The Robustness of Musical Language: A Perspective from Complex Systems Theory

Keller, Flavio; Stefano, Nicola Di

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-01198-7_11

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Regardless of differences related to major and minor thirds, these intervals were most likely perceived as the same in the tonal condition, where they both represent a distance of two scale steps. Based on the work of Keller and Di Stefano (2018), we sustain that our results can be interpreted in light of robustness of musical information.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

“…Finally, it is possible to interpret our results in light of Keller and Di Stefano (2018) who recently put forward the idea that human appreciation of music is dependent on our ability to recognize core properties of complex acoustic and musical information. Due to the inherent complexity and multivariate nature of sound, the extraction of meaningful information must be robust to certain internal and external interferences (Keller & Di Stefano, 2018, p. 209). According to the authors, “robustness in music perception is linked to the ability to ignore small differences” which do not directly determine the idiosyncratic core of a given musical object.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 75%

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Cents versus scale steps: Can we tell the difference between major and minor thirds?

Neto

Vanzella

2021

Psychology of Music

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We report an experiment in which participants ( N = 368) were asked to differentiate between major and minor thirds. These intervals could either be formed by diatonic tones from the C major scale (tonal condition) or by a subset of tones from the chromatic scale (atonal condition). We hypothesized that in the tonal condition intervals would be perceived as a function of scale step distances, which we defined as the number of diatonic leaps between two notes of a given music scale. In the atonal condition, we hypothesized that intervals would be perceived as a function of cents. If our hypotheses were supported, we should verify a less accurate performance in the tonal condition, where scale step distances are the same between major and minor thirds. The data corroborated our hypotheses, and we suggest that acoustic measurements of intervallic distances (i.e., frequency ratios and cents) are not optimal when it comes to describing the perceptual quality of intervals in a tonal context. Finally, our research points to the possibility that, in comparison with previous models, scale steps and cents might better capture the notion of global versus local instances of auditory processing.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 75%