Microstructural musical linguistics: composers' pulses are liked most by the best musicians

Journal/Book: Cognition. 1995; 55: 269-310.

Abstract: Western music is a combination of notated structure plus microstructure. Composers' pulses, as precise microstructural functions, were tested with five groups of subjects of graded musical proficiency: (1) 10 famous artists including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yehudi Menuhin, Paul Badura-Skoda and others; (2) 14 Julliard School of Music graduate students; (3) 19 Manhattan School of Music graduate students; (4) 51 Australian conservatory students; and (5) 41 non-music students (total, 135 subjects). Composers' pulses consist of combined amplitude and timing warps specific to each composer--the composer's pulse matrix. Each subject listened to and scored 40 versions of 10 short music examples (not selected by the author) of eight bars each, composed by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert, performed by computer, in which composers' pulses, as developed by Clynes (1983, 1985a,b, 1986, 1987), were incorporated in a two-level hierarchic pulse configuration, and interchanged. Each example was heard with the pulses of those four composers in turn, in quasi-random sequence, one performance thus incorporating the "right" pulse and three the "wrong" ones. Results show dramatically that the greater the musical proficiency, the more marked the preference for the "right" pulse (p .0001). Non-musicians as a group showed a similar tendency of preference, but typically to a considerably less pronounced degree. Further studies suggest that longer excerpts (32 bars) and repeated hearing would help non-musicians also to better understand composers' pulses. A theory of music as a double stream is introduced. The results suggest that the composers' pulse matrices posited by Clynes as a first approximation are in fact appropriately meaningful. Brain function aspects of the meaningful discrimination of such tiny time differences are discussed.

Keyword(s): Adolescence. Adult. Aged. Attention. Attitude. Discrimination Learning. Educational Status. Female. Human. Male. Middle Age. Music. Pitch Perception. Psychoacoustics. Software. Support, Non-U.S. Gov't. Time Perception

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