children in the music condition were more likely to help each other when marbles spilled, and more efficient on tasks achievable solo but more efficient with two.

Memory

• Schemata are knowledge of properties or patterns of something general, not specific.
• They directs our attention, interact and interfere with memory, and guide expectations.
• Memory is at the base of all knowledge and involves encoding, storage, and retrieval.
• Different memory processes: Long term, semantic, episodic, declarative, procedural, Short term, Working. Sensory, (echoic)
• Snyder (2000) defines Auditory memory as top-down processing.
• What we already know determines what we see and hear.
• Contents of STM, frequently rehearsed or at length, affect the schematic structure of LTM, which affects future information processing at levels including perceptual binding, contextual interpretation, and passage of auditory events into conscious awareness.

Expectation

• Expectation is a knowledge-based process that prepares organisms to better react to future events.
• Memory helps to retain a sense of the past, while expectation generates a sense of the future.
• In music psychology, fulfilled or violated expectations form the basis of the experience of surprise, tension, pleasure, and meaning in music (Meyer 1956).
• The ITPRA model includes 5 components (Huron 2006):
  • Imagination
  • Tension
  • Prediction
  • Reaction
  • Appraisal

Functional Approach To Perception

• Brunswik's lens model (1955, 1956): According to Brunswik's lens model, perception is an indirect process. It is based on achieving focal variable by means of a set of proximal cues that are not fully dependable because they have a probabilistic relation to the focal variable.
• Jurslin modified lens model (1997)
  • Encoding means The Performer has an intention to express themself and has to translate this into the appropriate sonic cues.
  • Ecological validity refers to the relationship between the performer's expressive intention and an objectively measurable cue in the performance - the potential usefulness of that particular cue.
  • Decoding: Listener has to make a judgment about the intentions based on the sonic cues they hear.
  • Functional validity refers to the relationship between a particular cue in the performance and the judgment made by the listener - the extent to which the cue has ben actually used by the listener in their judgment.
  • Functional achievement is a Relationship between the expressive intention of the performer and the judgment made by the listener, the extent to which the communicational act is successful or not.
  • Communication process and intensions occur though the performer(s) with a probability and partly redundant cues an the listen than interprets.Success happen when the the performer and listerner interpretation are the same

Studying Performance

• Repp (1997) study diversity, commonality and aesthetics, and focused on tempo and timing patterns. This including including artificial "average" performances
  • The Average performances received high ratings, with average of expert performances rated the highest.
  • Individuality of expert pianists were recognized but had a negative correlation between individuality and aesthetic ratings.
• Tempo and loudness curves reveal that:
  • Most performers tend to slow down, speed up, crescendo and decrescendo at the same points over the course of a piece.
  • Reveals reveal the individualities of some performers.
  • World-class artists tend to use greater changes (extremes of range) in dynamics and tempo.

Emotions And Affect

• Affect: is an umbrella term that covers all evaluative or 'valenced' (positive/negative) states (e.g., emotion, mood, preference)
• Emotion: is a quite brief but intense affective reaction that usually involves a number of sub-components of subjective feeling, physiological arousal, expression, action tendency, and regulation and 'Synchronized'.
• Mood:denote such affective states that are lower in intensity than emotions, that do not have a clear 'object', and that are much longer lasting than emotions.
• Feeling- subject of experience emotion
• Arousal- activate the autonomic nervous system
• Locus Of affect/ emotion- induced/felt emotions- perceptual- cognition process- understand what to communicated the affected process- Recognize emotions
• Modelling emotions consists is - categorical approach- Dimension Approach - Domains - Specific - Miscellaneous

Emotions: Approach and Model

• Categorical:There is a basic set of discrete emotion categories and functionally.
• neurophysiologically, and expressively independent.
• Dimensional: Term are not independent a placed in circular for Pleasantness

Emotions And Affect

• To perceive the emotions we have to follow through is the Report , Phenomenological description - choice and Continuous judgment.
• The concept or communication is very important for studying emotion perception.
• The Communication of emotions through, intention, Tempo loudness Time timbre , model,
• The Communications that involve expression communication the there has to be the performers and the listioners , integral aspect social of network