Perception of modulations in South Indian classical (Carnātic) music by student and teacher musicians: A cross-cultural study (original) (raw)
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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.
Implicit learning of Indian music by Westerners
Studies by Bigand and Barrouillet (1996), Perruchet, Bigand, and Benoit-Gonin (1997), Bigand, Perruchet, and Boyer (1998), and Tillmann, Bharucha, and Bigand, E. (2000) show that short exposure to an artificial grammar trains listeners to distinguish between stimuli that obey and disobey the rules. The present study considers the extent to which rules of a musical tradition with which subjects have had no contact are learned. Within Bhatkande’s monumental anthology (1965/1910-32) the examples of rāga Alhaiya bilawal provide a basis for contriving stimuli that obey and disobey Alhaiya bilawal’s rules. A study tested the hypothesis that after ten minutes of exposure to Alhaiya bilawal, subjects would correctly distinguish between instances of the rāga and examples that diverged. Fifteen subjects heard 20 two-tala-cycle passages from Bhatkande’s model melodies for rāga Alhaiya bilawal. They then heard 20 passages of the same length and musical format: five from the first session, five from Bhatkande’s anthology that had not previously been heard, and ten that diverged. Subjects indicated which of the ten divergent-plus-lure pairs sounded like the passages heard in the first session. A majority of the non-Indian/nonmusician subjects correctly identified the ten divergent stimuli in the second session. Subjects correctly identified stimuli that diverged from the rules of virtually all rāgas and families of rāgas more often than those that diverged from the more constrained rules of Alhaiya bilawal. A pair of stimulus pairs that resulted in correct identifications by relatively few subjects involved transformations of Clough and Douthett’s usual diatonic collection into anhemitonic pentatonic (1991: cf. also Rahn 1999). An implicit learning design holds promise for corroborating and clarifying cross culturally various musical systems’ claims to universal validity.
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/
Foundations in music psychology: Theory and research (pp. 503–541). The MIT Press., 2019
Most research on the perception and cognition of music has involved the consideration of measurements taken from Western listeners in response to presentation of Western tonal music. This chapter discusses empirical studies of music that involve a cross-cultural comparison, and reviews relevant areas of study that are useful for generating hypotheses. It begins by discussing the concepts of culture on the one hand, and music on the other, as these terms are often left undefined. The chapter then provides a review of research in this area, focusing on the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional foundations of music. The authors organize their review according to the level of analysis at which cross-cultural comparisons can be made, considering elementary features of music and the syntactic rules for combining them, behavior genetics, emotional experiences, and evidence for hard-wired constraints on musical systems. They primarily focuses on the cognitive foundations of music—a perspective that is traditionally used to explain similarities across cultures. However, they points readers to parallel research in ethnomusicology, which draws upon scholarly traditions in anthropology and sociology and highlights some of the dramatic differences in the social, economic, and political functions of music across cultures.(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
Development of Listenership for Indian Hindustani Music By Using Mimetic Comprehension
2019
How can we train adults in listenership for Indian Hindustani music belonging to a different culture? Can mimetic comprehension of beat patterns using hand gestures and visual feedback improve rhythm perception and recognition ability? Culture influences the processing of music rhythm, but the precise aspects are still unknown. We developed a rhythm training setup to perform a music cognitive study and investigate the effects of visual feedback enforced mimetic comprehension of Hindustani Rhythmic Beat Patterns (also called Talas) on participants with different musical cultural background. The participants were trained in three different Talas: Tintal (16 beats), Ektal (12 beats) and Jhaptal (10 Beats). We investigated whether the participants are able to (1) detect the "Sam", which is the starting beat of every beat cycle by pressing the key "s" on keyboard while listening to the audio excerpt and (2) recognize the Tal in 12 different audio excerpts of Hindustan...
Music Perception and Cognition: A Review of Recent Cross-Cultural Research
Experimental investigations of cross-cultural music perception and cognition reported during the past decade are described. As globalization and Western music homogenize the world musical environment, it is imperative that diverse music and musical contexts are documented. Processes of music perception include grouping and segmentation, statistical learning and sensitivity to tonal and temporal hierarchies, and the development of tonal and temporal expectations. The interplay of auditory, visual, and motor modalities is discussed in light of synchronization and the way music moves via emotional response. Further research is needed to test deep-rooted psychological assumptions about music cognition with diverse materials and groups in dynamic contexts. Although empirical musicology provides keystones to unlock musical structures and organization, the psychological reality of those theorized structures for listeners and performers, and the broader implications for theories of music perception and cognition, awaits investigation.
SUBTLE CHANGES ON BEHAVIOR OF LISTENING RAGA MUSIC
SHODH SANCHAR BULLETIN, APPROVED UGC CARE, ISSN - 2229-3620, Vol. 10, Issue 40, 2020
Music is widely accepted to produce changes in effective states to the listener. Being a musician I got motivated when I experience the constantly undergoing changes in my mind during music listening and singing. However, the exact nature of the emotional responses and its effectiveness is an open question; therefore there was a need for further refinement and exploration of emotional responses to judge the actual effectiveness in different parts of brain and mind induced by music. Primary method to identify the changes in behavior is to rate experienced emotions after listened two basic ragas 'Bhupali' and 'Yaman' compositions by the participants. The result was focused towards the changes in different moods of a person elicit by raga music on the basis of 20 selected studies of past 20 years. A raga of Indian classical music has different notes (Swar) which hold their own definite psychological effects or emotions which are also interconnected, particularly to a chakra, color, mood, and time of day. This study can be an additional subject of contemplation to create a vast platform for students and teachers to get advanced benefits of learning raga music.
Cross-cultural perception of musical similarity within and between India and Japan
Cross-cultural perception of musical similarity is important for understanding musical diversity and universality. In this study we analyzed cross-cultural music similarity ratings on a global song sample from 110 participants (62 previously published from Japan, 48 newly collected from musicians and non-musicians from north and south India). Our pre-registered hypothesis that average Indian and Japanese ratings would be correlated was strongly supported (r = .80, p < .001). Exploratory analyses showed that similarity ratings were less correlated among different sub-groups within India than between average Indian and average Japanese ratings. In particular, ratings from experts in Hindustani music from the north and Carnatic music from the south showed the lowest correlations (r = .25). These analyses support previous findings that musical variability is greater within than between cultures, and suggest that the correlations we found are likely due more to shared musical exposure...