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Re: [AUDITORY] Perceptual basis of evolving western musical styles



Dear Pierre, 

I'm glad to be able to write to you, and somehow feel how your effort in collecting the data helped me understand what I was doing this last year.
   
Regarding your observation on the analysis, I totally agree that the analysis is very incomplete, both in the dataset and the features. This was mainly driven by the fact that we were unable to collect neither more data nor richer. However, the fact that these simple statistics provide such an insight is a surprising fact for itself. 

I usually explain this result to myself with the following analogy. If we wanted to distinguish between styles in paintings, and counted the amount of strokes and their width, we should probably be able to separate impressionist paintings from renaissance ones. This doesn't mean that those features define what the impresionist paintings are, they are just convinient statistics that we compute using our a-priori knowledge.

Nevertheless, we are now working in a follow up paper (already with some preliminary results) trying to overcome some of limitations you pointed out.

Best,

Pablo



On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 12:52 PM, Pierre Divenyi <pdivenyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I read Pablo's PNAS paper with great interest and some nostalgia: in the late 1960s Jack Taylor and I were James Carlsen's research assistants involved in collecting and analyzing the melodic expectancy data he published in 1981. Pablo's paper opens a whole territory and incites discussion of his findings and his model. Frederic was the first to start this discussion and I hope it will go on for a while — I am especially interested in hearing from Dave Huron!

My first reaction is that, as wonderful as the findings are, they are the fruit of a very incomplete analysis. In particular, I would like to see a subsequent combing through the database consider two temporal factors: (1) the place of a note in the metric framework (measures and N-measure thematic chunks) and (2) the influence of tempo. With respect to the latter, it is clear that in the Baroque era alone a voice often carries a hidden polyphony, i.e., breaks down into two melodic streams, and such breakdown is a function of the tempo, as Leon can Noorden showed. With respect to (1), the expectations Meyer was talking about are very much dependent on where in the N-measure chunk (N>=1) the implied continuation takes place.


On 5/30/13 10:59 AM, "Pablo Hernán Rodriguez Zivic" <elsonidoq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Frédéric,

   I appreciate you comments and suggested bibliography. I will certainly consider them for my next publication

Sincerely,

Pablo


On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:50 AM, frédéric maintenant <fmaintenant@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is a very intersting subject, and the abstract makes me want to read more.. but there is a massive draw back, how can you mention in your title western musical style and not mention anything about popular music, jazz and contemporary music? I can read that in fact you are just interested by melody. That's all right, but not mentioned in your title. Do you know that Hugues Dufourt, Costin Miereanu, Salvatore Sciarrino are specifically working on the transformation of western melody particularly using jazz standard. Beside, Kaija Saariaho has developped a very specific approach to melody. And I am not mentioning obviously the work of Wayne Shorter who has to my opinion push the idea of popular melody very far etc etc
It is time not to work on Commercial period of classical music. I remember this beautiful article on Density 21.5 by Marc Leman... this was to my opinion where research should have gone... unfortunatly like for many others money business has oriented his research... to help Google !!
But anyway, nice to see that music is not forgotten on the Auditory List.

Best,

Frédéric Maintenant
CNRS/Panthéon-Sorbonne



De : Pablo Hernán Rodriguez Zivic <elsonidoq@xxxxxxxxx>
À : AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Envoyé le : Jeudi 30 mai 2013 1h01
Objet : Perceptual basis of evolving western musical styles

Dear List,

   I hereby announce my first "Open Access" paper "Perceptual basis of evolving western musical styles" which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences


Thanks for your attention. 






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