One hundred years on from the infamous premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s epoch-defining ballet continues to evoke controversy and contention in both musicological and performance circles. Even to call it a ballet is to overlook, or compound, its problematic identity. Throughout its life span, most audiences will have encountered, valorised and identified the work as a landmark of orchestral musical modernism heard primarily, perhaps even exclusively, in concert halls and on audio recordings with not a dancer, theatre stage (...) or set in sight. Still to this day it thus remains one of music’s more remarkable split personalities: bifurcated along formalist and contextualist lines by Stravinsky’s ret⁠rospective and opportunistic assertion that he had written “un oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique.”. (shrink)

In this paper I show how the way experience presents things to us can be treated without attributing a representational content to experience. The basic claim that experience can present us with more things than the range of things available to us in thought is neutral with respect to the choice between a content account of experience and a naïve content-free account. I show how Meyer's theory of expectations in accounting for our experience of music supports the naïve account. Expectations (...) provide an account of the conditions that enable things to be salient in experience as targets for attention. Expectations do not provide a content to experience. (shrink)

Tension and suspense are powerful emotional experiences that occur in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., in music, film, literature, and everyday life). The omnipresence of tension experiences suggests that they build on very basic cognitive and affective mechanisms. However, the psychological underpinnings of tension experiences remain largely unexplained, and tension and suspense are rarely discussed from a general, domain-independent perspective. In this paper, we argue that tension experiences in different contexts (e.g., musical tension or suspense in a movie) build (...) on the same underlying psychological processes. We discuss key components of tension experiences and propose a domain-independent model of tension and suspense. According to this model, tension experiences originate from states of conflict, instability, dissonance, or uncertainty that trigger predictive processes directed at future events of emotional significance. We also discuss possible neural mechanisms underlying experiences of tension. The model provides a theoretical framework that can inform future empirical research on tension phenomena. (shrink)

In the mid-eighteenth century music underwent a sudden and drastic revolution when composers “discovered” a new dimension to their art. This had immense repercussions on the philosophy of art, for the music created before and after this divide represents two different species of aesthetic experience, which in due course affected our understanding of the meaning and import of the other arts as well. Despite the immense aesthetic repercussions of this Copernican revolution in music, philosophers of art seem not to have (...) taken much notice of it. This essay details the emergence of the relevant musical criteria during the eighteenth century and dwells on their long-term impacts on the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Most commentators have agreed with our thesis, that musical emotions cannot be studied without regard to underlying mechanisms. However, some commentators have expressed concerns that are addressed in this response. Others have suggested directions for future research. Topics discussed in our response include terminology, elaborations on particular mechanisms, possible additional mechanisms, ways of distinguishing among emotions and mechanisms, the prevalence of musical emotions, the relationship between perceived and felt emotions, developmental issues, and evolutionary perspectives. We end our response with a (...) plea for researchers to reach beyond the traditional disputes in the field to pave the way for more theory-driven studies that can facilitate a deeper understanding of musical emotions. (shrink)

Recent experimental psychological research on visual perception, auditory perception, and cross-modal perception has shed light on how these processes differ, and how the relations between visual and auditory stimuli shade our understanding of the events perceived. This work offers a possible way into considering the question of how music and dance “go together” or not, and particularly may shed light on the unusual twentieth-century human behavior of NOT having music and dance “go together.” Our paper presents relevant research in perception, (...) examines factors contributing to the separation of perceptual modalities that has often appeared in twentieth-century dance, and discusses the separation in terms of the specific behaviors of dancing and looking at dance. (shrink)

Singing is universal, and understanding sung words is thought to be important for many listeners’ enjoyment of vocal and choral music. However, this is not a trivial task, and sung text intelligibility is probably affected by many factors. A survey of musicians was undertaken to identify the factors believed to have most impact on intelligibility, and to assess the importance of understanding sung words in familiar and unfamiliar languages. A total of 143 professional and amateur musicians, including singers, singing teachers, (...) and regular listeners to vocal music, provided 394 statements yielding 851 references to one or more of 43 discrete factors in four categories: performer-related, listener-related, environment-related and words/music-related. The factors mentioned most frequently in each of the four categories were, respectively: diction; hearing ability; acoustic; and genre. In more than a third of references, the extent to which sung text is intelligible was attributed to the performer. Over 60% of respondents rated the ability to understand words in familiar languages as “very important,” but only 17% when the text was in an unfamiliar language. Professional musicians (47% of the sample) rated the importance of understanding in both familiar and unfamiliar languages significantly higher than amateurs but listed fewer factors overall and fewer listener-related factors. The more important the respondents rated understanding, the more performer-related and environment-related factors they tended to list. There were no significant differences between the responses of those who teach singing and those who do not. Enhancing sung text intelligibility is thus perceived to be within the singer’s control, at least to some extent, but there are also many factors outside their control. Empirical research is needed to explore some of these factors in greater depth, and has the potential to inform pedagogy for singers, composers, and choral directors. (shrink)

It does not typically seem to be worthwhile rewatching a sport match, for example, in a video recording, once the result is known. Sports matches are like detective stories. Once one knows ‘whodunit’, there seems little point in revisiting the tale. By drawing on an argument from musicologist Edward T. Cone, this paper argues that certain sports matches may be revisited with profit. The initial experience of a game may be of a series of events that are often ambiguous or (...) confusing as to their meaning or purpose. The full appreciation of a sport match requires, not just this initial familiarity with the immediately perceived events of the game, but also an awareness of the tactics being deployed by both sides. An understanding of tactics and strategy is akin to the analysis of a piece of music. A further viewing of the game, during which one can appreciate how the tactics inform the events naively experienced in the first viewing, will yield, it will be argued, an aesthetic pleasure. This takes the experience of sport beyond the merely entertaining or exciting. In certain games, the third viewing may also transcend an appreciation of the merely formal qualities of the game, and so offer substantial insights into what it is to be human. (shrink)

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

A basic function of cognition is to detect regularities in sensory input to facilitate the prediction and recognition of future events. It has been proposed that these implicit expectations arise from an internal predictive coding model, based on knowledge acquired through processes such as statistical learning, but it is unclear how different types of statistical information affect listeners’ memory for auditory stimuli. We used a combination of behavioral and computational methods to investigate memory for non-linguistic auditory sequences. Participants repeatedly heard (...) tone sequences varying systematically in their information-theoretic properties. Expectedness ratings of tones were collected during three listening sessions, and a recognition memory test was given after each session. Information-theoretic measures of sequential predictability significantly influenced listeners’ expectedness ratings, and variations in these properties had a significant impact on memory performance. Predictable sequences yielded increasingly better memory performance with increasing exposure. Computational simulations using a probabilistic model of auditory expectation suggest that listeners dynamically formed a new, and increasingly accurate, implicit cognitive model of the information-theoretic structure of the sequences throughout the experimental session. (shrink)

This study examines the philosophical question of how it is possible to appreciate music aesthetically as an expressive art form. First it examines a number of general theories that seek to make sense of expressiveness as a characteristic of music that can be considered relevant to our aesthetic appreciation of the latter. These include accounts that focus on resemblances between music and human behaviour or human feelings, on music's powers of emotional arousal, and on various ways in which music may (...) be imaginatively construed by listeners. It argues that none of these are entirely satisfactory. Then it proposes an alternative account, focusing on what is involved when our appreciation of music as an expressive art is informed by our awareness of it as something that is expressively interpreted in performance. It is claimed that this offers the basis for a better understanding of at least some aspects of expressiveness in music and its relevance to aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

The present study is a theoretical discussion concerning some of the important processes that characterize human perception, which is understood as a fundamental structure of consciousness. The aim is to acquire new insights for a better comprehension of the human experience in the world and the way individual subjects become familiar with their environment. To accomplish this task, the experience of listening to music is analysed due to the widespread acceptance of music as an important aspect of human life. With (...) reference to a various research studies and hypothesis focused on the way listeners understand music, principles of perceptual organization which allow immediate awareness of music are investigated. Particular attention is given to studies in the field of music perception and cognition. Through an analysis of the main mental processes involved, the goal is to describe several relevant aspects of how listeners understand music at the perceptual level and constitute musical meanings in a subjective manner. This constitution results in a listener’s ability to become immediately aware of their auditory experience as having a specific meaning – that of being, first of all, a musical experience. Focusing on everyday experience and exposure to music, expectation and anticipation are presented as fundamental principles that contribute to the knowledge of the auditory environment and the meaning which acoustic events acquire for a subject. An in-depth analysis of their specific features will show the different influence expectation and anticipation have on a listener’s basic perceptual comprehension of music and in the constitution of musical meanings that are subjectively characterized. Within the framework of a theoretical investigation into human processes of musical knowledge acquisition, the additional objective is to create a dialogue between empirical research results in the field of music cognition and phenomenological descriptions of the structures of human consciousness. In particular, through clarification of the specific terminology that characterizes these two fields of research, the intent is to go beyond the historical gap which has existed between them. This combination of perspectives may increase our understanding of the way human beings know the world and learn how to react to the events which they encounter. (shrink)

Ponencia inédita presentada en el II Congreso Internacional de Teatro, Buenos Aires 12 al 15 de octubre 2011. Instituto de Investigación en Teatro Departamento de Artes Dramáticas, Universidad Nacional de las Artes. Ritmo y lenguaje Muchos autores estudian el ritmo en el lenguaje en general, y especialmente en textos literarios. La mayor parte de ellos, especialmente quienes tratan sobre la poesía, discrimina particularmente el aspecto métrico por un lado, en el cual el número de sílabas y la - Poétique et (...) Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)