New Approaches in Applied Musicology

A Common Framework for Music Education and Psychology Research

Adam Ockelford, Graham Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317088745
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book presents four extended essays that are rooted in the growing interdisciplinary field of applied musicology, in which music theory – in particular, the zygonic conjecture – is used to inform thinking in the domains of music psychology, music education and music therapy research. It is essential reading for academics and postgraduate students working in these fields. The topics covered include a new study on the emergence of musical abilities in the early years, using the Sounds of Intent framework of musical development; an exploration of how the Sounds of Intent model can be extended to map how people with learning difficulties engage in creative multisensory activities; an investigation of the expectations generated on hearing a piece of music more than once evolve in cognition, using evidence from a musical savant; and a report on the effect on listeners of repeated exposure to a novel melody. Data are drawn from the findings of postgraduate and postdoctoral projects. It is hoped that this exciting new work will act as a catalyst in the emerging field of applied musicological research, and bring recognition to a group of new young academics.

1 Introduction

Graham Welch and Adam Ockelford

Introduction

The current volume presents four chapters rooted in the growing interdisciplinary field of applied musicology, in which music theory – in particular, the zygonic conjecture – is used to inform thinking in the domains of music-psychological, educational and therapeutic research (Ockelford, 2012a). The zygonic conjecture holds that the cognition of musical structure occurs through one sound or group of sounds being heard as deriving from another or others through imitation. The power of this proposition lies in its very simplicity: it enables both qualitative and quantitative analyses to be undertaken in a range of contexts and to a number of different ends. These include tracing the path of musical development in children with learning difficulties (set out in the Sounds of Intent framework; see Welch et al., 2009), tracking how pieces are learnt through repeated exposure (Ockelford and Pring, 2005; Mazzeschi, 2015), defining patterns of influence in group improvisation (Shibazaki, Ockelford and Marshall, 2013) and articulating the melodic expectations that are engendered in listeners as they attend to serial (atonal) music (Ockelford and Sergeant, 2012).

In the current volume, three topics are chosen that have been the subject of postgraduate research projects at the Applied Music Research Centre of the University of Roehampton, in collaboration with the International Music Education Research Centre at the Institute of Education, University College London, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Data from the projects are subject to fresh analysis with a view to interrogating the deeper cognitive processes involved in perceiving, understanding and remembering music (see Chapters 2, 4 and 5). In Chapter 3, it is theory that drives empirical research, as initial attempts are made to gauge the potential relevance of the zygonic conjecture to other areas of artistic and creative endeavour.

Zygonic theory

Zygonic theory made its first appearance in the academic literature around three decades ago (Ockelford, 1991). It seeks to explain how music makes sense: how it is that human beings, with no formal music education and limited (if any) understanding of musical concepts, come to have an intuitive grasp of what is effectively a form of natural language. The theory holds that the essence of music is that one sound or group of sounds, or a feature or features thereof, should be heard as deriving from another or others through imitation.

In order to describe zygonic theory in more detail, we will consider first the issue of how language-based art forms work, which, as a reflection of an external ‘reality’ or potential, have a more evident source of meaning construction. According to T.S. Eliot (1933, 1960), literature has three principal sources of meaning (couched in terms of aesthetic response):

• an objective correlative – a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the ‘formula of a particular emotion’;
• the manner of representation (including, for example, the use of metaphor);
• the sound qualities and structure of the language itself.

This thinking is shown in Figure 1.1. In semiotic terms, the model captures the stages corresponding to the transition from:

Figure 1.1 Representation of T.S. Eliot’s model of aesthetic response to literary works, and its correspondence to semiotic thinking.

• semantics (the relationships between the signs and the things to which they refer); through
• syntactics (the relationships between the signs themselves); to
• pragmatics (the relationships between the signs and the effects that they have on readers or listeners).

However, absolute music (and the abstract component of music with referential meaning, which overtly refers to extra-musical ideas) has no objective correlative – no semantic component (see Figure 1.2). In these circumstances, how is meaning constructed and conveyed?

Figure 1.2 Absolute music has no objective correlative – so how is meaning conveyed?

In the absence of semantics, it follows that the meaning of music must derive solely from its syntax – the logical arrangement of its constituent sounds – which has two elements: the qualities of the sounds themselves (in zygonic theory referred to as ‘content’) and their organisation (termed ‘structure’).

First, we consider ‘content’. Zygonic theory asserts that all sounds and the relationships we perceive between them can potentially cause or enable an emotional response (cf. Johnson-Laird and Oatley, 1992; Sparshott, 1994, p. 28; Reybrouck and Podlipniak, 2019). There appear to be two main sources of such responses: ‘expressive non-verbal vocalisations’ and ‘music-specific’ qualities of sound.

‘Expressive non-verbal vocalisations’ comprise the cues used to express emotions vocally in non-verbal communication and speech (Juslin, Friberg and Bresin, 2001). They are present cross-culturally (Scherer, Banse and Wallbott, 2001), suggesting a common phylogenetic derivation from ‘non-verbal affect vocalisations’ (Scherer, 1991) and apparently embedded ontogenetically in early maternal/infant interaction (Malloch, 1999; Trehub and Nakata, 2001/2002). It seems that these cues can be transferred in a general way to music, and music-psychological work from the last 80 years or so has shown that features such as register, tempo and dynamic level do relate with some consistency to particular emotional states (Gabrielsson and Lindström, 2000). For example, passages in a high register can feel exciting (Watson, 1942) or exhibit potency (Scherer and Oshinsky, 1977), whereas series of low notes are more likely to promote solemnity or to be perceived as serious (Watson, op. cit.). A fast tempo will tend to induce feelings of excitement (Thompson and Robitaille, 1992), in contrast to slow tempi that may connote tranquillity (Gundlach, 1935) or even peace (Balkwill and Thompson, 1999). Loud dynamic levels are held to be exciting (Watson, op. cit.), to be triumphant (Gundlach, op. cit.) or to represent gaiety (Nielzén and Cesarec, 1982), while quiet sounds have been found to express fear, tenderness or grief (Juslin, 1997). Conversely, as the musicologist Leonard Meyer observed (2001, p. 342), ‘one cannot imagine sadness being portrayed by a fast forte tune played in a high register, or a playful child being depicted by a solemnity of trombones’.

‘Music-specific’ qualities of sound, like those identified above in relation to early vocalisation, have the capacity to induce consistent emotional responses, within and sometimes between cultures, especially for core emotional states such as joy or sadness (Gabrielsson, 2011). For example, in the West and elsewhere, music typically utilises a framework of relative pitches with close connections to the harmonic series. These are used idiosyncratically, with context-dependent frequency of occurrence and transition patterns, together yielding the sensation of ‘tonality’ (Krumhansl, 1997; Peretz, 1998). Such frameworks of relative pitch can accommodate different ‘modalities’, each potentially bearing distinct emotional connotations. In Indian music, for example, the concept of the ‘raga’ is based on the idea that particular patterns of notes are able to evoke heightened states of emotion (Jairazbhoy and Khan, 1971), while in the Western tradition of the last four centuries or so, the ‘major mode’ is typically associated with happiness and the ‘minor mode’ with sadness (Hevner, 1936; Crowder, 1985), differences which have been shown to have neurological correlates (Suzuki et al., 2008; Nemoto, Fujimaki and Wang, 2010).

On their own, however, separate emotional responses to a series of individual sounds or clusters would not add up to a coherent musical message – a unified aesthetic response that evolves over time. So what is it that binds these discrete, abstract experiences together to form a cogent musical narrative? It is our contention that the organising force is ‘structure’, as defined in zygonic theory.

To understand how this works, consider verbal language once more. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ is likely to be a series of events, actions, feelings or thoughts that are in some way logically related, each contingent on another or others through concepts such as causation. Relationships like these will be conveyed and given additional layers of meaning through language-specific relationships such as metaphor (in the domain of ‘manner of representation’), rhyme and meter (in the domain of ‘sounding qualities’) and syntax (in the domain of ‘structure’) – see Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 The forms of logical relationship underpinning meaning in language.

But how does a comparable sense of coherence and unity – a sense of structure – come about in music, when it cannot borrow a sense of contingency from the external world? In the absence of an objective correlative, musical events can refer only to themselves (Selincourt, 1920). Self-evidently, one sound does not cause another one to happen (it is performers who do that), but one can imply another (Meyer, 1989, pp. 84ff) through a sense of derivation. That is, one musical event can be felt to stem from another, and it is our contention that this occurs through imitation: if one fragment or feature of music echoes another, then it owes the nature of its existence to its antecedent. And just as certain perceptual qualities of sound are felt to derive from one another, so too, it is hypothesised, are the emotional responses to each. Hence over time a metaphorical (musical) narrative can be built up through abstract patterns of sound (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 Relationships underpinning logic in music.

The agency through which mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series’ editor’s preface: SEMPRE Studies in The Psychology of Music
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The development of music-structural cognition in the early years: a perspective from the Sounds of Intent model
• 3 Extending the Sounds of Intent model of musical development to explore how people with learning difficulties engage in creative multisensory activities
• 4 Expectations generated on hearing a piece of music on more than one occasion: evidence from a musical savant
• 5 Exploring the effect of repeated listening to a novel melody: a zygonic approach
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index