Melody (original) (raw)

An Alternative Postulate to see Melody as “Language”

2007

The paper proposes a way to see melodic features in music/songs in the terms of “letters” constituting “words”, while in return investigating the fulfillment of Zipf-Mandelbrot Law in them. Some interesting findings are reported including some possible conjectures for classification of melodic and musical artifacts considering several aspects of culture. The paper ends with some discussions related to further directions, be it enrichment in musicology and the possible plan for musical generative art.

A Brief Note: The Structured Melody

It's about the evolution of Music, especially Indian Classical. We propose here a mathematical model about the musical sign system, and an alternative understanding of authenticity and originality. Introducing the concept of Syntactic Bias.

Chapter 2 Root , leaf , blossom , or bole : Concerning the origin and adaptive function of music

2014

In an earlier survey of ideas about the adaptive function of art (Dissanayake 1994), I invoked the old analogy of blind men examining an elephant to describe what kind of creature it is. The concept of art, I said, is similarly composed of a variety of features, some as different from one another as the elephant's trunk from its ear or tail. Yet to discuss the subject of art's function (or origin) cogently, we need to know what it is that we are referring to-we need to have an idea of the larger whole. It is the same with 'music', which-like 'art'-is not a word or concept in many human societies, even ones that conspicuously engage in what we would call music or art. Like the editors and other contributors to the present volume, my subject here is music as a component of communicative musicality, a term that offers a new way of thinking about that complex, manyfaceted entity that we call music. As the essays in this volume seek to demonstrate, musicality is a...

The Correspondence Between Composition in Fine Arts and Music throughout History

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

This study explores a novel approach to estimating a timeline of the evolution of music by establishing the commonalities between the principles of spatial organization of pictorial composition in works of visual art and the principles of tonal organization of music composition in music works. The cross-modal features of perception of music allow musicians and listeners to envisage melodic motion and harmonic progressions in a peculiar virtual space, where the height axis is associated with frequency, the width - with time, and the depth - with music texture, i.e., the number of simultaneously active parts and/or voices. The available evidence from psychophysiological research suggests that capacity of music to trigger spatial representation constitutes a cross-cultural phenomenon biologically rooted in the shared mechanisms of perception of pitch contours of music parts and visual contours of pictorial and real-life objects. Hence, drawing parallels between the typologies of visual composition in works of realistic art, on the one hand, and the typologies of music texture and schemes of harmonic organization in music compositions, on the other hand, might reveal patterns of tonal organization of music that otherwise are hard to identify. This line of inquiry is especially beneficial for the reconstruction of prehistoric music that lacks direct documentation, other than the disposition of holes on the earliest wind musical instruments excavated by archaeologists. Prehistoric artworks, in contrast, present a well documented source for charting a timeline of evolution of spatial organization through establishing patterns and schemes of pictorial representation of perceptual reality. Matching of such schemes to the typological schemes of tonal organization of music of those indigenous ethnicities that maintain the lifestyle and inhabit environments similar to prehistoric people can potentially help detect the general course of the evolution of music and sketch its global history in a manner similar to existing histories of human art. This study seeks to review the compositional commonalities between major canons of pictorial representation, from the Ancient Egypt to the 18th century Europe, and those music systems that were in use by the same people who used those pictorial canons. I start with the well established similarity between the rules of linear perspective and the rules of Western tonality and try to track their correspondences at first to the Hellenic theory of perspective and theory of music, then, identify their common traits and trace their development chronologically all the way from the earliest forms of Paleolithic art to the Baroque period, focusing on the geographic area of Europe and the Near East. The presentation contains 40 carefully selected images and 45 audio examples - identifying 15 principal types of musical texture along with their pictorial analogs. The entire overview reveals the dramatic change in compositional organization that accompanied the rise of urban civilizations of the Bronze change, followed by the steady increase in structural complexity, the discovery of the depth parameter and the prevalence of naturalistic approach to semantic content - until the fall of the Roman Empire. The Dark Ages marked a temporary decline in the techniques of rendition of the depth parameter while instituting new means of compositional integration, until the compositional methods of Antiquity were restored on a new platform of hierarchically differentiated parameter of depth during the 12-14th centuries. At this point the compositional practices of the West and the East diverged. The Renaissance opened a new era of rational science-like approach to various aspects of composition, eventually merging them into a coherent comprehensive theory of perspectival organization in arts and theory of tonality in music. In the process of this advance, music composition acquired a considerably greater capacity to transmit large volumes of information amongst general population than that of pictorial composition. In conclusion, this study offers possible explanations of this discrepancy.

Defining Popular Music: Towards a “historical melodics”

Contemporary Popular Music Studies, 2019

Alexander Veselovsky, the father of formal methods and semiotics, defined “historical poetics” as the study of the role of tradition in individual creativity; this can be applied to music studies, in order to explain the relationship between repetition and originality and better define popular music, in its differences with; folk and classical music, respectively. The theory of “primitive syncretism” can show how new musical genres and styles often arise from older ones through the separation of their secondary features. The distinction between motif and plot, with its explanation of complex elements as composition of smaller ones, provides parallels with many popular music structures (riffs; chorus/bridge/verse; chord progression, etc.). The concept of cultural borrowing as “counter-flows”, according to which the receiving culture actively selects and readapts the received elements, fits, inter alia, with non-Anglo-American versions of rock. Therefore, historical poetics provides a good ground for a dynamic, non-normative theory of popular music, both as a whole and in its parts.