Perceptions of More Complete Musical Compositions: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This study describes a methodology for documenting listeners' conceptions of musical structure. The method uses digital technologies that allows precise identification of musical structure, together with a word-processing feature that allows the researcher to capture listeners' interpretations of the piece. In the study, inexperienced listeners (N = 19) and experienced listeners (N = 13) were asked to identify structural events when listening to an intact musical example (last movement, Symphony No. 34 in C major, K. 338 by Mozart). The data collected using this method showed that inexperienced listeners were significantly poorer than the experienced listeners at recognising formal structural events. Most experienced listeners used perceptual attributes or musical labels to describe the structural units that they had identified; many of the inexperienced listeners did not. Eight inexperienced listeners reported psychoacoustic labels, two reported affective labels, four reported sporadic imagery and five reported sustained action involving imagined characters. Thus, this method demonstrated its ability to capture data at each of Umemoto's (1990) four dimensions for analysing compositions.

Graphic Representations of Short Musical Compositions

“…These findings are in line with many other studies that show that musically untrained listeners often focus on personal reactions and extra-musical ideas when listening to music (e.g. Berz and Kelly, 1998;Hedden, 1981;Vernon, 1930). Musically trained listeners, on the other hand, are usually taught to pay more (though not sole) attention to the intrinsic content of the music, reflecting the view that musical meaning is not primarily derived from feelings and ideas outside the music (for example, provided by a program or a personal association), but from musical elements within the music itself (Hanslick, 1986(Hanslick, [1891; Smith, 1795).…”

Musically puzzling II: Sensitivity to overall structure in a Haydn E-minor sonata

“…Moreover, many of them reported noticing explicitly that they were presented with a sonata form and used this to guide their performance on the task. A similar dissociation between explicit identification of the musical piece as a sonata form and the failure to relate its various sections to the functional sections of this form was also reported in Berz and Kelly (1998). This result may reflect on the methods we use to teach our students about the sonata form, possibly indicating too much theoretical training and too little auditory training.…”

Influences of Large-Scale Form on Continuous Ratings in Response to a Contemporary Piece in a Live Concert Setting

“…Few studies of complete musical works have been performed. Of those that have, many have used a segmentation task (at times with post-performance descriptions of the form) to explore the processing of larger scale musical structure (Aiello, 1994;Berz & Kelly, 1998;Clarke & Krumhansl, 1990;Deliège, 1989;Karno & Konečni, 1992;Pollard-Gott, 1983). Globally, the results show effects of change in texture, tempo, density, register, instrumentation, or pauses at section boundaries.…”