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Perceiving Melodies and Perceiving Musical Colors

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Notes

  1. For discussion of psychological models of visual recognition, see Tarr and Bülthoff 1998. Pinker (1998:274–84) considers the mental rotation of objects in perception, along with issues such as handedness and mirroring.

  2. Obviously this skill can be acquired, however. Typesetters from the era of movable type had to read reverse lettering. Etching and engraving also is done in mirror image.

  3. For further discussion, see Alperson 1980 and Levinson and Alperson 1991.

  4. In a personal communication, Robin Maconie offers this description of the sound of the reversed note: the reversed sound of course consists of an initial radiance that is room resonance that condenses into a more structured and dynamic body of sound that races back and is guillotined with a sense of physical violence at the speaker.

  5. I ignore other factors counting against the musical sense of backwardly directed music; for instance, that rhythms do not always retrograde in a perceptually predictable manner (see Gjerdingen 1993).

  6. The term ‘cancrizan’ is also used for retrograde, but more often refers to a canon where the comes is the dux played backward.

  7. Krumhansl et al. (1987) show that some musically trained listeners can follow the row’s transformation in two chamber pieces by Schoenberg. This need not invalidate Cook’s findings, however, because Webern’s treatment of the material is deliberately less traditionally melodic than Schoenberg’s. Interestingly, rhesus monkeys recognize diatonic melodies when these are transposed at the octave (but not at the fifth), yet do not recognize atonal melodies transposed at the octave (Wright et al. 2000). Also, human babies react positively to diatonic melodies and turn away from atonal ones (Trehub et al. 1990). Such experiments suggest that neural encodings of tonal and atonal melodies are fundamentally different.

  8. Assume it is not reidentified in terms of its location, but only in terms of its appearance.

  9. I consider this case in 2001:57–8. Clarke (2005, ch. 2) offers a detailed discussion and transcription of Hendrix’s performance.

  10. Jonathan McKeown-Green drew my attention to the form of this song.

  11. I do not assume that a melody can always survive modification. The composer might derive one theme from another—perhaps as shown in sketches for a work in which both appear—yet stretch the relationship beyond breaking point, so that the melodies are appropriately experienced as distinct (S. Davies 2001:54–8).

  12. Narmour (1992) identifies sixteen melodic archetypes that can combine to form some 200 complex structures that, in turn, can chain together in a theoretically infinite number of ways. Just as the archetypes are higher-level abstractions than the 200 complex structures, the 200 complex structures must be higher-level abstractions than the Ur-melodies I am describing.

  13. Indeed, the prototype could be more detailed if it is stored in tempo and pitch space as a rich and complex structure, so that when we identify an instance of the melody we find that it is equivalent to a slice of the prototype through tempo and pitch space. Such a prototype is far more detailed than any of the slices that intersect with it.

  14. The need to consider this possibility is suggested by an experiment in which listeners were presented with a number of variants based on an unsounded theme. When later asked to identify, from a series of themes they had not heard previously, their degree of relatedness to the set they had heard, listeners picked the unsounded theme as the most closely related (Welker 1982). A similar result for facial recognition was earlier demonstrated in Solso and McCarthy (1981). Their subjects mistakenly identified the prototype face as having been seen previously and were more confident of this than they were for any of the derivative faces that were actually shown. See also Franks and Bransford 1971.

  15. For discussion of some relevant factors, see Schulkind et al. 2003 and for reviews of brain imagining studies of musical memory and familiarity, see Platel et al. 2004, along with Platel et al. 1997 and Peretz and Zatorre 2005.

  16. For technical discussion of these and other considerations with respect to timbre, see Cogan and Escot 1976:326–401, J. Meyer 1978, Handel 1995, and Risset and Wessel 1999. For a more general introduction, see Dowling and Harwood 1986, ch. 3.

  17. Some individuals have synesthetic color experiences of sounds, a phenomenon sometimes called psychochromasthesia. In other words, they experience sound as colored. (Olivier Messiaen claimed to be a color-sound synesthete and Alexander Scriabin is widely but probably erroneously identified as a color-sound synesthete.) The sounds in question may be phonemes or musical keys, as well as the timbres of instruments. For neurophysiological accounts of synethesia, see Critchley 1977, Cytowic 1989, 1993, and Marks et al. 1987. For detailed discussion of synethesia with respect to music, see Merriam 1964, ch. 5, Brougher et al. 2005, and Higgins 2009, ch. 5.

  18. I allow that the notion of a musical instrument here must be taken broadly; for instance to include, as well as the sirens of police cars, the New Guinea tribe that use their mouths as resonators for the tone of the drone beetle they insert there (Fisher 1994). And I include among the voiced creatures nonhuman animals, such as birds and whales, that often produce clearly pitched tones and glissandi, and have voices with distinctive timbres.

  19. Unrealistic colors (red grass) in paintings do not stimulate the color region of the brain the same way as do realistic colors (red blood) (Zeki 1999).

  20. Music may be able to represent the sources of distinctive non-musical dynamic processes, however, such as steam trains (Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231) or storms at sea (Felix Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave). And it can also represent music, as do onstage bands in opera. For discussion, see S. Davies 1994, ch. 2.

  21. See S. Davies 2001:62–3. For replies to these points and a spirited defense of timbral sonicism, see Dodd 2007.

  22. Levinson (1990b and 2002) defends a position like mine, though I do not share his view that the action that goes into playing music is always apparent in the music made (see S. Davies 2001:66–8) or his theory that we conceive of gestures heard in music as those of an imaginary persona (see Levinson 2006 and S. Davies 2006).

  23. For further discussion, see Clarke 1985, Handel 1989, and Shove and Repp 1995.

  24. For their helpful comments on drafts of this paper, I thank David Braddon-Mitchell, Roberto Casati, Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Nicola Dibben, John Andrew Fisher, Alf Gabrielsson, Andy Hamilton, Sherri Irvin, Fred Kroon, Andrew Kania, Jerrold Levinson, Justin London, Robin Maconie, Jonathan McKeown-Green, Aniruddh Patel, and William Seeley.

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Davies, S. Perceiving Melodies and Perceiving Musical Colors. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 19–39 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-009-0007-2

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