Music Theory Commons^™

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

Getting Under Your Skin Until You Jump Out Of It: The Psychological Effects Of Music On The Experience Of Film, Clare Ellen Herzog

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Music is like magic. It can sweep you off your feet and spirit you away to places you never thought possible: it can serve as a teleportation device, achieve time travel, and let us read minds. Some pieces of music exist for their own sake, like Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, while others accompany different forms of media: ballets such as The Nutcracker and operas like La Bohème are instantly recognizable for their grandiose and immersive scores. For a moment in time, audiences can really believe that they are traveling to a magical world with Clara, and even without the …

A Schema-Theoretic Approach To Hierarchy In Eighteenth-Century Tonality, Simon K. S. Prosser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prevalent modern-day theories of tonal hierarchy for eighteenth-century music, especially those influenced by the ideas of Heinrich Schenker, have been called into question by schema theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Vasili Byros, who argue from both cognitive and historical evidence that eighteenth-century tonal cognition was sequential or “windowed” rather than hierarchical. This dissertation seeks to recuperate the concept of tonal hierarchy in eighteenth-century music, drawing on research that reconstructs the implicit tonal theories of the partimento and thoroughbass traditions, as well as concepts of hierarchy from schema theory itself, to formulate a historically and cognitively grounded theory of tonal …

The Role Of A Polyrhythm’S Pitch Interval In Music-Dependent Memory, Hadley R. Parum

Senior Projects Spring 2021

When listening to music, humans can easily and often automatically assess the perceptual similarity of different moments in music. However, it is difficult to rigorously define the way in which we determine exactly how similar we find to moments to be. This problem has driven inquiry in music cognition, musicology, and music theory alike, but previous results have depended on behaviorally mediated responses and/or recursive analytic strategies by music scholars. The present work employs the context-dependent memory paradigm as a novel way to investigate the extent to which listeners consider two musical examples to be similar. After incidentally learning words …

Fostering Music Performers In The 21st Century: A Contemporary Professional Perspective Toward A New Curricular Agenda For Graduate Study In Music, Andre Januario

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

What if the core curriculum for graduate students in music performance were designed to prepare students to succeed in the world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

This dissertation offers a hypothetical answer: a structured and systematic academic curricular framework for music graduate students of performance of concert music (especially those in terminal degrees, such as doctoral students), along with music instructors, professional music performers, school administrators, and college professors, seeking to prepare such students for achieving and maintaining a music career more in keeping with the current work environment, especially those skills demanded by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the …

Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table Of Contents], Roger Mathew Grant

Philosophy & Theory

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to …

Thelonious Monk's Prototypical Style: Close And Distant Readings Of Jazz Stylings, Connor Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Thelonious Monk’s style has been considered non-conformist, modernist, technically stilted, intentionally unconventional, even incompetent. His performing is idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, by what metric is his performing idiosyncratic, or, framed another way, in what ways do Thelonious Monk’s performances deviate from the prototypical performance? Situated within family resemblance theories of prototypicality, I utilize supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches to categorize jazz solos based on their melodic usage of standard jazz language (novel corpus of 530 jazz solo improvisations). Using these distant readings to determine which solos are prototypical, I perform a close reading of these prototypical solos …

Modeling Melodic Dictation, David John Baker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Melodic dictation is a cognitively demanding process that requires students to hear a melody, then without any access to an external reference, transcribe the melody within a limited time frame. Despite its ubiquity in curricula within School of Music settings, exactly how an individual learns a melody is not well understood. This dissertation aims to fill the gap in the literature between aural skills practitioners and music psychologists in order to reach conclusions that can be applied systematically in pedagogical contexts. In order to do this, I synthesize literature from music theory, music psychology, and music education in order to …

Effects Of Genre Tag Complexity On Popular Music Perception And Enjoyment, Lauren Shepherd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popular online streaming platform Spotify added over 1400 genre tags in the last two years. Despite that numerous artists and composition competitions claim to seek projects that “transcend the traditional notion of genre,” the industry has only added more complex and mystifying genre labels. This dichotomy between artists and industry ignores the effects these labels have on consumers. Do more complex genre tags enhance the listening experience for the average consumer by providing additional information about what they are about to hear? The current research seeks to examine the effects of the granularity of genre tags on popular music …

Interactive Sonification Strategies For The Motion And Emotion Of Dance Performances, Steven Landry

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Immersive Interactive SOnification Platform, or iISoP for short, is a research platform for the creation of novel multimedia art, as well as exploratory research in the fields of sonification, affective computing, and gesture-based user interfaces. The goal of the iISoP’s dancer sonification system is to “sonify the motion and emotion” of a dance performance via musical auditory display. An additional goal of this dissertation is to develop and evaluate musical strategies for adding layer of emotional mappings to data sonification. The result of the series of dancer sonification design exercises led to the development of a novel musical sonification …

Do Different Music Genres Differentially Affect Autonomic Activity? How Music And Sound Affect Autonomic Activity Aroused By Visual Stimuli, Andrew Manson

Online Theses and Dissertations

The primary researcher sought to determine whether different genres of music would differentially influence measures of autonomic nervous system activity (heart rate, galvanic skin response) while viewing visual stimuli in a sample of college students. All participants listened to the same songs and music genres and viewed the same International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images. Autonomic nervous system activity was recorded by attaching electrodes to participants' non-dominant hand and torso. Music order presentation and picture order presentation were randomly determined by E-Prime. Heart rate and skin conductance responses were both significant, with melodic metal music inducing greater intensity of responses …

The Doctrine Of Affections: Where Art Meets Reason, Sharri K. Hall

Musical Offerings

The Doctrine of Affections was a widespread understanding of music and musicality during the Baroque era. The Doctrine was a result of the philosophy of reason and science as it coincides with music. It aimed to reconcile what man knew about science and the human body, and what man thought he knew about music. It was a reconciliation of practical musicianship and theoretical music which had begun to rise in the time. Though it is generally understood as being apart from Enlightenment thinking, the Doctrine is a result of Enlightenment-style philosophy. As the Enlightenment sought to explain why things occurred …

Examining Relationships Between Basic Emotion Perception And Musical Training In The Prosodic, Facial, And Lexical Channels Of Communication And In Music, Jamie Twaite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research has suggested that intensive musical training may result in transfer effects from musical to non-musical domains. There is considerable research on perceptual and cognitive transfer effects associated with music, but, comparatively, fewer studies examined relationships between musical training and emotion processing. Preliminary findings, though equivocal, suggested that musical training is associated with enhanced perception of emotional prosody, consistent with a growing body of research demonstrating relationships between music and speech. In addition, few studies directly examined the relationship between musical training and the perception of emotions expressed in music, and no studies directly evaluated this relationship in the facial …

War Of The Worlds: Music And Cosmological Battles In The Balinese Cremation Procession, Michael B. Bakan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Abstract

This article explores processional action as a form of cosmological intervention in Hindu-Balinese cremation processions, focusing on the multiple and intersecting functions of a particular type of Balinese instrumental music ensemble: the gamelan beleganjur. It explores the alternately “enlivening and protective aspects” (DeVale 1990, 62) that underlie the use of beleganjur music in the ngaben, or cremation ritual, showing how beleganjur’s sonic power and rhythmic drive serve to combat malevolent spirit beings, strengthen and inspire processional participants in their efforts to meet challenging ritual obligations, and grant courage to the souls of deceased individuals embarking on their …

The Universal Language, Amelia Richards

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Memory And Production Of Standard Frequencies In College-Level Musicians, Sarah E. Weber

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis examines the nature of long-term absolute pitch memory—an ability traditionally assumed to belong only to absolute pitch (AP) possessors—by testing for evidence of this memory for “standard” frequencies in musicians without AP. Standard frequencies, those based on the equally tempered system with A = 440 Hz, are common in the sonic environment of the Western college musical education, and thus could have the opportunity to penetrate listeners’ long-term memories. Through four experimental tasks, this thesis examines musicians’ ability to recognize and produce frequencies from the set of equally tempered frequencies based on A = 440 Hz, without regard …

Varying Degrees Of Difficulty In Melodic Dictation Examples According To Intervallic Content, Michael Hines Robinson

Masters Theses

Melodic dictation has long been a daunting task for students in aural skills training. Research has found that interval identification is a factor when taking melodic dictation. Research has also found that some intervals are easier to identify than other intervals. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether the difficulty of melodic dictation examples can be categorized by their intervallic content. A popular aural skills text was used as the source for the melodic dictation examples. The adjacent intervals in each melodic dictation example were counted and recorded by interval type. The analysis of the melodic dictation examples …

Cognitive Processes For Infering Tonic, Steven J. Kaup

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Creative Work, and Performance

Research concerning cognitive processes for tonic inference is diverse involving approaches from several different perspectives. Outwardly, the ability to infer tonic seems fundamentally simple; yet it cannot be attributed to any single cognitive process, but is multi-faceted, engaging complex elements of the brain. This study will examine past research concerning tonic inference in light of current findings. First I will survey the recent history of experimental research in cognitive functions for memory retention and expectation as they relate to the recognition and learning of musical schemas. Then I will discuss distributional theories associated with the tonal hierarchy of major and …

Learning Mechanisms For Acquiring Knowledge Of Tonality In Music, Rikka Quam, Matthew Rosenthal, Erin Hannon

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Most people think that musical knowledge is exclusive to trained musicians. Actually, casual music listeners have implicit knowledge of important structural aspects of music, such as tonality. Tonality contributes to the feeling of anticipation one would experience when hearing someone sing “do re mi faso la ti” without singing the final “do”. Knowledge of tonality may be learned through the statistics of music (Krumhansl, 1990). However, learning mechanisms have rarely been investigated experimentally (Creel et al., 2002). Artificial grammar learning experiments have shown that listeners can acquire highly structured knowledge such as syllable co-occurrence and language syntax through passive exposure. …

The Feeling Of Music Past: How Listeners Remember Musical Affect, Alexander Rozin, Paul Rozin, Emily Goldberg

Music Theory, History & Composition Faculty Publications & Performances

No abstract provided.

The Direction Of Memory For Music For Popular And Novel Songs, Susan Rose Sibma

Theses : Honours

Previous research on memory for music has typically measured participants' reaction times (RTs) and accuracy in tests of recall and recognition of songs presented to them. The current study was interested in what occurs during the time that elapses between stimulus onset and the generation of a response. It has been suggested that people sing or hum to themselves as they search for an answer (Rubin, 1977), but a question that has been overlooked to date is in what direction this occurs. As music unfolds in time, it was proposed that in memory for music, 'forward is best'. In the …

Possible Factors Influencing Music Preference, Isabella M. Pinto

Psychology ETDs

The purpose of this study is to determine factors influencing musical preference. The most important factor related to preference for classical music is thought by some to be the cultural background of the listener. According to Lazersfeld, "there is probably no question so sensitive to socialize differences as listening to serious music." This is consistent with the opinion of musicians and music critics who state that discriminating musical taste is a result of frequent listening to good music.