This study investigated several factors presumed to influence the intelligibility of song lyrics. Twenty-seven participants listened to recordings of musical passages sung in English; each passage consisted of a brief musical phrase sung by a solo voice. Six vocalists produced the corpus of sung phrases. Eight hypotheses derived from common phonological and prosodic principles were tested. Intelligibility of lyrics was degraded: (i) when archaic language was used; (ii) when words were set in melismatic rather than syllabic contexts; (iii) when the musical rhythm did not match the prosodic speech rhythm; and (iv) when successive target words rhymed. Intelligibility of lyrics was facilitated: (i) when words contained diphthongs rather than monophthongs; (ii) when a word from an immediately previous passage reappeared; (iii) when a syllabic setting of a word was preceded by a melismatic setting of the same word. No difference in word intelligibility was observed between musical-theatre singers and opera singers.

Forty-four participants were asked to sing moderate, high, and low pitches while their faces were photographed. In a two-alternative forced choice task, independent judges selected the high-pitch faces as more friendly than the low-pitch faces. When photographs were cropped to show only the eye region, judges still rated the high-pitch faces friendlier than the low-pitch faces. These results are consistent with prior research showing that vocal pitch height is used to signal aggression (low pitch) or appeasement (high pitch). An analysis of the facial features shows a strong correlation between eyebrow position and sung pitch-consistent with the role of eyebrows in signaling aggression and appeasement. Overall, the results are consistent with an inter-modal linkage between vocal and facial expressions.

The ability to maintain steady tempos using two different mental practice techniques was assessed through measurement of excerpt duration fluctuations. Ten musicians of various voice and instrument types participated in a two-part experiment. First, I recorded participants' metronomic performances of lyrical and technical excerpts, which were selected from their repertoire. Next, participants mentally rehearsed their two excerpts over a total of 12 trials. Participants attempted to imagine a steady tempo that reflected the tempo of their actual performance. During each trial, participants heard a 3-second prompt from their recorded performance; following the prompt, each participant continued to mentally rehearse the respective excerpt while using one of two strategies. Participants engaged in two types of mental practice: non-motor imagery and motor imagery. At the end of each trial, participants rang a call bell to indicate each imagined excerpt's ending articulation. Analysis of the magnitude and direction of excerpt duration discrepancies showed no significant differences in mean tempo accuracy when using the two different mental practice strategies. Non-motor and motor imagery exhibited differences of tempo variance across the two excerpt types: non-motor imagery was more consistent internally across a broad range of tempos. I also observed two significant interactions between successive mental rehearsals: musical sophistication and excerpt note density. In addition, repeated mental rehearsals of a musical tempo seem to settle into a more precise tempo; and motor imagery might provide support for this phenomenon. Both motor and non-motor forms of imagery may have specific applications to different goals in the mental rehearsal of musical tempo.

The Standard, Power, and Color (SPC) model describes the nexus between musical instrument combination patterns and expressive goals in music. Instruments within each SPC group tend to attract each other and work as a functional unit to create orchestral gestures. Standard instruments establish a timbral groundwork; Power instruments create contrast through loud dynamic climaxes; and Color instruments catch listeners' attention by means of their sparing use. Examples within these three groups include violin (Standard), piccolo (Power), and harp (Color). The SPC theory emerges from analyses of nineteenth-century symphonic works. Multidimensional scaling analysis of instrument combination frequencies maps instrument relationships; hierarchical clustering analysis indicates three SPC groups within the map. The SPC characterization is found to be moderately robust through the results of hypothesis testing: (1) Color instruments are included less often in symphonic works; (2) when Color instruments are included, they perform less often than the average instrument; and (3) Color and non-Color instruments have equal numbers of solo occurrences. Additionally, (4) Power instruments are positively associated with louder dynamic levels; and (5) when Power instruments are present in the musical texture, the pitch range spanned by the entire orchestra does not become more extreme. MUTUAL instrument-family membership implies that certain instruments have a similar timbre, but studies suggest that shared family does not always correlate with common, perceived timbre. John Grey (1977) investigated listeners' perception of timbre similarities between instruments: he observed that acoustical properties of instruments can -override the tendency for instruments to cluster by family‖ (p. 1276). The questions and methods of Grey's study extend through several decades of timbre research (e.g., Caclin, McAdams, Smith, & Winsberg, 2005;McAdams, Winsberg, Donnadieu, De Soete, & Krimphoff, 1995). These studies explore the perceptual dimensions of timbre: spectral centroid and attack time are well-established timbral elements. The remaining dimensions are generally acknowledged to be types of spectral or spectral-temporal cues (Caclin et al., 2005). Despite the importance of these findings, they have yet to be fully applied to music analysis and the study of orchestration. A timbre-based perspective on instrument similarity and dissimilarity has important applications to understanding orchestration.For example, Grey's study demonstrated that mutes drastically alter tone color: the oboe and muted trombone were heard as similar. Additionally, instruments can have fluctuating timbre characteristics depending on register: a high-range bassoon tone was judged as similar to a brass tone. These observations suggest that acoustic parameters might influence the instrument groupings used in real musical situations, where instruments change roles flexibly according to their manner of performance.In contrast to the timbre model, the instrumen...