A Unified Model of Structural Organization in Language and Music

Bod, Rens

doi:10.1613/jair.1076

Cited by 37 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Gaussian processes), and probabilistic grammars, such Bod's Data Oriented Parsing (43). The latter in particular, incorporating explicit tree structures over time, are better suited to modelling long-term dependencies and are likely to be a closer fit to the way humans process music.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information dynamics: patterns of expectation and surprise in the perception of music

2009

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Measures such as entropy and mutual information can be used to characterise random processes. In this paper, we propose the use of several time-varying information measures, computed in the context of a probabilistic model which evolves as a sample of the process unfolds, as a way to characterise temporal structure in music. One such measure is a novel predictive information rate which we conjecture may provide a conceptually simple explanation for the 'inverted-U' relationship often found between simple measures of randomness (e.g. entropy rate) and judgements of aesthetic value (1). We explore these ideas in the context of Markov chains using both artificially generated sequences and two pieces of minimalist music by Philip Glass, showing that even such a manifestly simplistic model (the Markov chain), when interpreted according to information dynamic principles, produces a structural analysis which largely agrees with that of an expert human listener. Thus, we propose that our approach could form the basis of a theoretically coherent yet computationally plausible model of human perception of formal structure, potentially including seemingly abstract qualities like interestingness and aesthetic goodness.Keywords: information theory; expectation; surprise; subjective probability; Bayesian inference; Markov chain; music. Expectation and surprise in musicOne of the more salient effects of listening to music is to create expectations of what is to come next, which may be fulfilled immediately, after some delay, or not at all as the case may be. This is the thesis put forward by, amongst others, music theorists L. B. Meyer (2) and Narmour (3). In fact, this insight predates Meyer quite considerably; for example, it was elegantly put by Hanslick (4) in the nineteenth century: 'The most important factor in the mental process which accompanies the act of listening to music, and which converts it to a source of pleasure, is frequently overlooked. We here refer to the intellectual satisfaction which the listener derives from continually following and anticipating the composer's intentions-now, to see his expectations fulfilled, and now, to find himself agreeably mistaken. It is a matter of course that this intellectual flux and reflux, this perpetual giving and receiving takes place unconsciously, and with the rapidity of lightning-flashes. ' An essential aspect of this is that music is experienced as a phenomenon that 'unfolds' in time, rather than being apprehended as a static object presented in its entirety. Meyer argued that musical experience depends on how we change and revise our conceptions as events happen, on how expectation and prediction interact with occurrence, and that, to a large degree, the way to understand the effect of music is to focus on this 'kinetics' of expectation and surprise. The business of making predictions and assessing surprise is essentially one of reasoning under conditions of uncertainty and manipulating degrees of belief about the various proposition which may or may not hold, an...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information dynamics: patterns of expectation and surprise in the perception of music

2009

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“…For example, the following (recursive) fi nite-state diagrams ( Fig. 6.2 ) do not produce all A n B n strings and also produce (Bod, 2002 ;Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983 ). It is important to note here that the A n B n or Dyck language are two of the most simple examples of context-free languages that can be constructed, which feature a structure of recursively nested brackets that is typical for context-free languages.…”

Section: The Concept Of Recursion In Artifi Cial Grammarsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Learning and Recursion

Rohrmeier

Dienes

Guo

et al. 2013

Language and Recursion

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“…It has been proved that language and music reveal similar structure which admits reasonable treatment in symbolic and statistical models: phenomena occurring in natural language and in musical texts can be properly explained in terms of statistically enriched grammatical formalisms [Bod 2002;Scha, Bod 1993]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probabilistic Topic Modeling of the Russian Text Corpus on Musicology

Mitrofanova

2015

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Abstract. The paper describes the results of experiments on the development of a statistical model of the Russian text corpus on musicology. We construct a topic model which is based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation and process corpus data with the help of GenSim statistical toolkit. Results achieved in course of experiments allow to distinguish general and special topics which describe conceptual structure of the corpus in question and to analyse paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between lemmata within topics.

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A Unified Model of Structural Organization in Language and Music

Cited by 37 publications

References 49 publications

Information dynamics: patterns of expectation and surprise in the perception of music

Information dynamics: patterns of expectation and surprise in the perception of music

Implicit Learning and Recursion

Probabilistic Topic Modeling of the Russian Text Corpus on Musicology

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