Philippe Lalitte

The Time Course of Emotional Responses to Music

Abstract: Two empirical studies investigate the time course of emotional responses to music. In the first one, musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning. In one condition, the excerpts were 25 seconds long on average. In the other condition, excerpts were as short as 1 second. The groupings were then transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analyzed with multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). We compared the outcome of these analyses for the 25‐s and 1‐s duration conditions. In the second study, we presented musical excerpts of increasing duration, varying from 250 to 20 seconds. Participants were requested to evaluate on a subjective scale how “moving” each excerpt was. On the basis of the responses given for the longer duration, excerpts were then sorted into two groups: highly moving and weakly (or less) moving. The main purpose of the analysis was to identify the point in time where these two categories of excerpts started to be differentiated by participants. Both studies provide consistent findings that less than 1 s of music is enough to instill elaborated emotional responses in listeners.

The influence of musical relatedness on timbre discrimination

Musical priming research has reported that sensory consonance/dissonance judgements for a target chord were faster when targets were musically related to a musical prime context. The present study extended this context effect to a timbre discrimination task. This new task allowed us to investigate whether musical priming results from congruency effects similar to those reported in other domains. Targets were played with two musical timbres and were either strongly related (i.e., tonic chord) or less related (i.e., subdominant chord) to the prime context. In three experiments, timbre discrimination judgements were always faster for related targets than for less-related targets. This finding establishes that musical relatedness influences the processing of timbres and suggests that this priming effect does not derive from response biases due to congruency effects. Using a timbre discrimination task in musical priming studies offers other methodological advantages and controls, which are discussed in the final section.

Implicit Learning of Nonlocal Musical Rules: A Comment on Kuhn and Dienes (2005).

In a recent study, G. Kuhn and Z. Dienes (2005) reported that participants previously exposed to a set of musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes that respected the grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because the study and test tunes did not share any chunks of adjacent intervals, this result may be construed as straightforward evidence for the implicit learning of a structure that was only governed by nonlocal dependency rules. It is shown here that the grammar modified the statistical distribution of perceptually salient musical events, such as the probability that tunes covered an entire octave. When the influence of these confounds was removed, the effect of grammaticality disappeared.

Looking into the eyes of a conductor performing Lerdahl's “Time after Time”

The eye movements of a conductor were tracked during a performance of Lerdahls “Time after time”. The analysis of the data revealed that, for most of the time, the conductor was looking at the score, rather than the performers. Most of the score-reading was in anticipation of the music to be played. Micro- and macro-anticipations could be defined, the former being between 2 to 5 seconds in advance, the later being more than 5 seconds in advance. The largest visual anticipations were as long as 10 seconds. The longer anticipations were found to correspond to the occurrence of those thematic cells the conductor considered to be of expressive importance for the piece. This suggests that the conductors eye movements were governed on a small scale by the coordination of instrumental performance and on the large scale by his musical conception of the piece.

Towards a semiotic model of mixed music analysis

In this paper I try to outline a model that can bring out the meaningful relationships between ‘the instrumental’ and ‘the electronics’ in mixed music. The model is based on the semiotic square which is considered in semiotics as a powerful conceptual framework to examine the relationships between two terms (S1/S2) and their negative (non-S1/non-S2), terms which can be characters, situations, actions, concepts, etc. Two paradigmatic axes represent the relations between the actors of mixed music: the sources (instrumental and electronic) on the one hand, and the manipulations (real-time processing and sound projection) on the other. According to the semiotic square, the relations inside the environment are defined in terms of contrariety, contradiction and complementarity. This model allows us to start out with a purely technological description of the ‘mixed music’ genre and of individual pieces, with the advantage of a pre-operative analysis of the system. It describes the immanent structure of the environments and releases the potential interactions between the instrumental and the electronics of mixed music. These interactions are examined, from a paradigmatic point of view, with numerous representative pieces of mixed music from the twentieth century.

Boosting syntax training with temporally regular musical primes in children with cochlear implants

OBJECTIVES Previous research has suggested the use of rhythmic structures (implemented in musical material) to improve linguistic structure processing (i.e., syntax processing), in particular for populations showing deficits in syntax and temporal processing (e.g., children with developmental language disorders). The present study proposes a long-term training program to improve syntax processing in children with cochlear implants, a population showing syntax processing deficits in perception and production. METHODS The training program consisted of morphosyntactic training exercises (based on speech processing) that were primed by musical regular primes (8 sessions) or neutral baseline primes (environmental sounds) (8 sessions). A crossover design was used to train 10 deaf children with cochlear implants. Performance in grammatical processing, non-word repetition, attention and memory was assessed before and after training. RESULTS Training increased performance for syntax comprehension after both prime types but for grammaticality judgements and non-word repetition only when musical primes were used during training. For the far-transfer tests, some effects were also observed for attention tasks, especially if fast and precise sequential analysis (sequencing) was required, but not for memory tasks. CONCLUSIONS The findings extend the previously observed beneficial short-term effects of regular musical primes in the laboratory to long-term training effects. Results suggest that the musical primes improved the processing of the syntactic training material, thus enhancing the training effects on grammatical processing as well as phonological processing and sequencing of speech signals. The findings can be interpreted within the dynamic attending theory (postulating the modulation of attention over time) and associated oscillatory brain activity. Furthermore, the findings encourage the use of rhythmic structures (even in non-verbal materials) in language training programs and outline perspectives for rehabilitation.

The Theories of Helmholtz in the Work of Varèse

In 1905 Varèse discovered the French edition of Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik [On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music] of Hermann von Helmholtz (1863), the explicit intention of which was to bring together the common frontiers of science and music. This discovery was a revelation for the 22-year-old composer that went on to condition his whole philosophy of sound. The experiences of the German scientist, achieved with the aid of sirens, resonators or tuning forks, caught the imagination of the young composer. This article investigates the importance of the theories of Helmholtz for the Varèsian aesthetic and tries to put into context the methods of composition inspired by these experiments concerning the spectral constitution of timbres, resultant sounds and beating. We also examine the ways in which a change in the understanding of consonance, initiated by Helmholtz, drove Varèse towards an original conception of atonality.