The cognition of harmonic tonality in microtonal scales

Abstract

Music is ubiquitous across all human cultures. It is hypothesised that the development of music and of language in human evolution is linked (Wallin et al., 2001), and music, in addition to language, is known to be communicative. One way music "" particularly music employing the widely used system of tonality "" communicates is through tension and resolution, or stability and instability, where instability is the need to resolve and stability its destination. Most tonal-harmonic music today exists in a Western tuning system and experimental research into the perception of harmonic tonality is conducted almost entirely in 12-TET. This project is the first empirical study of the cognition of harmonic tonality in microtonal scales. Through the employment of novel scales in an unfamiliar tuning system, effects of familiarity are weakened, allowing a more focussed investigation of other effects. Particularly, bottom-up models for the cognition of harmonic tonality are allowed a more careful investigation, providing valuable insight into the cognition of music otherwise beyond reach. This research also provides valuable information for hopeful composers of novel music in shaping their music to elicit a desired response, thus enabling expansion of the palette of possible musical expression. This project utilizes a common experimental paradigm for research into the cognition of tonality: participants are first played context-setting stimuli, after which a probe tone or chord is sounded and they are asked to rate how well the probe tone "fits" the context, or how stable it is given the context. A psychoacoustic feature "" spectral pitch class similarity "" is used to predict the perceived stability of pitch classes and triads of not only familiar scales (Experiment 1), but unfamiliar (Experiment 2), and novel scales (Experiments 3-5), where models of long-term statistical learning are available only for familiar scales. Through a series of 5 experiments the perceived stability of tones and triads in novel, microtonal scales is predicted, demonstrating the usefulness of our psychoacoustic model.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English