Development of Listenership for Indian Hindustani Music By Using Mimetic Comprehension (original) (raw)
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Meer, Wim van der and Suvarnalata Rao, What You Hear Isn't What You See: The representation and cognition of fast movements in Hindustani music, FRSM 2006, Lucknow
In Hindustani music the space ‘between the notes’ is often more important than the discrete notes themselves. With the help of melography, and more in particular the use of advanced models of pitch perception in computer software, we can actually ‘see’ the precise forms of meend and other aspects of pitch bending. Generally, both musicians and musicologists agree that this graphic representation does much better justice to the music than staff notation or sargam notation. However, there are also serious limitations, especially when we look closely at rapid ornamentations or tans. From perception studies of the seventies it is known that the ear starts averaging out rapidly oscillating pitches at speeds of 6 movements per second. In this paper, we demonstrate the limitation of this hypothesis and attempt to formulate a model of how the visual representation corresponds to the perceived note patterns in case of fast movements involving murki and gamak. The article is online here: http://bakesociety.net/van-der-meer-and-rao-what-you-hear-isnt-what-you-see/
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Cross-cultural influences on rhythm processing: reproduction, discrimination, and beat tapping
The structures of musical rhythm differ between cultures, despite the fact that the ability to entrain movement to musical rhythm occurs in virtually all individuals across cultures. To measure the influence of culture on rhythm processing, we tested East African and North American adults on perception, production, and beat tapping for rhythms derived from East African and Western music. To assess rhythm perception, participants identified whether pairs of rhythms were the same or different. To assess rhythm production, participants reproduced rhythms after hearing them. To assess beat tapping, participants tapped the beat along with repeated rhythms. We expected that performance in all three tasks would be influenced by the culture of the participant and the culture of the rhythm. Specifically, we predicted that a participant's ability to discriminate, reproduce, and accurately tap the beat would be better for rhythms from their own culture than for rhythms from another culture. In the rhythm discrimination task, there were no differences in discriminating culturally familiar and unfamiliar rhythms. In the rhythm reproduction task, both groups reproduced East African rhythms more accurately than Western rhythms, but East African participants also showed an effect of cultural familiarity, leading to a significant interaction. In the beat tapping task, participants in both groups tapped the beat more accurately for culturally familiar than for unfamiliar rhythms. Moreover, there were differences between the two participant groups, and between the two types of rhythms, in the metrical level selected for beat tapping. The results demonstrate that culture does influence the processing of musical rhythm. In terms of the function of musical rhythm, our results are consistent with theories that musical rhythm enables synchronization. Musical rhythm may foster musical cultural identity by enabling within-group synchronization to music, perhaps supporting social cohesion.
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Implicit learning of Indian music by Westerners
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How does our mind process musical rhythm? Based on recent researches and theories on music cognition, the present paper seeks to clarify this question by discussing some issues related to rhythm perception, such as the mental processes involved in the recognition, coding, and retrieval of rhythm and the influence of enculturation and formal musical training on these processes.
Effects of perceptual experience on children's and adults’ perception of unfamiliar rhythms
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2012
Rhythm and meter are fundamental components of music that are universal yet also culture specific. Although simple, isochronous meters are preferred and more readily discriminated than highly complex, nonisochronous meters, moderately complex nonisochronous meters do not pose a problem for listeners who are exposed to them from a young age. The present work uses a behavioral task to examine the ease with which listeners of various ages acquire knowledge of unfamiliar metrical structures from passive exposure. We examined perception of familiar (Western) rhythms with an isochronous meter and unfamiliar (Balkan) rhythms with a nonisochronous meter. We compared discrimination by American children (5 to 11 years) and adults before and after a 2-week period of athome listening to nonisochronous meter music from Bulgaria. During the first session, listeners of all ages exhibited superior discrimination of isochronous than in nonisochronous melodies. Across sessions, this asymmetry declined for young children but not for older children and adults.
We used Toiviainen and Krumhansl's (2003) concurrent probe-tone technique to track Indian and Western musicians' tonal-hierarchy profiles through modulations in Carnātic (South Indian classical) music. Changes of mode (rāgam) are particularly interesting in Carnātic music because of the large number of modes (more than 300) in its tonal system. We first had musicians generate profiles to establish a baseline for each of four rāgams in isolation. Then we obtained dynamic profiles of two modulating excerpts, each of which incorporated two of the four baseline rāgams. The two excerpts used the two techniques of modulation in Carnātic music: grahabēdham (analogous to a Western shift from C major to A minor), and rāgamālikā (analogous to a shift from C major to C minor). We assessed listeners' tracking of the modulations by plotting the correlations of their response profiles with the baseline profiles. In general, the correlation to the original rāgam declined and the correlation to the new rāgam increased with the modulation, and then followed the reverse pattern when the original rāgam returned. Westerners' responses matched those of the Indians on rāgams with structures similar to Western scales, but differed when rāgams were less familiar, and surprisingly, they registered the shifts more strongly than Indian musicians. These findings converged with previous research in identifying three types of cues: 1) culture-specific cues—schematic and veridical knowledge—employed by Indians, 2) tone-distribution cues—duration and frequency of note occurrence—employed by both Indians and Westerners, and 3) transference of schematic knowledge of Western music by Western participants.
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It has been argued that Japanese and western musicians give different impressions to the listener when performing western music (Saito, 1999; Shibata, 1987). However, these claims are mostly based on subjective impressions and very few studies provide corroborative empirical evidence. The aim of the present study is to compare Japanese and western musicians with regard to timing. Japanese and Dutch percussionists performed nine kinds of rhythmic patterns consisting of two intervals, under two conditions, in three tempi. There seemed to be a tendency for the Japanese participants to perform 4:1, 5:1, 1:4 and 1:5 patterns with a smaller duration ratio than instructed, although performance of patterns with ratios closer to 1 were similar between the participant groups.