Grouping in Music Composition, Performance and Listening

The figure on the cover is a modified version of figure 9 in W. Jay Dowling's article. It shows the melody Twinkle, twinkle little Star (squares) together with distractors. Preface On a sunny day in late May 1991, the Music Acoustics Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music arranged a full-day public seminar. The theme was called Mzlsicidn's Tone Glzle and it concerned the phenomenon that when we listen to music we hear that some tones belong together while others do not. This seems to be of fundamental significance to music communication. Composers carefully mark, e.g. by pitch jumps, tone length and harmonic formulae, what notes belong together and form groups, and where the boundaries are between different groups of tones. These aspects were discussed by Gerald Bennett, Professor of Music Composition at the Ziirich Music Conservatory. When musicians play music, they insert micropauses, lengthenings, shortenings, tempo changes and many other details to show the listener where the boundaries are, which notes and chords are remarkable and which are not. In this way they facilitate the listener's understanding of the piece. This topic I discussed myself in my contribution. Music is probably the only form of human culture that is appreciated by very nearly 100% of the population in all civilizations. Of course the types of music that people prefer to listen to varies considerably, but almost everybody wants to listen to music every now and then. Further, even small children like music. What is the reason for this? A factor of relevance might be that music and languagelspeech share significant characteristics. For example, both are communicated by means of acoustic signals that are processed by the auditory system. Also, both have syntax, grammar and hierarchical structure. Are the reasons for all theses parallels that both explore innate potentials of the human perception mechanism? York, reviewed her own and her fellow researchers' investigations of infants' perception of musical and speech structures. The composer's and the performer's hints as to musical structure trigger psychological processes in the listener. These processes were considered by His vast experimental work has revealed that the processes depend on the listener's previous knowledge providing a basis for expectancies.The listener also has a special tool that both composers and performers play on, namely the possibility of selective attention, i.e. the focussing of one's attention on one particular tone sequence imbebbed in a great number of other …