Graphic Representations of Short Musical Compositions

Abstract

A B S T R AC T 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. K E Y W O R D S : listening maps, music, music listening, musically trained, musically untrained, visual representation Graphic representations are a topic of interest in several areas of music research. Among other questions, researchers are interested in how graphic representations of music created by children and adults shed light on the development of understanding of symbol systems (Sadek

Cross-Cultural Representations of Musical Shape

“…The musically trained participants demonstrated a tendency to create representations aligned on an x-y axis (henceforth referred to as Cartesian), representing time in a horizontal, left-to-right fashion, and depicting aspects of the musical surface (primarily pitch) on the vertical axis, in accordance with findings described elsewhere (Athanasopoulos & Moran, 2012;Athanasopoulos, Moran, & Frith, 2011). However, Tan and Kelly (2004) also found that musically untrained participants tended to provide pictorial representations through images or pictures telling a story. Küssner (2013) obtained comparable results from British participants.…”

“…Undertaking just this task, Tan and Kelly (2004) used whole musical compositions as stimuli, requesting musically trained and untrained US college participants to "make any marks" in order to represent the sounds visually. The musically trained participants demonstrated a tendency to create representations aligned on an x-y axis (henceforth referred to as Cartesian), representing time in a horizontal, left-to-right fashion, and depicting aspects of the musical surface (primarily pitch) on the vertical axis, in accordance with findings described elsewhere (Athanasopoulos & Moran, 2012;Athanasopoulos, Moran, & Frith, 2011).…”

“…Similar to the method of Tan and Kelly (2004), Bamberger (2005) and Barrett (2005) designed studies that permitted their participants to create notational systems of their own "invention" without being restricted to the pitch versus time model which most organised notational systems follow. In these two investigations, participants (mainly children) were asked to provide a means of invented notation for a familiar tune so that one of their peers would be able to perform the tune, without further guidance from the researcher.…”

“…• Individuals literate in western standard notation (WSN) or Japanese traditional notation (JTN) will depict variations in pitch taking a Cartesian approach, using orthogonal axes to show time versus pitch, thus representing sequential occurrence (Küssner & Leech-Wilkinson, in press;Tan & Kelly, 2004). …”

Quantifying Shapes: Mathematical Techniques for Analysing Visual Representations of Sound and Music

“…This issue has been addressed by scholars from various disciplines to shed light on questions such as how we perceive motion in music (Repp, 1993;Godøy, Haga & Jensenius, 2006), how auditory information is processed and mapped onto the visual domain (Marks, 2004;Spence, 2011), how children develop an understanding of rhythm (Bamberger, 1995) and represent music graphically (Reybrouck, Verschaffel, & Lauwerier, 2009;Verschaffel, Reybrouck, Janssens, & Van Dooren, 2010), and how musical training influences the ways in which we represent short but complete musical compositions visually (Tan & Kelly, 2004). The idea that musical training affects how adults hear music has been around for several decades (Sloboda, 1985), including the belief that experts and novices listen to music differently (Gromko, 1993) and that musical training leads to adults paying more attention to the structural properties of musical stimuli that they hear (Sloboda, 1984).…”