Music Theory Colloquium Series

Neuroscientific accounts of music-theoretical topics are increasingly prominent. It is important to critically examine the challenges and contributions of incorporating neuroscience into music studies. Such examination allows for more meaningful integration, and leads to better designed experiments that are appropriately sensitive to the historical and cultural situatedness of the topics they investigate. Here I discuss three contributions and three challenges. The contributions are mechanistic explanations (which identify entities and activities that carry out musical behaviors), comparison (which can unite or distinguish between apparently different or similar behavioral capacities), and consilience (the ability to transfer knowledge across domains of inquiry). The challenges are the problem of defining behavior (musical behaviors are under-defined, complicating the attribution of neural data), reverse inference (a logical fallacy complicating the association between neurophysiology and a musical task), and problems from issues with the cognitive ontology (i.e., the set of fundamental cognitive capacities). Following this theoretical discussion, I apply the six ideas to recent work on improvisation and syntax (including my own), analyzing the work’s value and pitfalls. A final emergent theme from this critical analysis is that music neuroscience makes its best contributions when synthesizing work from other areas of music studies.

In musical settings with ambiguous chromaticism, it can be difficult to identify the tonality and, thus, the scale-degree motion among voices. In this paper, I propose a new methodology to describe motion that occurs when the voices of one chord reposition themselves into different positions of another chord (e.g., root, 3rd). I generalize a chord-member space with accompanying intervals that form a “mod-7” group structure, inspired by David Lewin’s definition of a Generalized Interval System, or “GIS” (1987). By combining Richard Bass’s (2007) enharmonic position-finding nomenclature and Steven Ring’s (2011) “heard” scale-degree GIS, my methodology introduces the concept of heard chord members. I argue that through this apparatus, one can hear changes in vertical placement as characteristic linear gestures, even in progressions that do not convey a clear tonal center. In my proposed system, I represent any given note as an ordered pair derived from the direct product CM × PC, where CM is chord-member space (newly introduced here), and PC is the usual pitch-class space. The ordered pair is of the form (cm, pc), where cm represents the heard chord member, and pc represents its regularly assigned pitch-class integer. To describe the interval between two notes, I use a different ordered pair of the form (cmint, pcint), where cmint represents the ascending chordal interval (the designation “3rd” denotes an ascending chordal third, “3rd2” denotes two ascending chordal thirds, and so forth), and pcint represents the ascending chromatic interval. I additionally argue that this system illustrates characteristics of chromatic progressions that are not so easily detected by previously established transformational approaches. For example, this system describes types of individual voice motions across chords of different qualities (e.g., major and diminished triads) and cardinalities (e.g., triads and seventh chords). By analyzing the chord-member transformational activity of a sample of ambiguously chromatic nineteenth-century musical passages (from Frédéric Chopin’s Etude in A-flat major, Op. 25, No. 1; and Franz Schubert’s “Die junge Nonne,” D. 828), I show that this system offers a newly instructive way of thinking about chord progressions and voice leading. In so doing, this approach closely reflects the transformational attitude.

In September 2019, spectators at L’Opéra de Paris encountered a new approach to Rameau’s Les Indes galantes. Bintou Dembélé—renowned French hip-hop choreographer and first Black woman to choreograph at L’Opéra—transported dance styles such as wacking, voguing, krump, and break-dancing from streets and night clubs to a historical stage in Paris. Dembélé’s choreographed the “Danse du Grand Calumet Paix, exécutée par les Sauvages” with krump, a style created in 2000’s Los Angeles that evokes increased emotional reactions. As the choreographer herself acknowledges: “We use very expressive dance forms. Krump adds a lot to that. The emotional charge overflows…”
In this paper, I investigate how dancers’ bodies and music work together to communicate the “overflow of emotional charge” Dembélé describes. Her choreography changes how audiences encounter Rameau’s music, eliciting affective states that subvert the rondeau’s usual predictability. To overload the emotional charge, Dembéle manipulates the choreography’s intensity overriding the rondeau’s form. I ground my analysis on kinetic affect and evaluate how spectators feel this type of affect using the theory of constructed emotions.
I demonstrate how to interpret dancer’s kinetic affect dividing my analysis in two parts. First, I analyze dance moves through four parameters: posture— whether dancers initiate or finish their gestures in a concave or convex pose; energy—the amount of perceived force dancers use when performing swings and pumps; speed—how fast dancers swing, pulse, or rotate their limbs; and movement type—specific gestures from krump’s vocabulary. Second, I evaluate how, when combined, dance moves and music elicit affective states in audiences by mapping possible core affects into Russel’s circumplex model, which plots values of intensity (high or low) and valence (positive or negative) in a cartesian plane. My analysis demonstrates how dancers combine the four parameters outlined above to construct different affective states and alter music’s intensity.

The soundtrack from the 2006 anime Death Note interacts with a listener’s perception of rhythm and meter in a number of sophisticated ways. Metric and rhythmic irregularities pervade the entirety of the soundtrack and their prominence, combined with the specific musical and thematic settings in which they arise, strongly indicates that they are part of a broader system of compositional design which seeks to instill particular effects in listeners. In this presentation, I provide analyses of several themes from the soundtrack, discussing instances of metric irregularity at both micro- and macro-levels. Observing continuities in its application across multiple themes in the soundtrack, I argue that metric irregularity is used in specific ways as a means of characterization for the primary protagonist (Light Yagami, a.k.a. Kira) and antagonist (Detective L), as well as the ethereal spirits of death known as shinigami. In congruence with this, I categorize instances of irregularity as belonging to either a “L Group,” “Kira Group,” or “Shinigami Group” of characterization. L Group irregularities often occur in the musical foreground and disrupt listeners’ immediate sense of metric stability, mirroring L’s preoccupation with trickery and deception throughout the show; my analysis of these irregularities extensively borrows from models of listeners’ processive projections of meter as described by Gretchen Horlacher (2001) and Christopher Hasty (1997). Contrastingly, Kira Group irregularities occur either at background levels or in ways that aren’t as obtrusive to local metric stability, enticing listeners to adopt new metrical frameworks in a similar manner to how Kira encourages Death Note’s world to adopt his sinister Machiavellian worldview; these are understood within the taxonomy of metrical dissonances outlined by Harald Krebs (1999). Finally, Shinigami Group irregularities arise mainly via timbral effects and references to musical styles like plainchant or aleatoricism, generating rhythmic phenomena which fall outside the bounds of the metrical consonance/dissonance spectrum. Just as the shinigami in the story belong to the realm of the dead but interact with the world of the living, Shinigami Group irregularities interact with (but do not adhere to) the expectations posed by “earthly” metrical structures.

Traditional thematic analysis may encounter difficulty in analyzing a piece that lacks motivic crispness and formal articulation. For example, the preludes in J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites No. 2 and 3 feature textural homogeneity and thematic fuzziness; their continuous musical flow causes difficulties in grasping the material organization. In this project, taking the two Bach preludes as examples, I developed a comprehensive computational model, which effectively analyzes such a melody without the human analyst giving any motivic information in advance. The model is based on Marvin and Laprade’s COM-matrix/CSIM algorithm, which quantifies contour information and calculates contour similarity; the model also depends on unsupervised clustering techniques to categorize the contours. Before the main analytical process, the model slices a melody into regular segments at two levels (for example beat- and bar-levels) and unifies the cardinality at each level. Then, the system generates the contour matrix of each segment. There are three main analytical modules. Module One creatively uses CSIM values to both recognize the most representative segment and evaluate the level of monothematicism; a low monothematic level triggers the system to look for the second representative segment. Module Two focuses on the macro-level contours. It uses clustering techniques to separate contours into an appropriate number of groups. Then, it evaluates the cohesiveness among a group of contours using clustering parameters and CSIM algorithm; the “sparse” data points are then labelled and require extra attention from the ananlyst. Module Three is technically similar to the previous module, except that it addresses the organization of contours at the micro-level. Moreover, this module is used to further explore what the analyst obtains in previous modules, such as detecting the subtle patterns in a module-two group or the similarity and difference between outstanding module-one contours. Overall, depending on the cooperation between COM-matrix/CSIM algorithm and clustering techniques, the model shows in detail the distribution of, and the interactions between melodic contours at different levels, producing both factual data and interpretive potentials for the analyst.

The music theory faculty will offer their advice on how to get the most of your time at IU. Topics will be relevant to music theory majors at all levels. Experienced students will have an opportunity to share their own advice.

As musicians and scholars, we tend to assume that some form of meaning is inherent in music itself, that much of what we do is aimed at uncovering and conveying the intrinsic affect of a musical work. This paper will explore the ways in which digital sampling problematizes these assumptions by reconfiguring and recontextualizing musical excerpts, to the point that they can take on opposite affective qualities from those they had in the original work. We will investigate the following questions: how long does a musical passage need to be to have a consistent expressive meaning? And how many musical layers can one remove and replace while still maintaining the music’s expressive core?

A recent issue BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute was dedicated to exploring the relationship between Bach and intonation. Two articles stand out: “The Notes Tell Us How to Tune,” by Bradley Lehman and “Reconsidering Tonal Procedures in J.S. Bach’s First Year in Leipzig: Some Implications from the Wind-Player’s Perspective,” by Geoffrey Burgess. Lehman (2022) delimits the range of temperaments which could support both Bach’s chromatic practice as well as accounts of Bach and others’ intonational practices. Burgess (2022) synthesizes research into pitch levels and historical woodwind performance practices to better understand how certain compositions from Bach’s first year in Leipzig might have been executed, building on research by him and Bruce Haynes. Each paper is compelling, but a gap exists between the two approaches: Lehman talks about intonation without discussing how that intonation is manifested in practice, whereas Burgess talks about practice without exploring the nuances specific intonation practices produce.

This paper combines these methodologies to produce a composite description of a single sonority across three hypothetical performances, moving from abstract cents to concrete hertz and tracking the sonic distortions that may occur. The chord in question is the Neapolitan on beat 3 of “BWV 21/3, “Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not”; the three versions are a modern performance, a performance based on the 1723 Leipzig version, and a performance based on the 1714 Weimar version. Each has a different combination of temperaments, pitch standards, and keys that change how the oboe and organ realize the chord. By comparing upper partial beat frequencies in the organ and timbral distortion caused by pitch bends and fingerings in the oboe, this paper argues that each realization is unique, providing each hypothetical audience with a distinct sonic experience.