Tonality: The Shape of Affect

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed an increasing interest in studying music as it relates to human evolution, leading to the establishment of so-called evolutionary musicology as a new field of enquiry. Researchers in this field maintain that music indeed played as crucial a role as the development of language in the evolution of humankind. The most frequently cited musical phenomena in relation to various adaptive functions include rhythm, meter, and melodic contour. In this connection, the universal phenomenon of tonal organisation of pitch in musical systems received no attention. This article provides a hypothesis regarding the evolutionary origins of tonality as a system for the dynamic shaping of affect, and establishes further connections between music and affective states by proposing a link between the emergence of tonality and of the human capacity to regulate inter-subjective dynamics by shaping the course of affect towards stable states. The article also proposes that tonality provides an archetypal psychological space within which the human ability to shape different paths towards stable affective states could evolve. KEYWORDS: tonality, attraction schema, evolutionary musicology TONALITY AS A UNIVERSALTHE idea that there exist correspondences between the dynamic principles of heavenly bodies, of our subjective experiences and of music is a very old one, and not confined to the West. In the earliest accounts of human music and musicality within ancient mythologies of China, Babylonia and India (Lippman, 1992, pp. 3-9), the constitution of the cosmos, of humans and of music are integrally related; and the Pythagorean tradition originating in ancient Greece attributes the powerful effects of music to the harmonic principles it shares with cosmic order. The similarities humans observe between musical motion and physical motion, on the one hand, and between musical motion and "inner motion" or emotion, on the other hand, constitutes one of the recurrent themes in the history of Western musical aesthetics, and many non-Western cultures draw parallels between musical movement and the progression, regeneration and return perceived in the natural world as well as in psychological phenomena. Musical thought across different times and places appears to consistently attribute human musicality to something that goes deeper than the accidents of culture or nurture. Arguably the most significant development in contemporary music psychology has been the recognition precisely of this fact, that musical phenomena are indeed rooted in the hard-wired biological, i.e. perceptual, affective and motor, capacities of our species and not merely in the accidental features of cultural and historical circumstances.A landmark in this connection has been the publication of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, which identified music theory as an integral branch of cognitive science. Setting out to provide an account of human musicality by identifying the psychological principles und...

Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric

“…Since musical gravity operates on principles that only partially imitate principles of physical gravity, dogmatic reliance on gravitational correspondence might lead to error. The recent theory of evolutionary origin of tonality (Doğantan-Dack, 2013 ) leans on universality of resolution: claiming that melodic motion is meant to end in a stable state analogous to physical unstable states, terminated by stable states. Even for Western tonality this is not necessarily the case.…”

Intra-line and inter-individual variation in Sardinian arrepentina

“…References to the issue of segmentation within the field of Sardinian traditional song are found in Angeli 2006: 123-189, Macchiarella 2009: 187-212, Lutzu 2009: 49-65 and Bravi 2010 The concept of a "tonal centre", metaphorically denoted as a recognizable "center of gravity" in the organization of pitches in any piece of music, was developed in the field of ethnomusicology in order to avoid the implications of the word "tonic", which is definitely associated with the harmonic concepts of Western tonality (see Nettl 1964, Agamennone 1991. This concept is now currently in use in the field of music theory (see Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Doğantan-Dack 2013 to indicate a major point of attraction in music structure. finally, (iii) the use of the "tritonic" scale in the majority of MPb's, which, particularly in the case of CE, contrasts with the wider pitch range and high tones used in MPa's.…”