Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Investigating the influence of musical training on cross-modal correspondences and sensorimotor skills in a real-time drawing paradigm

Previous research comparing musically trained and untrained individuals has yielded valuable insights into music cognition and behaviour. Here, we explore two aspects of musical engagement previously studied separately, auditory-visual correspondences and sensorimotor skills, in a novel real-time drawing paradigm. To that end, musically trained and untrained participants were presented with 18 short sequences of pure tones varying in pitch, loudness and tempo, as well as two short musical excerpts. Using an electronic graphics tablet, participants were asked to represent the sound stimuli visually by drawing along with them while they were played. Results revealed that the majority of participants represented pitch with height (higher on the tablet referring to higher pitches), and loudness with the thickness of the line (thicker line for louder sounds). However, musically untrained participants showed a greater diversity of representation strategies and tended to neglect pitch information if unchanged over time. Investigating the performance accuracy in a subgroup of participants revealed that, while pitch-height correspondences were generally represented more accurately than loudness–thickness correspondences, musically trained participants’ representations of pitch and loudness were more accurate. Results are discussed in terms of cross-modal correspondences, the perception of time, and sensorimotor skills.

Portamento and Musical Meaning

Portamento was a significant expressive device among performers for at least two hundred years; yet, for the past sixty it has made musicians uncomfortable. More than a change of fashion, this suggests responses formed at a relatively deep psychological level. Drawing on work in developmental psychology, and reading in the light of it performances of art music lullabies, it is suggested that portamento draws on innate emotional responses to human sound, as well as on our earliest memories of secure, loving communication, in order to bring to performances a sense of comfort, sincerity, and deep emotion. The decline of portamento after the First World War and its sudden disappearance after the Second is traced to a new emphasis—influenced by psychoanalysis and reflected in writings on music—on darker meanings in music, which can be understood in the light of the reinterpretation of human motives and behavior forced on a wider public by the Second War. Portamento, because of its association (however unconscious) with naive trust and love, became embarrassingly inappropriate. This hypothesis also sheds light on the deepening of vibrato after the War, new objectivity and authenticity in Bach, the rise of music analysis, and the performances and writings of the avant-garde. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to http://www.arts.unco.edu/jmr/ for the following free supplemental resources: eight Sound Clips featuring archival early-twentieth-century recordings of works by Bach, Brahms, Donizetti, and Schubert. Refer to the complete text of the article for specific performance titles and credits.]

Musicians are more consistent: Gestural cross-modal mappings of pitch, loudness and tempo in real-time

Cross-modal mappings of auditory stimuli reveal valuable insights into how humans make sense of sound and music. Whereas researchers have investigated cross-modal mappings of sound features varied in isolation within paradigms such as speeded classification and forced-choice matching tasks, investigations of representations of concurrently varied sound features (e.g., pitch, loudness and tempo) with overt gestures—accounting for the intrinsic link between movement and sound—are scant. To explore the role of bodily gestures in cross-modal mappings of auditory stimuli we asked 64 musically trained and untrained participants to represent pure tones—continually sounding and concurrently varied in pitch, loudness and tempo—with gestures while the sound stimuli were played. We hypothesized musical training to lead to more consistent mappings between pitch and height, loudness and distance/height, and tempo and speed of hand movement and muscular energy. Our results corroborate previously reported pitch vs. height (higher pitch leading to higher elevation in space) and tempo vs. speed (increasing tempo leading to increasing speed of hand movement) associations, but also reveal novel findings pertaining to musical training which influenced consistency of pitch mappings, annulling a commonly observed bias for convex (i.e., rising–falling) pitch contours. Moreover, we reveal effects of interactions between musical parameters on cross-modal mappings (e.g., pitch and loudness on speed of hand movement), highlighting the importance of studying auditory stimuli concurrently varied in different musical parameters. Results are discussed in light of cross-modal cognition, with particular emphasis on studies within (embodied) music cognition. Implications for theoretical refinements and potential clinical applications are provided.

Performance Style in Elena Gerhardt's Schubert Song Recordings

Performance style is conceptualised as a collection of small ‘expressive gestures’ consisting of changes in frequency, loudness or duration within or between notes or phrases. Collections differ somewhat between individuals (personal style) and change in content over time (period style). The changing style of Elena Gerhardt (1883–1965), as documented in her recordings of Schubert Lieder (1911–1939), is analysed through her habits of timbre, vibrato, scoops, portamento, tuning, and rubato. Beneath the general impression of consistency throughout her career, more detailed analysis of the data, especially concerning vibrato and rubato, reveals a process of gradual evolution consistent with the hypothesis that performance style changes in unrecognisably small steps which accumulate rapidly across a musical culture.

Listening and Responding to the Evidence of Early Twentieth-Century Performance

ABSTRACT Early recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very different music-cultural environment? This paper looks at some of the ways in which musical sounds model other processes involving change over time. A mechanism is proposed that may underlie the cross-domain mappings generating musical meaning. Music is seen to be exceptionally adaptable to the modelling of other experiences, able to offer many potential likenesses, among which those with most relevance to what an individual brain already knows and believes are favoured by conscious perception. Performance and perception styles change over time as certain kinds of potential meaning are selected for their relevance to other aspects of contemporary experience. The model helps to explain how subjectivity is constructed and how it changes.

Methods for analysing recordings

If analysis means studying something in order to gain knowledge and understanding of it, then there are any number of ways of analysing recordings, and any number of reasons for doing so. Performers, recording engineers, historians of recording technology and historians of performance practice listen to recordings with quite different kinds of knowledge and understanding in mind: analysis means different things to them. The same applies to acoustic scientists, record collectors and archivists, or communication theorists, not to mention people in the A&R divisions of record companies whose job is to spot the next big hit. The list goes on. This chapter basically assumes that your reason for analysing recordings is to gain a better understanding of them as culturally meaningful objects, and more specifically that you are primarily interested in the effect of music as experienced in performance, whether live or recorded. In that sense its orientation is musicological, although that too is a term that can be defined in different ways. Recordings are a largely untapped resource for the writing of music history, the focus of which has up to now been overwhelmingly on scores, and recent technological developments have opened up new ways of working with recordings – ways that make it much easier than before to manipulate them, in the sense that we are used to manipulating books and other written sources. I begin by introducing software that makes it possible to navigate a number of different recordings, and to create visualisations that help to heighten aural understanding of what is going on in the music.

Recording practices and the role of the producer

Introduction The editors 1 Personal takes: Learning to live with recording Susan Tomes 10 A short take in praise of long takes Peter Hill 13 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone Donald Greig 16 Personal takes: Producing a credible vocal Mike Howlett 30 ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction Steve Savage 32 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer Andrew Blake 36 Personal takes: Still small voices Jonathan Freeman-Attwood 54 Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio Michael Haas 59 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering Albin Zak 63 Personal takes: Limitations and creativity in recording and performance Martyn Ware 77 Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80 Richard Witts 80

Sound and meaning in recordings of Schubert's "Die junge Nonne"

Musicologys growing interest in performance brings it closer to musical science through a shared interest in the relationship between musical sounds and emotional states. However, the fact that musical performance styles change over time implies that understandings of musical compositions change too. And this has implications for studies of music cognition. While the mechanisms by which musical sounds suggest meaning are likely to be biologically grounded, what musical sounds signify in specific performance contexts today may not always be what they signified in the past, nor what they will signify in the future. Studies of music cognition need to take account of performance style change and its potential to inflect conclusions with cultural assumptions. The recorded performance history of Schuberts “Die junge Nonne” offers examples of significant change in style, as well as a range of radically contrasting views of what the songs text may mean. By examining details of performances, and interpreting them in the light of work on music perception and cognition, it is possible to gain a clearer understanding of how signs of emotional state are deployed in performance by singers. At the same time, in the absence of strong evidence as to how individual performances were understood in the past, we have to recognise that we can only speak with any confidence for our own time.

Le Voir Dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame : aspects of genre and style in late works of MacHaut

Le Voir Dit is one of the most fascinating of the works left by the celebrated poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut ( d . 1377), and at the same time, as John Stevens has said, ‘one of the most curious documents of the [fourteenth] century’. Through 9000 lines of narrative, sixty-two lyrics in all the main forms (nine of them set to music), and forty-six letters which include comments on the character of the songs and on the business of producing poetry, music and manuscripts, we seem to take a guided tour of Machauts emotional and professional life over three years of his old age. For more than a century it has proved a rich source of revealing quotations, sustaining many varied arguments. The story it tells of Machauts literary and emotional affair with a young girl, Peronne, has been read at times as autobiography, at times as fiction; and the incidental comments on composition, performance and copying have been interpreted in studies ranging far beyond Le Voir Dit as evidence of fourteenth-century professional practice. None the less, the constituent parts of the text as they survive in manuscripts from Machauts circle are disordered, the poem lacks an adequate published edition, and even its music – in size, at least, the most manageable of its components – has yet to be considered as a whole.

Classical music as enforced Utopia

In classical music composition, whatever thematic or harmonic conflicts may be engineered along the way, everything always turns out for the best. Similar utopian thinking underlies performance: performers see their job as faithfully carrying out their master’s (the composer’s) wishes. The more perfectly they represent them, the happier the result. But why should performers not have a critical role to play in re-presenting a score, just as actors are permitted – required even – to find new meanings and new relevance in texts? And what or whom are performers obeying, the long dead composer (and what is the ethical basis for that?) or a policing system (teachers, examiners, adjudicators, critics, agents, promoters, record producers) that enforces an imaginary tradition from childhood to grave? Starting from the evidence of early recordings, showing that composers are misrepresented, this article seeks to unpick some of the delusions that support classical music practice.