Previous Updates

ESCOM 2024, July 3–6, York Hub, UK

Dr. Ève Poudrier will be presenting a summary of three experiments that investigated perceived emotions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension) in a talk titled “The influence of sonority dissonance and rhythmic complexity on listeners’ perceived emotions.” This research was performed in collaboration with Bryan Jacob Bell (University of British Columbia), Jason Yin Hei Lee (McGill University), and Craig Stuart Sapp (Stanford University/CCARH/PHI). This talk will be presented remotely and available for viewing online on July 4 at 7:20 PST.

You can now watch the video here.

ABSTRACT

Research on perceived emotion faces a methodological problem of whether to use “real music” or “laboratory music” as stimuli for investigation (Jones, 2010). In this study, we offer an approach that balances the need for ecological validity and the specificity afforded by controlled stimuli. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of sonority dissonance and rhythmic complexity on listeners’ perceived emotions using excerpts from twentieth-century music from Europe and North America that feature polyrhythm (i.e., superposed rhythmic streams based on competing reference time units). Participants listened to a series of musical excerpts and rated the perceived mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension expressed by the music using six 7-point Likert scales. Piano and string quartet excerpts were manipulated in terms of performance mode (human/mechanical), pitch presentation (ordered/randomized), and pitch content. Rhythmic measures were extracted and compared with participants’ ratings using multiple regression.

In Experiment 1, synthetic audio and piano excerpts were perceived as more positive in mood and as conveying less tension than human performance and string quartet excerpts. Given these observed differences, excerpts used in the following two experiments were limited to synthetic piano. In Experiment 2, excerpts with the original pitch collection in randomized order were perceived as more negative in mood, lower in energy, less likely to induce sensorimotor synchronization, more dissonant, and more tense. Experiment 3 tested the influence of dissonance operationalized as randomized pitches from four scale types (pentatonic major, diatonic major, whole-tone, and chromatic). There was a statistically significant influence of scale type on all rated emotional dimensions, excerpt for energy. Sonority dissonance was predictive of perceived dissonance and tension, and negatively correlated with mood and movement. Composite event density and event density ratio were positively correlated with mood, energy, and movement, and negatively correlated with perceived dissonance. The results of the three experiments show that sonority dissonance is predictive of perceived mood, movement, dissonance, and tension. Measures of rhythmic complexity were also found to have reliable effects on listeners’ perceived emotions, thus providing insight on the role of rhythmic features in original compositions. These results trace a promising path of investigation into the role of rhythm in polyphonic music using naturalistic stimuli.

CITED WORK: Jones, M. R. (2010). Music Perception: current research and future directions. In Springer handbook of auditory research (pp. 1–12). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6114-3_1.

SMPC 2024, July 25–28, Banff, Canada

In addition to the above talk, which will be presented on July 25 at 5:25 MT (Track 2, Consonance Session), Dr. Ève Poudrier will also be presenting preliminary research on the analysis of a sample of excerpts from the Suter (1980) Corpus using composite and coincidence rhythms in a poster titled: “Polyrhythm classification using the composite tool” on July 26 (Poster Session I). The composite tool is the fruit of a collaboration with Craig Stuart Sapp and can be used on this website as well as on Verovio Humdrum Viewer. Full documentation for the composite filter is available at: https://doc.verovio.humdrum.org/filter/composite.

ABSTRACT

Polyrhythm can theoretically be defined as concurrent contrasting rhythms, beats or speeds, that are not readily reducible to a single metric framework built from perceptually relevant pulse streams. However, in current music-analytical practice, the simultaneous rhythms must relate to one another in a very specific manner, which is most often described as involving a ratio other than N:1, the simplest being 3:2. This practice results in a wealth of rhythmic designs that can at best be described as complex, irregular, or metrically dissonant. This study proposes classification of polyophonic excerpts based on their “composite” (sequential presentation of event onsets, where an “event” includes all the notes that have the same onset time), and “coincidence” (coinciding event onsets across parts) rhythms. Classification is performed using a stratified sample from the Suter 1980 Corpus, a collection of 725 short notated polyrhythmic excerpts extracted from 450 works by twenty composers from Europe and North America, 1877–1969. Excerpts were encoded in kern format and rhythmic parsing was completed using the composite tool on Verovio Humdrum Viewer.

One of the advantages of the composite tool is that it facilitates comparison across different types of ensembles, regardless of the number of instrumental parts. Computational measures derived from composite rhythms can also be used to test the perceptual relevance of these features. While both composite and coincidence rhythms will be assessed based on rhythmic patterning, composite rhythms will also be examined based on event density ratio (relative density of contrasting strands) and saturation, while coincidence rhythms will be examined based on nested ratio (degree of coincidence across parts) and metric orientation. It is argued that measures derived from composite rhythms not only afford fine-grain characterization of rhythmic structures, but they also provide an opportunity to address issues of perceived complexity using naturalistic stimuli. Furthermore, while the tool was developed using a specific repertoire, it is not limited by musical style and could be used to investigate polyrhythms from other musical practices.