Harmonic Closure: Music Theory and Perception

Abstract

Music theorists have often disagreed about the material variables that determine the perception of harmonic closure. To investigate this controversial topic, we presented subjects with pairs of selected two-chord progressions. The subjects judged which member of each pair seemed more closed. Preferences varied across pairs of cadences and generally obeyed transitivity. Quantitative reformulation of theoretical harmonic variables permitted correlational analysis of the results. Three or four variables, including one or two that reflect learned stylistic structures, best explained our findings. Conventional harmonic factors of scale step, soprano position, and root position demonstrated surprisingly little explanatory power.

Perceiving the Classical Cadence

“…The harmonic and melodic content at the cadential arrival (i.e., the syntactic parameters of tonal music) therefore plays a pivotal role in the perception of closure. Moreover, both groups provided higher completion, confidence, and familiarity ratings for the PAC category than for the other categories, providing converging evidence in support of the claim that listeners familiar with Western music possess a schematic representation for authentic cadential closure (Eberlein, 1997;Eberlein & Fricke, 1992;Gjerdingen, 2007;Rosner & Narmour, 1992;Sloboda, 1985).…”

“…The cadential status of the final tonic in an authentic cadence, for example, is crucially determined by the harmony of the preceding event. In a study examining the perception of harmonic closure in a two-chord context, Rosner and Narmour (1992) reported that schematic representations of root progressions common to known cadences appeared to play the most prominent role in explaining the participants' ratings, leading the authors to claim that the various harmonic formulae located at phrase endings result in the formation of schematic representations of harmonic closure. Eberlein and Fricke (1992) have extended this claim to the melodic, rhythmic, and metric parameters employed in the articulation of cadences, theorizing that experienced listeners of tonal music form schematic representations for frequently occurring cadential formulae.…”

“…Finally, examining a variety of cadential categories will provide the opportunity to consider the cadential hierarchy. Rosner and Narmour (1992) have suggested that style-structural closing schemata may be stored hierarchically in long-term memory, and several theorists have proposed hierarchical models of cadential strength (Caplin, 1998;Latham, 2009;Schmalfeldt, 1992), yet the psychological reality of the cadential hierarchy has not been examined empirically.…”

Different Brain Mechanisms Mediate Sensitivity to Sensory Consonance and Harmonic Context: Evidence from Auditory Event-Related Brain Potentials

“…Expectations for the last chord were varied by changing the harmonic context created by the first six chords. In one context, the last chord was part of an authentic cadence (i.e., a dominant chord followed by a tonic chord, V±I, see Rosner & Narmour, 1992), while in the other context, the last chord took the form of a fourth harmonic degree following an authentic cadence (I±IV, see Figure 1a). The penultimate chord and the target chord were identical in both contexts.…”

Our Varying Histories and Future Potential: Models and Maps in Science, the Humanities, and in Music Theory

“…Statistics, after all, is based on theorems and theoretical laws regarding numbers. Those who use statistics without knowing those theorems and laws do so at their peril (e.g., multiple regressions can be misleading if the data lack homoscedasticity; see Rosner & Narmour, 1992).…”