In my submission "A Brief History of Modulation in Musical Rhetoric and Brahms' Harmonic Ambiguity ", I identify the need for a study to correlate musical devices and mental states. The first step is to develop[ a catalog of such devices. These include among many effects, modulation (shifts in tonicity), silence, unison, changes in rhythmic texture etc.
By using the term "mental states", I choose a broader field than mere "emotion".
With an understanding of composition/improvisation (generative), there are a great many possibilities. Just within modulation, Max Reger has developed an extensive catalog of the devices, alas no mention is made of effect on an audience. Rameau in his treatise on Harmony discusses very briefly an emotional response to chromatic modulation (please see my article for the citation specifics; Reger is not cited in this paper yet. It remains in an unfinished form: more than a few citations TBD.
Gee, how do I put a citation here? - simple footnote:
Max Reger: Modulation (Dover Books on Music) Paperback 2007
ISBN 048645732X
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Treatise on Harmony Dover 1971
ISBN 0-486-22461-9
Dear karl,
surely, you know, that one of the first thinker to correlate musical devices and emotional responses was Plato, in The Republic.
Ferenc
Thank you Ferenc. I will explore this. (I believe its somewhere near Aristotle on my book shelf :-)
Right now I am studying performance theory in the form of The Archaeology of Performance, Inomata and Coben ed.
It is my plan to devise a study protocol for establishing connections between mental states and musical device.
Thanks again,
Karl
I corrected the original question text. For some reason I had Rameau talking about harmonic ambiguity when I meant chromatic modulation. I'm sure that sowed much confusion.
Study in the link seems to confirm the belief that music is a universal language.A language containing semantic structures that are comprehensible to a wide and diverse range of individuals.Musical devices are definitely an important unit of analysis in the analysis of a piece of music's semantic structure. Musical devices especially those related to the Baroque era may have a universal impact on the mental states with regards to "movement planning, memory and attention". Especially music's role in helping the brain to " foreshadow".
http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/04/study-shows-different-brains-have-similar-responses-to-music.html
I have known all along that musicians of the enlightenment would have developed a very serious rational understanding of the effect of musical devices. In "Music in the Galant Style", Robert Gjerdingen writes of Christian Bach: "One hesitates to point out indications of calculation and conscious construction in a movement (Opus 12: andante) that succeeds so well in conveying the “Noble simplicity” and naturalness that was an avowed aesthetic goal in the later 1770’s. Yet naturalness is an artful impression and not necessarily indicative of the mode of construction.”
In particular the Galant period focused very much of the conveyance of elaborate emotion via very complex methods but which are designed to look simple and natural. One always wants ones performances to appear effortless in spite of our preparatory work.
Robert Gjerdingen "Music in the Galant Style", Oxford U Press ISBN 978-0-19-531371-0. © 2007
"Being an Essay on Various Schemata Characteristic of 18th century Music for Courtly Chambers, Chapels, and Theaters, Including Tasteful Passages of Music Drawn from Most Excellent Chapel Masters in the Employ of Noble and Noteworthy Personages, Said Music All Collected for the Reader's Delectation on the World Wide Web."
This question/topic and its companion piece on Adrian Shepard and Cantilena are superseded by the new direction for research in answering this question, of course mentioned is a reference for this new direction.
Originally I had planned on basing the research on 17th c. North German Sacred Music (all caps, giving my passions away). I see popularity will be a necessary function in selling the concepts. I am now starting a project analyzing the Galant style (JC Bach, Arne, Boyce, Abel, Thomas Tinley, father and sons and Sam the oboist)
Thank you Ferenc Hörcher, Shian-Loong Bernard Lew, Jason Sabol, Lio Moscardini, Karen McAulay for your help. In particular I'd like to thank Lio and Karen for pointers to the remaining Cantilena alumni. Molto Grazie.
The important thing to note about the Galant is that it was entirely formulaic, fertile ground for studying the effects of musical device on mental states.
hello
here are the publications :
https://www.heartmath.org/assets/uploads/2015/01/music-iga.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Williams3/publication/6515307_A_functional_MRI_study_of_happy_and_sad_affective_states_induced_by_classical_music/links/09e415113f94aa87f4000000.pdf
http://eclub.unige.ch/system/files/biblio/1995_Scherer_JVoice.pdf
Article Functional MRI study of happy and sad – affective states ind...
What a lovely set of documentation to peruse. Thank you very much indeed.
That`s really a very interesting question. Palmer et al. published a very interesting paper "Music-color associations are mediated by emotion." They just distinguish rough emotional categories, like strong/weak, positive/negative and relate these categories to fast/slow music, major/minor, etc. However, it is a very nice approach!
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/22/8836.full.pdf
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