Identifying the Unknown Communicator in Painting, Literature and Music: The Significance of Minor Encoding Habits

Paisley, William

doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1964.tb02925.x

Cited by 35 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There is some tendency for works with more themes to feature melodies having greater originality (j8 = .03, F = 3.95, p < .05) and the remaining control variable, composer bias, has a significant negative relationship with melodic originality (j8 = -.09, F = 23.85, p < .01). This latter result endorses Paisley's (1964) demonstration that a composer's personal musical style can be uniquely indentified usiug just the first few notes of his or her themes. Because composers with more themes more greatly influenced the expected frequencies used for estimating melodic originality, we would anticipate such composers to have lower melodic originality scores.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Thematic fame and melodic originality in classical music: A multivariate computer-content analysis1

Simonton

1980

J Personality

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In order to understand the foundation of eminence in cultural activities, an attempt was made at learning why some works creators produce are more famous than others. This paper specifically investigates the differential fame of 5,046 themes by 10 eminent composers of classical music. Hypotheses derived from past research in creativity and esthetics were tested using a computerized content analysis. The results show that (a) the fame ofa musical theme is a positive linear function of melodic originality (rather then a curvilinear inverted-U function), and (b) melodic originality is a positive function of biographical stress and of historical time, and an inverted backwards-J function of age.Past research suggests that individual eminence in cultural activities is largely due to creative productivity (Albert, 1975; Simonton, 1977b). That is, the more famous creators are those who produce a large number of notable or influential works. But this very relationship raises yet another question, what are the attributes of a given work which make it earn posterity's high regard? Why are Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Michelangelo's David, and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony better known than comparable works by other creators, or even more appreciated than comparable efforts by the very same creators? Given that any creator's reputation rests on his or her finest works, individual differences in eminence cannot be fully appreciated without first understanding the causes that differentiate major from minor works. Even though there has been some empirical inquiry into the determinants of creative productivity across individuals (Simonton, 1977b) and into the relationship between quality and quantity of productivity within individuals (Simonton, 1977a), little scientific research has been directly aimed at the factors rendering some works more notable than others. To be sure, theoretical and experimental esthetics offers a large body of findings on tbe factors affecting the appreciation of litera-1. A Faculty Crant from the University of California made this project possible. I thank Susan Youel Simonton for helping me define the measure of melodic originality.

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Thematic fame and melodic originality in classical music: A multivariate computer-content analysis1

Simonton

1980

J Personality

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Each genius will tend to display a predilection for a certain type of metaphor, image, expression, or heuristic. For instance, in classical music, despite the fact that each major composer generates hundreds of distinct melodies and that the number of permutations of the chromatic scale is virtually infinite, the thematic signature of each composer can still be uniquely identified -even by a dumb computer (Paisley, 1964;Simonton, 1980). Indeed, historiometric analyses suggest that a cornposer's stylistic personality becomes ever more consolidated over the life span (Simonton, 1980).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Quality and purpose, quantity and chance

Simonton

1988

Creativity Research Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Some early work was published by Schubert (1949), O. WinNer (1950, and Paisley (1964). Czekanowska (1986Czekanowska ( /1969) produced dendrograms on a somewhat ad hoc basis to provide a taxonomy of folksongs.…”

Section: Counting Notes and Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A bibliography of statistical applications in musicology

Nettheim

1997

Musicology Australia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Statistical applications in musicology appear in widely scattered publications. The present bibliography, mainly of English language publications, extends back to the beginning of the present century. The analysis of musical scores is emphasized, but applications in the social sciences arc also touched upon, as well as those to performance studies and algorithmic composition. Statistical techniques include simple summarization, graphical methods, time series analysis, information theory, Zipf's law, Markov chains, fractals, and neural networks. Several cases of misapplication of statistics are noted. Commentary is provided on the field and its sub-fields.

show abstract

Identifying the Unknown Communicator in Painting, Literature and Music: The Significance of Minor Encoding Habits

Cited by 35 publications

References 2 publications

Thematic fame and melodic originality in classical music: A multivariate computer-content analysis1

Thematic fame and melodic originality in classical music: A multivariate computer-content analysis1

Quality and purpose, quantity and chance

A bibliography of statistical applications in musicology

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About