[Smt-talk] Classical Form and Recursion

[Ildar Khannanov]

Dear Fred, Dmitri and all,
 
this is truly fascinating:
 
"As to a I or V chord, my unexceptional view is that while naming things can improve performance, the main mental action is unconscious. To take a well-studied area, the computations behind the construction of a visual field are incredibly complex and largely opaque to consciousness. The same is true of auditory scene analysis (see Bregman's book of that name) and, still more so, of music perception.

Unconscious music processing does not include the label "V chord." Rather, the experience is of a certain sensory quality combined with a state of tension and expectation."
 
I have a question to Fred: 
How to study this field, which instruments can be used here? From what I have read I understand that current techniques mostly involve statistic analysis of experiments with large numbers of listeners (often UG students). Can we come up with some tools which visualize tension and relaxation? My mother, a doctor psychiartist,  and I are going to present our own studies of musical emotions at the conference in UK next fall. We understand emotion as e-motion. This can be linked to tension and relaxation. We have been using  equipment based on Kirlian effect (Gas Discharge Visualisation). Would this be helpful in the study of unconscious music processing? 
 
Theory of tonal-harmonic function relied heavily on intuitive knowledge. I am very excited to see that cognitive science is going to explicate this knowledge.
 
 
Best,
 
 
Ildar Khannanov, Ph.D.
Peabody Conservatory
solfeggio7 at yahoo.com

--- On Wed, 4/15/09, Fred Lerdahl <awl1 at columbia.edu> wrote:


From: Fred Lerdahl <awl1 at columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: [Smt-talk] Classical Form and Recursion
To: "smt-talk Talk" <smt-talk at societymusictheory.org>
Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2009, 11:48 PM


Dmitri writes:

> My own view is that the uncritical exporting of the performance/competence distinction from linguistics to music is highly problematic -- in fact, I'd say it's the very root of our disagreement.  My view is that in the linguistic case, most people approach idealized "competence" at least for relatively uncomplicated sentences.  The idealization, in other words, is small.
> 
> In TPS, I think the idealizations involved are very large -- actual listeners are not close to having the abilities attributed to them by TPS, for instance because they can't hear the return to the tonic after about a minute and a half.  (Among many other issues: they also can't reliably hear the V chord.)  Furthermore, and more interestingly, the very definition of "competence" involves delicate aesthetic questions that do not arise in the linguistic case.  Is the listener "competent" who loves Beethoven but does poorly on ear training exams?  What about the one who hates music but passes every test?  Does the ideal listener have perfect pitch?  Etc.
>     The interesting observation here is that semantics (non-obviously) helps to underwrite the definition of "linguistic competence"; operationally, our only access to syntactic competence runs through semantics.  Absent semantics, the notion of "competence" becomes thorny.
> 
> In fact, I've been giving a talk entitled "Why linguistics is a bad model for music theory" in which the basic points I make are:
> 
>     1. The problem of information loss in music perception is large, and should not be idealized away.
>     2. The notion of a "performance/competence distinction" in music theory is highly problematic, and should not be assumed automatically.
>     3. Without semantics, it's very hard to set a non-controversial lower threshold on "competence."

The competence-performance issue is not important to me, or generally to practitioners of cognitive science in language or music, except as a marker of the study a mental capacity according to certain simplifying idealizations. The value of the results reveals the usefulness of the idealizations. Dmitri questions the idealizations but offers nothing in return. Meanwhile progress is being made using them.

I am currently co-teaching a course on music and language with the auditory perceptual psychologist Robert Remez. Our students (from music, linguistics, psychology, computer science, neuroscience, etc.) report on all kinds of research about music and language. No one is worried about the competence-performance issue. One talks instead about this or that theory or experiment concerning some aspect of music and/or language. There is a lot of research on music and language (a good reference is Patel's book, "Music, Language, and the Brain," Oxford, 2008). Rather than make a broad assertion that "linguistics is a bad model for music theory," I suggest direct engagement with some of these theories and experiments.

> 1. TPS assumes that listeners can reliably tell whether something is a V or I chord, because this information is an input to its various algorithms.
>     2. We all agree that ordinary listeners cannot reliably name whether something is a V or I chord.
> 
> Now there's a friction between #1 and #2, one that the TPS-defender has to explain away.  You don't make this vanish by changing the topic to "tension" -- at least, not if the tension-calculation requires knowledge of whether something is a I or a V.  (In other words, talking about tension hides, but does not resolve, the contradiction.)  As far as I can see, your only option is to say that the difficulties labeling I and V are entirely the result of trying to retrieve the relevant information from the unconscious -- it's there, but we don't realize it.  Thus, on your view, when we learn to apply Roman numerals, we're not learning to perceive more accurately -- instead, we're learning to *label* perceptions that we already have.  (The is reminiscent of Meno's Socrates.)
> 
> I, for one, do not find this to be compelling -- it seems more likely that when we learn Roman numerals, we're learning to perceive more accurately.  But this then weakens my credence in those parts of TPS which depend on your implicit-knowledge hypothesis.

Dmitri seems to have trouble with two points that are foundational in cognitive science: the distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge, and the amazing complexity of implicit knowledge. Both points are beyond dispute within the field. It would be better to move on to issues that are indeed under investigation--for instance, the structures and principles involved in a capacity's mental representation (my interest), the role of statistical learning (see Huron, "Sweet Anticipation," Oxford, 2006), the different roles of representation and processing and their neural instantiation (Patel), or neuropsychological evidence of what music and language do and do not share (Peretz & Coltheart, 2003).

As to a I or V chord, my unexceptional view is that while naming things can improve performance, the main mental action is unconscious. To take a well-studied area, the computations behind the construction of a visual field are incredibly complex and largely opaque to consciousness. The same is true of auditory scene analysis (see Bregman's book of that name) and, still more so, of music perception.

Unconscious music processing does not include the label "V chord." Rather, the experience is of a certain sensory quality combined with a state of tension and expectation. The machinery of my theory attempts to account quantitatively for the shifting states of tension and expectation. The quantitative aspect is an advance over GTTM because its predictions are more precise, hence more testable and falsifiable. The empirical paper with Krumhansl shows reasonable success in the machinery's predictions; but the results are provisional, and no doubt the theory can be improved. In any case, there is no "friction" between Dmitri's two points above.

Dmitri quotes Art Samplaski and replies:

>> I agree with Fred's underlying principle, that "average
>> listeners" (here taken to mean, are untrained but have
>> listened to a fair deal of Western music) can distinguish
>> "dominant" because of tonal tension.
> 
> On reflection, I'm not sure that Fred believes this -- strange as it seems, he may believe something closer to the opposite.
> 
> What I'm thinking is that according to TPS perceived tension is the *result* of certain calculations that are performed subconsciously -- calculations that in effect use the knowledge that a particular configuration of notes is a V chord.  So, tension is produced by the (unconscious) knowledge that something is a V chord, rather than the other way around.  It's not that we hear something tense and think -- "oh, an unstable sonority, must be a V7."  Or we may do this consciously, but the unconscious already knows that we've heard a V7, because it's got access (essentially) to the score.

I would rewrite the last phrase to say access not to the score but to the sound signal after it is processed into pitches and rhythms. Otherwise Dmitri interprets me correctly. As in other areas of unconscious behavior, listeners perform computations on the musical input. From these computations arise intuitive understanding, feelings of tension and expectation, and affective response. This means, according to TPS, that, among other things, the listener mentally registers ongoing configurations of TPS's "basic space," which itself reflects the underlying psychoacoustics. At the end of chapter 2, I note that any such configuration can be stated in a more or less neurally plausible hierarchical binary notation. Another possibility is that the tonotopic mapping of pitch on the basilar membrane and in the auditory cortex (for a review, see Weinberger's chapter in the 2nd edition of Deutsch's "Psychology of Music") extends to more complex spatial mappings in
 the brain. In TPS the numerical format is primary, but no one knows yet how mental structures such as these are neurally instantiated.

It is of course possible that such structures are figments of the theoretical imagination. But then one must come up with another way to explain the perceptual distinctions and experiences that musicians sense and that ordinary listeners show in experiments.

I could go on with responses to the indefatigable Dmitri, but life is not infinite. He writes:

> Let me say that I think all of these questions are very, very deep, and very interesting....I don't by any means think any of these questions are conclusively settled.  I'd love to see more thinking and discussion about all of this -- in Spectrum, at SMT, on this list, or whatever.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez once said to me that Americans are good at building technologies but poor at reflecting on foundational issues. Dmitri's challenges, as well as those of others to whom I have not responded, are a healthy rejoinder to Nattiez. I agree that the issues raised in these exchanges are deep, and I thank Dmitri and others for raising them.

Fred Lerdahl
Columbia University
awl1 at columbia.edu

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