The Corelli trio sonatas are emblematic of the mid-Baroque period, characterized by their elegant melodies, intricate counterpoint, and systematic development of thematic material. Extending harmonic annotations from Hentschel et al. (2021), we provide a dataset with annotations of all 38 slow movements of the Sonate da chiesa Op. 1 (1681) and Op. 3 (1689), focusing on this Baroque writing style. The 7,000+ annotations describe the texture (homorhythmy, imitations, suspensions), further detailing thematic and imitation patterns, with other information such as rhythmic density. We provide audio synchronizations to a recording by the London Baroque Orchestra. We release the corpus for download as well as through the Dezrann platform.
Research on musical harmony has shown how some harmonies are perceived as more stable than others, and how this stability can be affected by other musical features. There is a gap in the research on how larger units of harmonies function together as a group. This study begins to investigate whether musical training can play a role in recognizing loop-based harmonic progressions, also known as musical schemata. In the first experiment, we presented participants with a chord progression and asked participants to select the answer choice with the matching chord progression that are paired with melodies, amongst four an-swer choices. In the second experiment, we reverse this and present participants with a chord progression and a melody and ask participants to select the answer choice with the matching chord progression. We found that all participants did well above chance and that musical training did have a slight effect on participants’ abilities to identify the looped-based har-monic progressions, while participants self-identity of their musical ability only was signif-icant for the first experiment. Taken together, these results suggest that the average listener is good at matching loop-based harmonic progressions, regardless of musical training.
The theory of Jesse Berezovsky (2019) is a rare foray of a physicist into the territory of music science. In their follow-up article in Empirical Musicology Review, Ryan Buechele, Alex Cooke, and Jesse Berezovsky (2024) show how the evolution of Western tuning systems and compositions can be rationalized by a theoretical model that describes a trade-off between minimizing sensory dissonance and maximizing compositional variety. From the Renaissance period onwards there was a trend towards more dissonance, and more compositional variety in both tuning systems and compositions. While this historical progression has perhaps been described qualitatively elsewhere, this model provides a more precise quantitative description of the phenomenon. The validity and scope of this model ought to be tested further by comparing its predictions with empirical measurements of tuning systems in both Western and non-Western cultures, alongside predictions of other theories of scale evolution. In the hope of encouraging and facilitating more of these interdisciplinary endeavors, I discuss some of my anecdotal experiences as a physical scientist embedded in the music science community, and offer advice on how to achieve better understanding and communication across disciplines.
It is typically assumed in the empirical aesthetics literature that generalizable abstract stimulus attributes like familiarity, fluency, and complexity drive preferences. This general nature means that they can, at least in principle, apply to any stimulus regardless of its characteristics and sensory modality. However, most studies in this tradition are restricted to group-level trends and particular stimulus properties. Therefore, they say nothing about amodal or general preferences for particular levels of such abstract attributes independently from their characterization at the individual level. Moreover, the hypothesis of a general, amodal preference for attributes like complexity was not empirically supported and only scarcely tested until we provided empirical evidence against it in our Clemente et al. (2021) study. In their quest for empirical evidence in favor of a preference for complexity across the auditory and visual modalities, Friedman et al. (2024) made two central claims: First, they found it surprising that aesthetic sensitivity for visual and musical complexity did not correlate in our study. Second, they expressed concerns about the comparability of the musical and visual stimuli we used. In this commentary, I show how these claims and the premises on which they rely are debatable and how the results of Friedman et al. (2024) support our conclusion that stimulus information rather than abstract attributes like complexity drive evaluative judgments such as liking.
This commentary situates Friedman et al. (2024) – and by extension, Clemente et al. (2021) – within a broader research context. Both papers raise important issues, but neither study’s result can be considered definitive. The operationalization and assessment of aesthetic constructs across many investigations should reflect the inherent diversity of human artmaking, yielding a structured sense of the conditions under which modality-specific versus modality-general representations predominate in aesthetic or evaluative cognition. Additionally, I note that this research enterprise touches on two sets of issues, which are simultaneously central to an understanding of the nature of human artistry, yet which remain under-represented in contemporary research. One concerns the murky evolutionary origin of our human artistic capacity, including the role of cross-modal processing and its role in aesthetic cognition. The second involves the first-person deployment of this capacity in creative problem solving, rather than in a merely receptive mode. Both speak to the importance of understanding inherent structure and constraints on human aesthetics and creativity.
How does musical texture relate to large-scale form in classical string quartets? Are certain textural strategies associated with sections or formal functions in a sonata movement? Some music theorists have argued that contrapuntal textures are more common in developments and transitions. In their view, these medial sections would use polyphony to foster a sense of looseness, instability, and momentum. Our study tested these claims by examining a pre-existing corpus of string quartet movements in sonata form by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. We measured texture in terms of average onset synchrony, where lower onset synchrony represents greater rhythmic and textural independence among parts. Although average onset synchrony was lower in developments, compared to expositions, for most pieces in the corpus (65.22%), there was a significant interaction between section and composer, and post hoc analysis indicated that this difference in onset synchrony was significant only for Beethoven. Within expositions, transitions did not tend to have lower onset synchrony, and there was no significant effect for subsection. However, there was a significant main effect for composer here. Overall, these results imply that textural strategies in classical sonata form are complex and may vary from piece to piece and from composer to composer.
The corpus study reported by De Souza, Dvorsky, and Oyon (2024) investigates texture in sonata form movements of classical string quartets (by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven) using onset synchrony. The following commentary provides some additional discussion on the behavior of various measures of onset synchrony when applied to this genre, and the potential of this research to be more widely generalizable.
The following is a commentary on De Souza, Dvorsky, and Oyon's (2024) target article on polyphonic texture and sonata form. Their study suggests that development sections display more polyphony than exposition sections, as indicated by lower onset synchrony. However, the expected increase in polyphony during transitions was not observed. Using the exploration-exploitation framework from cognitive science, I propose potential explanations for these findings. I also recommend that future research on polyphonic texture incorporates expert evaluations alongside computational metrics to achieve a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of musical texture.
I discuss Buechele, Cooke, and Berezovsky’s entropy-based model of scale structure and compare it with a different entropy-based model from Milne et al. (2017). I also present an augmented version of the 2017 model to provide an additional entropy-based explanation for preferred scale structures. Our models have similarities and differences in terms of their constructions and constraints, and their results differ somewhat in meaning. Despite this, they are broadly comparable in terms of the “optimal” scales found. This suggests that entropy-based approaches can explain the origins of historical and contemporary scales, whilst also indicating interesting alternative scales that align with psychoacoustic and cognitive affordances.
We explore a physics-based model describing systems of musical intonation. Under the assumption that tuning systems seek to balance minimization of dissonance with maximization of compositional variety, we can use the same methods that are used to describe how transitions between the phases of matter are governed by a balance between minimizing energy and maximizing entropy. In both cases, a parameter – temperature – controls the balance between these factors. We show that as the temperature is raised from low to high, our model generates tuning systems that closely resemble those used throughout the history of Western music, from just intonation, to meantone temperaments, to equal temperament. We demonstrate how our model reflects the way in which tuning systems evolved along with trends in composition by comparing the results of our model vs. temperature to a corpus of 9620 pieces vs. year of composition from 1568-1968. By changing parameters in the model, we also find that other tuning systems, such as 31-tone temperaments, emerge. These results provide a new lens for understanding tuning systems, and a new approach for generating novel systems of intonation.
The following is a commentary on Vazquez’ two-part study of mothers’ everyday uses of music and their relationships to the quality of mother-child interaction and bonding. The commentary considers how Vazquez’ findings are linked to the experiences and meanings of motherhood in modern times, including the stressors and pressures that many women experience as they begin their journeys as new mothers. The commentary presents three main points: the necessity to listen to maternal voices, the need to diversify study samples, and the recognition that mothers are a diverse group.
In a provocative recent study, Clemente et al. (2021) found that individual differences in aesthetic sensitivity to stimulus complexity in the musical domain were uncorrelated with those in the visual domain. This ostensibly contradicts existing theory and research pointing to a link between idiographic preferences for musical and visual complexity. However, a review of their methodology reveals that Clemente et al. (2021) inadvertently introduced confounds in the temporal dynamics of their experimental stimuli as well as in their operational definitions of complexity in each domain. To address these confounds, we conceptually replicated part of their procedure using musical and visual stimuli that were either very closely matched in their temporal dynamics and/or for which complexity was operationalized more similarly. With these modifications, reliable positive correlations indeed emerged between aesthetic sensitivities to complexity across domains, providing renewed evidence for cross-modal correspondence in evaluative responses to musical sounds and visual images.
This two-part study explored if mothers' uses of music in everyday life enhanced and facilitated the quality of mother-infant interactions, and consequently influenced maternal bonding. Study 1 was an exploratory qualitative study, which analysed the patterns of the mothers' general uses of music and general experiences of motherhood. Study 2 analysed and explored the effects of mothers' self-selected music on the quality of mother-infant interactions. The second study was based on a two-week trial with a mixed-method design including quantitative and qualitative approaches. It examined how mothers' self-selected uses of music (maternal singing and listening to music) might influence parental stress, maternal attachment, and the quality of mother-infant interactions over the two-week period. The general findings suggested that mothers' self-selected uses of music during daily mother-infant interactions can enhance face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, it served as an effective tool for promoting mothers' sense of well-being. Finally, a cycle of three elements was observed: mothers' musical responses influenced the infants' musical responses by the synchrony of behavioral parameters between mother and infant.
This commentary on Alves and Nogueira (2024) proposes a potential approach to compare expert and non-expert music teachers' use of embodied teaching strategies in one-to-one lessons with advanced performance students. The approach is hypothesis-driven, and builds on Alves and Nogueira's theoretical framework of expert competency domains, as well as empirical studies of musical communication and oneto-one teaching strategies. It is argued that a comprehensive definition of embodied teaching strategies should be conceptualized in terms of the quality of teacher-student interactions and the measurable outcomes of those interactions, and that it should account for the wide range of verbal and non-verbal forms of embodied musical communication that arise.
Vazquez-Diaz de Leon's (2024) study explores mothers' uses of music in everyday life, illuminating the potential of this reciprocal process in supporting the quality of mother-infant interactions and maternal bonding, while also supporting maternal identity, regulation and coping during motherhood. This commentary calls for further matricentric focused research that acknowledges the social and cultural context of 'matrescence' as a significant and transformation shift into motherhood that is largely underrepresented and warrants further exploration and discourse into how this period may intersect with mothers' musical engagement in everyday life.
In this commentary on the fascinating study completed by Anderson C & eacute;sar Alves and Marcos Nogueira, I discuss two avenues for considering the complexities of embodiment conscious music performance pedagogy. In the first, I contend that music, including but not limited to music performance pedagogy, is inherently interdisciplinary. In the second, I offer that music performance pedagogy, in particular "studio" or one-on-one pedagogy, is necessarily relational. It is my hope to add value to Alves and Nogueira's work, while also broadening the lens through which we observe the competencies of both teacher and student within the private lesson context. I close with suggestions for future studies, continuing the important conversation around exceptional teaching and learning for musicians.
This paper provides a commentary on "Embodiment Consciousness in Music Performance Pedagogy" by Alves and Nogueira, developing the notion that metaphorical language and extra-musical information can allow expert teachers to convey various teaching strategies. I expand upon some of the themes that are addressed in the article and the concept of metaphor in particular. This opens up some interesting ideas around how metaphors are culturally understood phenomena, ones that expert teachers can use to their advantage. The authors provide a framework in which this can be understood in terms of embodiment consciousness. However, there is room for more nuance as it relates to process.
Scholarly interest in the context of music listening and its influence on music cognition and connection is flourishing after decades of a predominantly individualistic approach. This article introduces a special issue that explores research on the theme of connectivity and diversity in music cognition research arising from the ICMPC16-ESCOM11 conference. The conference itself, held online during the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, transcended national borders, bringing together researchers and practitioners from multiple continents in a digital context. In this introduction, we set the scene for this topic as it related to the conference. The included papers are the outcome of workshops held as part of the conference. The first paper in the special issue explores the use of embodied consciousness as part of pedagogical strategies to help music performers connect with embodied memories that can support their understanding of the work they are performing. The second paper considers uses of music in the early stages of motherhood, including a comparison between the active choice to regularly sing or listen to music and its perceived effects for the mother and her infant. The papers and associated commentaries offer a window into the rich research theme of connectivity and diversity that is likely to be influential over the years to come.
