Siu-Lan Tan

Graphic Representations of Short Musical Compositions

Sixty college students were asked to ‘make any marks’ to visually represent five short orchestral compositions, and to write essays to explain their graphic representations. Most musically trained participants provided abstract representations (symbols or lines), while most pictorial representations (images or pictures telling a story) were created by musically untrained participants. A content analysis of the essays revealed that trained participants focused on themes, repetition, mode, changes in pitch, instruments, interplay of different instruments, and sections of the composition. Untrained participants were more likely to focus on arousal of emotions or sensations, fleeting images, and to create stories to accompany the music. Four styles of representations emerged, depending on whether listeners attended primarily to global qualities, fluctuations in dimensions of sound, perceptually salient features, or underlying structure of compositions.

The psychology of music in multimedia

PART I. MODELS AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES PART II. CROSS-MODAL RELATIONS IN MULTIMEDIA PART III. INTERPRETATION AND MEANING PART IV. APPLICATIONS: MUSIC AND SOUND IN MULTIMEDIA PART V. FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Listeners’ judgments of the musical unity of structurally altered and intact musical compositions

The aims of this study were to examine how listeners judge musical unity and whether they can detect lack of unity in compositions that have been structurally altered. Participants listened to 15 piano solos. Five were not altered. Ten were altered by combining three sections of three different compositions, or by repeating the same section three times in succession. Although their unity ratings for the 15 compositions were similar, trained and untrained participants focused on different aspects of the music. When judging unity, musically trained participants focused on repetition, themes/motifs, transitions, endings, and contrast providing overall balance. Untrained participants focused on pitch contour and range, tempo, mood, and pauses when judging musical unity. Although participants were not aware that any compositions had been altered, both groups were sensitive to varying degrees of repetition and variety in altered and unaltered compositions as shown in their unity ratings and written descriptions.

Musically untrained college students' interpretations of musical notation: sound, silence, loudness, duration, and temporal order

Fifty participants who had never learned how to read music completed a questionnaire about their interpretations of standard western musical notation. Some common assumptions were that a note must consist of a circle plus a line, symbols with unfilled spaces denote silence, the value of notes and rests increases with the size and number of features of a symbol, pitch is denoted by both note-head and stem, and tempo is determined by horizontal spacing. These assumptions are not consistent with the conventions of standard musical notation, thus the findings of the study suggest that many fundamental aspects of notation are not intuitive to beginners. Implications of the findings are discussed with respect to music pedagogy.

Influence of literacy on representation of time in musical stimuli: An exploratory cross-cultural study in the UK, Japan, and Papua New Guinea

Previous research has shown that literacy influences some dimensions of the visual (or graphic) representation of temporal events, and that concepts of time vary across cultures. The present exploratory study extends the scope of this research by examining representations of brief rhythmic sequences by individuals living in literate and nonliterate societies. A total of 122 participants were recruited at five sites: British musicians in the UK; Japanese musicians familiar and unfamiliar with English and Western Standard Notation (WSN) in Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan; language/WSN literate Papua New Guinean highlanders in Port Moresby; and nonliterate BenaBena tribe members in Papua New Guinea. In the first study, participants listened to brief rhythmic sequences and were asked to represent these graphically on paper in any manner of their choosing. In the second study, participants matched the auditory stimuli with pre-constructed sets of marks varying in directionality (i.e. the direction in which they should be read to correspond with the auditory events). The responses of literate participants generally reflected the directionality of their acquired writing systems, while responses of nonliterate participants conveyed no clear preference for directionality. In both studies, responses of literate and nonliterate groups in Papua New Guinea were distinct from each other.