The Sweet Sounds of Syntax: Towards Investigating Hierarchical Structures in Music
Date
2019-04-27
Authors
Whitehorne, Lee
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Music comprises connected sequences of hierarchically-related sonic events, roughly analogous in their timescales and construction to the words, phrases and sentences found in language. The concept of “grammatical correctness” in music is somewhat more challenging to define, however—in part due to the nature of structure and meaning in music and how it varies from language. Work such as Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) seminal Generative Theory of Tonal Music (seek to analyze musical structures with a fine degree of detail reminiscent of linguistic theory; most notably, they describe structures of implied “prolongation” of stable musical events across a musical passage, understood intuitively by listeners as the sense of building expectation and resolution felt when listening to a piece of music. Modelling the organization of musical cognition, Lerdahl and Jackendoff suggest rules of well-formedness and preference to help define these structures; this in turn provides a framework for investigating exactly how the mind and brain process the structure of musical ideas as they unfold before our ears. The current research developed a new methodology and stimulus paradigm, rooted in GTTM, for investigating the online processing of hierarchical structures in tonal music, analogous to those of linguistic syntax—informed by prior research such as Ding et al.’s (2016) neurolinguistics study.
Description
Keywords
Linguistic syntax, Music cognition, Hierarchical processing