Empirical Musicology Review Supplementary Materials

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This collection contains supplementary materials to accompany articles in Empirical Musicology Review and provide a deeper understanding of the presented scholarship.


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    Supplementary Materials for "Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process?"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023) Rom, Uri B.; Rosset, Saharon
    Theories of tonal music take for granted that all keys of the same mode (i.e., all major and all minor keys) are employed by composers in essentially the same way; however, newer analytical and cognitive research challenges this view by pointing to aspects of transpositional nonequivalence among the keys. The present study offers possibly the first systematic, data-driven investigation of correlations between the choice of absolute key and structure across a composer's body of works. By performing an extensive corpus-based analysis of music by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91), we derive 55 prototypes, subsuming phenomena from three independent domains: dynamic-rhetoric gestures that launch orchestral works, digressions to the parallel minor in sonata-allegro movements, and the occurrences of a particular six-note motive across Mozart's complete oeuvre. Ten prototypes display a significant association with a specific key after correction for multiple comparisons, amounting to a statistically significant total. Investigation of key-related musical structure offers fresh insight into Mozart's compositional decisions and the relation between schemata and their instantiations in his works, at the same time suggesting a revised perspective on traditional key characteristics. Mozart's perfect pitch offers one possible explanation for the role of key-related structure in his works; however, we also contemplate other possible explanations.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Isaac Newton's Microtonal Approach to Just Intonation"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2021) Muzzulini, Daniel
    In 1665 Isaac Newton wrote a notebook in which he collected materials for a musical treatise which was never completed. He investigated ways of approximately representing just intonation scales by dividing the octave into many equally sized intervals. Strictly speaking, equal divisions of the octave are incompatible with just intonation, and just intonation intervals are audibly different from the intervals played on a modern equally tempered modern piano. By increasing the number of parts of an equal division, just intonation can be approximated arbitrarily well. Scales with more than 60 microtonal steps per octave, however, never gained wide acceptance in music theory or practice. Newton divided the octave into 612 equal parts so that he could represent the syntonic chromatic scale very accurately and he studied several equal divisions of the octave with fewer parts. His approximation problem is looked at in three ways: (1) A reconstruction of how he determined the many EDO-representations listed in the notebook is given. (2) Using computer programs Newton's tuning problem is solved "empirically" through calculating and evaluating the related approximations comprehensively. (3) The findings from the computer-assisted analysis are used to develop a more general geometric approach to the approximation problem.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Historical Trends in Expressive Timing Strategies: Chopin's Etude, Op. 25 no. 1"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2021) Rector, Michael
    Studies of early 20th-century performance practice tend to focus on features that are alien to late 20th- and early 21st-century ears. Empirical analysis of timing in recordings of Chopin's Etude, Op. 25 no. 1—a piece for which performance style has remained relatively static—suggests how some foundational rules of phrasing and expressive nuance have changed over the history of recorded music. Melody note onsets were marked manually in 127 commercial recordings dating from 1909 to 2016. Overall, the data do not show an increase or decrease over time in the amount of tempo fluctuation. Independently of a tendency to use slower tempi, pianists changed the way they employ rubato. Several factors contribute to a trend whereby the fourth beat is lengthened at the expense of the second and third beats: an increase in phrase-final lengthening, an increase in the use of tempo arching for shorter groups of measures, and a tendency to delay the arrival of an accented dissonance or change of harmony instead of lengthening the melody inter-onset interval that contains it. The data illustrate nearly imperceptible shifts in interpretation and suggest that some practices thought to be the bedrock of expressive performance may be historically conditioned.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Two Studies of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): The Relationship between ASMR and Music-Induced Frisson"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018) Kovacevich, Alexsandra; Huron, David
    In recent years, a widely popular phenomenon has emerged as exemplified in thousands of videos available on the Internet. Referred to using the impressive sounding term "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" (abbreviated ASMR), followers claim that ASMR videos evoke a special "tingling" sensation that is regarded as highly pleasurable and relaxing. The popularity of this phenomenon is reflected in individual ASMR videos receiving more than 43 million views and a reddit ASMR forum with over 130,000 subscribers. Two exploratory studies are reported. In the first study, a content analysis was carried out on 30 popular ASMR videos, and compared with 30 videos employing two different control methods. In the second study, a content analysis was carried out on 3,600 comments on discussion forums and accompanying ASMR videos. The results indicate that ASMR videos typically employ a quiet, private scene, with a relaxed, friendly, and intimate actor ("ASMRtist"). Although ASMR is evoked by non-musical stimuli, the physiological responses to ASMR (skin-related tingling and goosebumps) strongly resemble the classic frisson experience—a phenomenon that has received considerable attention among music perception researchers. Careful consideration of ASMR stimuli and responses suggest that ASMR is consistent with Huron's (2006) theory of frisson.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Microtonal Analysis of 'Blue Notes' and the Blues Scale"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018) Cutting, Court B.
    Microtonal evaluation of blue notes in the early blues scale by empirical pitch measurement and statistical characterization has not yet been performed in existing research. To address this, fifteen recorded classic blues performances by acknowledged early masters of the blues were studied. Computer based methods were used to collect the audio frequencies of note samples from each performance. Each note had its frequency ratio with respect to the average tonic tone for the performance converted to microtonal cents format. Cluster analysis was performed on these note collections to identify individual note clusters. The fourth and fifth were clearly identified. Three principal "blue note" clusters were isolated with means of 319.1, 582.8, and 1037.9 cents. These values corresponded closely to the harmonic half diminished seventh chord (i.e. 1, ♭3, ♭5, ♭7 with harmonics 5:6:7:9). The "neutral" third was confirmed to occur in this sample. A similar blending of the perfect fourth and tritone was demonstrated in this study. The flat 7th presented as three separate clusters. Several clusters idiosyncratic to individual performers were also identified. Findings are discussed with regards to the array of theories proposed to explain the blues.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Emotion Painting: Lyric, Affect, and Musical Relationships in a Large Lead-Sheet Corpus"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2017) Sun, Sophia H.; Cuthbert, Michael Scott
    How are lyrical emotions expressed in music? This paper explores the correlation between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, duration, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Using computer-aided musicology software music21 and the NRC emotion lexicon, we conduct a corpus study on 1,895 folk and popular song lead-sheets encoded as MusicXML. The study reveals that metrical strength and note lengths are highly correlated with affects, while correlations of pitch height, consonance, and mode are in general less significant, at times contradicting previous research. Measurements of minor vs. major chordal context and tonal certainty, however, reveal certain previously unknown differences among emotional states. The paper uses a larger dataset of observations and gives greater values of significance than has appeared in symbolic corpus analysis of emotions in the past, and includes general discussions and directions for future work.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Tapping to Carter: Mensural Determinacy in Complex Rhythmic Sequences"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2017) Poudrier, Ève
    The tapping paradigm has played an important role in formulating beat induction models. However, experimental studies that make use of actual music as source materials to investigate pulse finding mechanisms in complex rhythmic sequences are lacking. The present study proposes to use the concept of mensural determinacy, that is, the emergence of temporal expectations that may or may not be realized (Hasty, 1997), to explore the relative salience of an implied beat in two contrasting rhythmic sequences extracted from Elliott Carter's 90+ for piano (1994), and test the influence of style-specific expertise on listeners' spontaneous tapping performance. The results of the experiment were consistent with the hypothesis that familiarity with the style represented by the source materials contributes to a more stable tapping period. In addition, although accent was found to have a main effect on tapping behavior, it also interacted with global temporal structure and a number of musical parameters and participant characteristics, including gender. Exploratory analyses of several additional musical parameters and participants' characteristics are also suggestive of how experimental methods could be complemented by post-hoc score analysis to investigate the contributions of specific factors to the relative influence of first- and second-order periodicity on musicians' beat percepts.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Comparing Timeline Rhythms in Pygmy and Bushmen Music"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2017) Poole, Adrian
    Combining theories of African rhythm from ethno/musicology and findings from anthropological research and population genetics with musical analyses based on transcriptions and computational phylogenetic techniques, this article compares rhythms used in Pygmy and Bushmen music in an attempt to provide new perspectives on an old debate that these musical cultures may share a common heritage. To do this, the comparative analyses focus on timelines: foundational rhythmic features that provide the structural basis of the music. The findings suggest that Pygmy and Bushmen timelines are interrelated and that most are organised according to the principles of 'rhythmic oddity' and maximal evenness. Generative theory suggests that commonly used rhythmic cells, in particular the 3:2 pattern, form the structural basis of many Pygmy/Bushmen timelines as well as many other timelines featured in African and African-derived musics. Timelines are also multi-purpose musical devices used in various different social contexts and their structure appears to be resilient to radical change. Phylogenetic analysis of timelines provides no clear Pygmy/Bushmen ancestral timeline, although it is possible that foundational rhythms such as the 3:2 pattern may have featured in the music of a common ancestral group.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Small Influence of Performing from Memory on Audience Evaluation"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2017) Kopiez, Reinhard; Wolf, Anna; Platz, Friedrich
    This study investigates the influence of an actual music stand on the evaluation of a videotaped audio-visual solo instrumental performance. Previous research has provided evidence that the presence of a score or music stand (obstructing the audience's view of the performer) might negatively influence the evaluation of the performance. However, due to methodological ambiguities, results in previous studies cannot be regarded as definitive. Thus, we conducted a replication study of Williamon (1999) with better control over confounding variables (e.g., varying levels of technical proficiency in different conditions). A violoncello player performed two pieces for solo instrument: once with a music stand on stage (pretending to play from score) and once without. The level of technical proficiency was kept constant in both performance presentations by the use of a pre-recorded, well-rehearsed performance from memory. Audio tracks were synchronized with the performance movements in a playback paradigm. Based on the performance evaluations from a web-based experiment (N = 471 participants), we found a significant but small effect size for the main effect of performance presentation (with vs. without music stand) (d = 0.23). We conclude that the audience's appreciation of a particular performance from memory might be based on factors other than the objective performance quality.
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    Supplementary Materials for "In Search of the Golden Age Hip-Hop Sound (1986–1996)"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2017) Duinker, Ben; Martin, Denis
    The notion of a musical repertoire's "sound" is frequently evoked in journalism and scholarship, but what parameters comprise such a sound? This question is addressed through a statistically-driven corpus analysis of hip-hop music released during the genre's Golden Age era. The first part of the paper presents a methodology for developing, transcribing, and analyzing a corpus of 100 hip-hop tracks released during the Golden Age. Eight categories of aurally salient musical and production parameters are analyzed: tempo, orchestration and texture, harmony, form, vocal and lyric profiles, global and local production effects, vocal doubling and backing, and loudness and compression. The second part of the paper organizes the analysis data into three trend categories: trends of change (parameters that change over time), trends of prevalence (parameters that remain generally constant across the corpus), and trends of similarity (parameters that are similar from song to song). These trends form a generalized model of the Golden Age hip-hop sound which considers both global (the whole corpus) and local (unique songs within the corpus) contexts. By operationalizing "sound" as the sum of musical and production parameters, aspects of popular music that are resistant to traditional music-analytical methods can be considered.
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    Supplementary Material for "Style and Flow: A Commentary on Duinker & Martin"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2017) Katz, Jonah
    Duinker and Martin's excellent study presents a wealth of new data, findings, and analyses. It represents a welcome focus on the details of musical aspects of hip-hop, as well as an effort to combine those details with more global aspects of recordings in order to clarify what our notions of hip-hop 'style' or 'sound' are based on. The examination of instrumental backgrounds and production parameters is particularly novel. I would suggest, however, that the study could have benefitted from the use of details pertaining to flow, particularly in the examination of trends over time and stylistic sub-groupings. I show that several parameters pertaining to the complexity, rhythmic placement, and repetitiveness of rhymes help track changes in hip-hop style over time, distinguish between more and less similar songs, and capture effects of apparent time within the same actual time period.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Investigating Periodic Body Motions as a Tacit Reference Structure in Norwegian Telespringar Performance"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2016) Haugen, Mari Romarheim
    The pulse level in music is often described as a series of isochronous beats that provides an underlying reference structure against which we perceive rhythmic patterns. This notion is challenged by music styles that seem to feature an underlying reference structure that consists of beats of uneven duration, such as certain traditional Scandinavian dance music genres in so-called asymmetrical meter. This study investigates periodic body motion as a reference structure in a specific style of traditional Norwegian dance music called telespringar. The intimate relationship between music and motion is often highlighted in rhythm studies of telespringar, so this study encompasses both sound and motion analyses. It is based on a motion capture study of three telespringar performers; one fiddler and two dancers. Motion analysis of the fiddler's foot stamping indicates a stable long–medium–short duration pattern at beat level. Motion analysis of the dancers' vertical motion of the hips revealed a periodic pattern in synchrony with the beat duration pattern determined by the fiddler's foot stamping. This result implies that the underlying rhythmic structures in telespringar depend upon a shared and embodied knowledge of the underlying asymmetrical reference structure that is implicit in the production and perception of telespringar.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Sonata Form in the Nineteenth-Century Symphony"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2016) Cannon, Steven Craig
    This paper presents an analytical survey of 283 symphonies dating from 1800–1899. Features of full symphonies include the rate of compositional output over the course of the century, the number, order, and keys of movements, and the prevalence of sonata form. Individual movements that use sonata form receive greater attention, including analysis of the general proportions of internal sections (that is, relative lengths of slow introductions, expositions, developments, and recapitulations plus codas), as well as overall tonal plans.
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    Supplementary Material for "The 'Rhythmic Fingerprint': An Extension of the nPVI to Quantify Rhythmic Influence"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2016) Daniele, Joseph R.
    This article is in response to Leigh Van Handel’s "The war of the Romantics: An alternative hypothesis using nPVI for the quantitative anthropology of music." (2016) I address comments made in Van Handel's response and propose a new tool, the "rhythmic fingerprint," to move away from representing a composer as a single value (e.g. mean nPVI) and more accurately quantify and classify rhythmic influence within a composer's lifetime.
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    Supplementary Materials for "Expectancy-violation and information-theoretic models of melodic complexity"
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2016) Eerola, Tuomas
    The present study assesses two types of models for melodic complexity: one based on expectancy violations and the other one related to an information-theoretic account of redundancy in music. Seven different datasets spanning artificial sequences, folk and pop songs were used to refine and assess the models. The refinement eliminated unnecessary components from both types of models. The final analysis pitted three variants of the two model types against each other and could explain from 46-74% of the variance in the ratings across the datasets. The most parsimonious models were identified with an information-theoretic criterion. This suggested that the simplified expectancy-violation models were the most efficient for these sets of data. However, the differences between all optimized models were subtle in terms both of performance and simplicity.