Chromatic Mediants and Narrative Context in Film

Heine, E. W.

doi:10.1111/musa.12106

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(20 reference statements)

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“…In particular, theories of extended or chromatic tonality focus on characterizing several repertoires in the Western musical tradition that go beyond major/minor diatonicism, for example by exploring the entire chromatic space or by mixing different diatonic modes (Haas, 2004; Rohrmeier & Moss, 2021; Tymoczko, 2011). Such repertoires include subsets of classical, film, jazz, rock, and pop music (Capuzzo, 2004; Heine, 2018; Rohrmeier, 2020). In jazz, for example, substitutions are essential to improvisation, and musicians are explicitly trained to express their creativity by choosing different equivalent harmonizations (Levine, 1995).…”

Section: A Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study of music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

et al. 2022

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Functional harmony is an integral part of many repertoires in the Western musical practices, including both diatonic and extended tonality. In the latter context, music-theoretical accounts suggest that the three octatonic equivalence classes (OECs) consisting of pitch-classes related by stacked minor-third intervals may be associated with tonic (T), dominant (D), and subdominant (S) functions. Whether this theoretical description of music is also relevant to the perception of music has not yet been tested empirically. In this study, 100 participants familiar with Western repertoires were presented with jazz chord progressions containing chord substitutions. When each stimulus had been played, participants predicted how many more chords they would have expected to hear before the progression could reach a plausible conclusion. We computed the similarity of responses for pairs of stimuli containing different harmonic substitutions and modeled such similarity values based on different measures of harmonic relatedness between substitutions. Data show that the OEC membership of substitutions strongly predicts the similarity of participants’ completion ratings. Bayesian mixed-effects modeling of similarity values further showed a categorical distinction between D and S as functional categories, on one hand, and T, on the other hand. The data also appear to reflect the prevalent influence of rock and pop repertoires on the participants, encouraging further research into the influence of stylistic diversity and musical expertise. Overall, results contribute to the characterization of listeners’ implicit knowledge of the principles of harmonic structure in extended tonality and support the relevance of OECs not only as descriptors of extended-tonal compositional practices but also parsimonious predictors of perceived functionality.

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Section: A Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study of music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

et al. 2022

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“…Stimuli could be High or Low in both Topicality, a feature dependent on enculturation, and Contrast, a psychoacoustic feature less susceptible to enculturation, creating four stimulus categories in total (High Topicality, High Contrast; High Topicality, Low Contrast; Low Topicality, High Contrast; and Low Topicality, Low Contrast). Topicality assesses the degree to which individual excerpts make use of sonic patterns that feature within-culture conventionalized associations-for example horn calls associated with the hunt, or chromatic mediant progressions evocative of wonder (Cohn, 2012;Heine, 2018). Contrast assesses the degree to which individual excerpts vary along salient acoustic parameters.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music?

et al. 2021

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Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative experiences of Western and Chinese instrumental music for listeners in two suburban locations in the United States with those of listeners living in a remote rural village in China with different patterns of musical exposure. Supporting an enculturation perspective where learned extramusical associations (i.e., Topicality) play an important role in narrative perceptions of music, results from the first experiment show that for Western listeners, greater Topicality, rather than greater Contrast, increases narrative engagement, as long as listeners have sufficient exposure to its patterns of use within a culture. Strengthening this interpretation, results for the second experiment, which directly manipulated Topicality and Contrast, show that reducing an excerpt’s Topicality, but not its Contrast reduces listeners’ narrative engagement.

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“…That said, there remains no standardised method for analysing or describing the progression from any one triad to any other. Although neo-Riemannian theory works well in the analysis of chromatic mediants, and there is an argument that long combinations of operations helps to algebraically depict perceived harmonic distance (see Lehman, 2018, p.138), alternative nomenclatural systems are proposed by analysts such as Scott Murphy (2014) and Erik Heine (2018). While Heine makes a strong argument for the associative connotations of four specific chromatic mediants (and refers to them in shorthand as 'M4', 'M3', 'm4' and 'm3'), Murphy's more complete system of tonal triadic progression classes (TTPCs) represents the most effective and, in my view, the clearest way of naming any progression between triads.…”

Section: Example 2 -'Lothlórien' Theme From the Fellowship Of The Ring And The Arabic Maqām Hijazmentioning

confidence: 99%

One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor

White¹

2020

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image

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The opening sequences of narrative films are perhaps the most important moments for establishing a coherent film-world and drawing a viewer into a space and time often quite different from their own, and yet these moments remain largely untheorised within film studies and film music theory in particular. This article analyses the uses of music and sound in the opening sequences of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth trilogies: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and The Hobbit (2009-2011). The paratextual nature of opening sequences might lead us to understand them as theoretical gateways or airlocks, but it is the psychoanalytical concept of suture that proves most effective in theorising music’s dual roles in drawing an audience into a film-world and simultaneously building that world around them. This paper’s motivic and harmonic investigation draws particularly on Scott Murphy’s theories of transformational analysis to understand the different ways that musical language can be established as a form of cinematic suture.

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Chromatic Mediants and Narrative Context in Film

Cited by 6 publications

References 14 publications

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study of music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study of music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music?

One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor

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