Markus Neuwirth

In Western tonal music, voice leading (VL) and harmony are two central concepts influencing whether a musical sequence is perceived as well-formed. However, experimental studies have primarily focused on the effect of harmony on the cognitive processing of polyphonic music. The additional effect of VL remains unknown, despite music theory suggesting VL to be tightly connected to harmony. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate and compare the effects of both VL and harmony on listener expectations. Using a priming paradigm and a choice reaction time task, participants (N = 34) were asked to indicate whether the final chord in a sequence had a different timbre than the preceding ones (cover task), with the experimental conditions being good and poor VL or harmony, respectively. An analysis with generalised mixed effects models revealed a significant influence of both VL and harmony on reaction times (RTs). Moreover, pairwise comparison showed significantly faster RTs when...

Western musical styles use a large variety of chords and vertical sonorities. Based on objective acoustical properties, chords can be situated on a dissonant-consonant continuum. While this might to some extent converge with the unpleasant-pleasant continuum, subjective liking might diverge for various chord forms from music across different styles. Our study aimed to investigate how well appraisals of the roughness and pleasantness dimensions of isolated chords taken from real-world music are predicted by Parncutt’s established model of sensory dissonance. Furthermore, we related these subjective ratings to style of origin and acoustical features of the chords as well as musical sophistication of the raters. Ratings were obtained for chords deemed representative of the harmonic language of three different musical styles (classical, jazz and avant-garde music), plus randomly generated chords. Results indicate that pleasantness and roughness ratings were, on average, mirror opposites...

Present-day sonata theory scholarship increasingly draws on a typology of sonata forms that consists of five interrelated types, placing particular emphasis on the double return and thematic rotation. The present article aims at scrutinising a variety of formal phenomena in the Classical repertoire that potentially challenge, in one way or another, the established sonata-form typology and its analytic application. This includes the early double return, strong off-tonic cadences within the recapitulatory action space, false recapitulations as well as false-false recapitulations, recapitulations launched with P-based S and off-tonic recapitulations. The article concludes with a reflection on the epistemological status of the sonata typology and discusses the notion of a modularly conceived Formenlehre.

This is the initial release; the corpus identical to the data used in Moss (2019). Transitions of Tonality. The TP3C ('tonal pitch-class counts corpus') is a dataset of tonal pitch-class counts of Western classical music pieces over a large historical range. It was initially created for Moss (2019) and will be continuously updated.

The discovery of patterns using a minimal set of assumptions constitutes a central challenge in the modeling of polyphonic music and complex streams in general. Skipgrams have been found to be a powerful model for capturing semi-local dependencies in sequences of entities when dependencies may not be directly adjacent (see, for instance, the problems of modeling sequences of words or letters in computational linguistics). Since common skipgrams define locality based on indices, they can only be applied to a single stream of non-overlapping entities. This paper proposes a generalized skipgram model that allows arbitrary cost functions (defining locality), efficient filtering, recursive application (skipgrams over skipgrams), and memory efficient streaming. Further, a sampling mechanism is proposed that flexibly controls runtime and output size. These generalizations and optimizations make it possible to employ skipgrams for the discovery of repeated patterns of close, nonsimultaneous...

This contribution aims to shed light on the potentials and limits of analytical advices for performance interpretations. Based on a cognitive approach to meter presented in part one, the second part examines hypermetric ambiguity in two piano sonatas by Beethoven (op. 2 No. 1/i; op. 10 ...

This paper discusses the potential of musical corpus studies, taking research on common-practice tonal harmony as a case in point. Based on a brief depiction of a project carried out at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and two novel datasets of harmonic analyses of music in the classical style, we elaborate on research questions, applications, and the need of extending the annotation standard used.

The panel discussion focusses on thinking and listening in the context of contemporary music, connecting to the overall topic of the Graz congress, »music theory and interdisciplinarity«, as well as to the conceptualization of listening in musico-theoretical ...

This article explores W. A. Mozart's song Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte (K 520), focusing on how iconicity on surface and more abstract levels (cadences and key relations) helps contribute to the semantics of the song. It is argued that the main body of the song (mm. 4-18) constitutes an oversized structural parenthesis triggered by the emotional outbreak of the female protagonist. While the lyrics leave open the question whether Luise will ever be able to free herself from the painful memories of her unfaithful beloved, the music gives a more definite and indeed negative answer. In addition, the paper offers a reading of the song in terms of an aria-like adaption of a minor-mode sonata form, one that features a three-key exposition, a developmental retransition, and an utterly fragmented recapitulation. Without actually being in sonata form, Mozart's song may be seen to engage in a dialogue with the concept and the conventions of that form.

In Western tonal music, voice leading (VL) and harmony are two central concepts influencing whether a musical sequence is perceived as well-formed. However, experimental studies have primarily focused on the effect of harmony on the cognitive processing of polyphonic music. The additional effect of VL remains unknown, despite music theory suggesting VL to be tightly connected to harmony. therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate and compare the effects of both VL and harmony on listener expectations. Using a priming paradigm and a choice reaction time task, participants (n = 34) were asked to indicate whether the final chord in a sequence had a different timbre than the preceding ones (cover task), with the experimental conditions being good and poor VL or harmony, respectively. An analysis with generalised mixed effects models revealed a significant influence of both VL and harmony on reaction times (RTs). Moreover, pairwise comparison showed significantly faster RTs when VL was good as compared to both VL and harmony being poor, which was not the case when only harmony was good. this study thus provides evidence for the additional importance of VL for the processing of Western polyphonic music.

Tonal harmony is one of the central organization systems of Western music. This article characterizes the statistical foundations of tonal harmony based on the computational analysis of expert annotations in a large corpus. Using resampling methods, this study shows that 1) the rank-frequency distribution of chords resembles a power law, i.e. few chords govern a large proportion of the data; 2) chord transitions are referential and chord predictability is significantly affected by distinguished chord features; 3) tonal harmony conveys directedness in time; and 4) tonal harmony operates differently at the hierarchical levels of chords and keys. These results serve to characterize tonal harmony on empirical grounds and advance the methodological state-of-the-art in digital musicology.

Korpusbasierte Forschung nimmt in der Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft schon seit Langem einen wichtigen Platz ein. In der Musikforschung dagegen gewann sie erst vor Kurzem an Bedeutung. Die Gründe für diese verspätete Akzeptanz sind vielfältig und mitunter einer tiefgreifenden Skepsis gegenüber der Anwendung statistisch-quantitativer Methoden auf Musik als Kunstobjekt geschuldet. Der vorliegende Beitrag motiviert musikalische Korpusforschung, indem er grundsätzliche Probleme herkömmlicher Repertoireforschung (intuitive Statistik, metho-dische Intransparenz, Urteilsheuristiken) und gegenwärtiger Korpusforschung (z. B. Stichprobenerhebung, mangelnde Korpora und Annotationsstandards) aufzeigt und anhand repräsentativer Studien in den Bereichen Harmonik, Kontrapunktik, Melodiebildung und Rhythmik / Metrik exemplarisch diskutiert. Der Beitrag schließt mit einem Plädoyer für die Einbeziehung quantitativer Ansätze in der Musiktheorie im Rahmen eines übergeordneten ›Mixed Methods‹-Paradigmas.

Corpus-based research has long been occupying a prominent position in literary studies and linguistics. In musicology, by contrast, it is about to gain in importance only fairly recently. The reasons for this delayed acceptance are manifold. Among other things, they are rooted in a deep skepticism toward applying statistical-quantitative methods to music as an object of art. This article supports musicological corpus research by pointing out general problems inherent to traditional repertoire research (intuitive statistics, methodological non-transparency, and heuristics in judgment) as well as current corpus research (e. g., biased sampling, paucity of corpora, and lack of annotation standards). These problems are discussed in reference to prominent studies in the domains of harmony, counterpoint, melody, and rhythm / meter. The article concludes by making a case for the integration of quantitative approaches in music theory into the overarching framework of a ›mixed methods‹ paradigm.

This article aims to shed light on the complex relationship between music analysis and performance practice, taking hypermetric analysis, in particular hypermetric ambiguity, as a case in point. In many studies dealing with metre above the bar level, one encounters a prescriptive approach to performance where analytical insights are considered to determine the range of possibilities for the musician. Even in cases of hypermetric ambiguity, analysts tend to advise the musician to decide in favour of one preferred analytical reading and, thus, to resolve ambiguity. The present essay is organized into three parts: based on an essentially cognitive theory of metre presented in part one, the second part examines hypermetric ambiguity in the final movement of Beethoven's »Tempest Sonata« op. 31,2. Conflicting readings of this movement and hence ambiguity largely result from fundamental differences regarding both the underlying theoretical notion of metrical accent and the importance ascribed to various factors for metric analysis. Part three deals with various problems that go hand in hand with the prescriptive approach to performance. It is argued that analytical suggestions about how to perform a composition adequately are of relatively little value, so long as it remains unclear what a metric accent is and to what extent a metrical structure can be influenced by other types of accents (e.g., dynamic, agogic or tonal). A further difficulty is that analysts either rarely specify the means for realizing a proposed analytical reading or simply advise the performer that certain points in time should be played louder in order to make them heard as metrically accented, thus suggesting that dynamic accents automatically coincide with metrical ones.

"Durch Nacht zum Licht" (und zurück in die Nacht): Formstrategien, dramaturgische Funktionen und semantische Implikationen der Dur-Aufhellung in Reprisen "klassischer" Moll-Sonatenformen [in: Dur versus Moll – Zur Geschichte der Semantik eines musikalischen Elementarkontrasts. Ed. by H.–J. Hinrichsen and S. Keym. Vienna: Böhlau, 189--218.]

False recapitulations are often cited as a hallmark of Joseph Haydn’s sonata-form style, exemplifying perhaps better than any other technique the composer’s witty and subversive
engagement with formal conventions. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the concept of false recapitulation is based on a number of different, partially incompatible cognitive, intentional, theoretical, and historical criteria. In an attempt to reconstruct the horizon of expectations of historical listeners, I shall essentially draw on two sources: the compositional practice of the time as reflected in a preliminary repertoire study and contemporaneous theoretical writings. In a nutshell, I shall argue that the analytical practice of framing a double return in the development section in terms of a play with listener expectations is based on the anachronistic assumptions
of what I call the “modern paradigm of sonata form”. Placing expectations at the center of analysis and scrutinizing its complex preconditions allows us to arrive at a refined understanding of Haydn’s (and others’) usage of supposedly false recapitulations.

This essay examines the consequences of the exposition’s off-tonic opening for the recapitulation in the first movement of Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony. It will be argued that the massively recomposed recapitulation in the “Oxford” can in part be understood as the result of an attempt to recontextualize the form-functionally discrepant beginning. Although it is not possible to demonstrate that Haydn pursues a fixed musical task in any straightforward manner, it becomes clear that he nevertheless aims at exploiting in various ways the rich potential implied in his expositional material. In particular, Haydn creates in the recapitulation a long-range prolongation of dominant harmony – the problematic sonority with which the exposition begins – by an unexpected succession of voice-leading schemata expressing specific intrinsic formal functions.