Episode 3: Interactions of Metrical and Tonal Hierarchies with Bryn Hughes and guest Chris White

Music Theorist Bryn Hughes recommends Chris White’s “Relationships Between Tonal Stability and Metrical Accent in Monophonic Contexts“, published in the Empirical Musicology Review (2017). Bryn and Finn interview Prof. White about his sequence of perceptual studies on how tonal stability may inform metrical hierarchy and vis versa, and together they discuss implications for music theory and some common issues in music cognition studies.

Show notes

• Recommended article:
  • White, C. (2017). Relationships Between Tonal Stability and Metrical Accent in Monophonic Contexts. Empirical Musicology Review, 12(1-2), 19-37.
• Interviewee: Prof. Chris White, Department of Music and Dance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst twitter: @chriswmwhite
• Co-host: Prof. Bryn Hughes, in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge twitter: @brynmdhughes
• Papers cited in the discussion:
  • Krumhansl, C. L., & Kessler, E. J. (1982). Tracing the dynamic changes in perceived tonal organization in a spatial representation of musical keys. Psychological Review, 89, 334–368. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033- 295X.89.4.334
  • Lerdahl, F., & Jackendoff, R. (1983). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Time Stamps

• [0:00:10] Intro with Prof. Bryn Hughes
• [0:11:48] Interview: Corpus studies inspiration and Study format
• [0:23:31] Interview: Effect Size and Gender as a factor
• [0:36:00] Interview: Experiment 4 and more design questions
• [0:43:34] Interview: Follow up and future work
• [0:53:33] Closing summary and surprises with Prof. Bryn Hughes

Credits

The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2018.

The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion Sound Demo 1.