Crossmodal Associations with Olfactory, Auditory, and Tactile Stimuli in Children and Adults

People associate information with different senses but the mechanism by which this happens is unclear. Such associations are thought to arise from innate structural associations in the brain, statistical associations in the environment, via shared affective content, or through language. A developmental perspective on crossmodal associations can help determine which explanations are more likely for specific associations. Certain associations with pitch (e.g., pitch–height) have been observed early in infancy, but others may only occur late into childhood (e.g., pitch–size). In contrast, tactile–chroma associations have been observed in children, but not adults. One modality that has received little attention developmentally is olfaction. In the present investigation, we explored crossmodal associations from sound, tactile stimuli, and odor to a range of stimuli by testing a broad range of participants. Across the three modalities, we found little evidence for crossmodal associations in young children. This suggests an account based on innate structures is unlikely. Instead, the number and strength of associations increased over the lifespan. This suggests that experience plays a crucial role in crossmodal associations from sound, touch, and smell to other senses.

Consistent Pitch Height Forms: A commentary on Daniel Muzzulini's contribution Isaac Newton's Microtonal Approach to Just Intonation

This text revisits selected aspects of Muzzulini's article and reformulates them on the basis of a three-dimensional interval space E and its dual E*. The pitch height of just intonation is conceived as an element h of the dual space. From octave-fifth-third coordinates it becomes transformed into chromatic coordinates. The dual chromatic basis is spanned by the duals a* of a minor second a and the duals b* and c* of two kinds of augmented primes b and c. Then for every natural number n a modified pitch height form hn is derived from h by augmenting its coordinates with the factor n, followed by rounding to nearest integers. Of particular interest are the octave-consitent forms hn mapping the octave to the value n. The three forms hn for n = 612, 118, 53 (yielding smallest deviations from the respective values of n h) form the Muzzulini basis of E*. The respective transformation matrix T* between the coordinate representations of linear forms in the Muzzulini basis and the dual chromatic basis is unimodular and a Pisot matrix with the dominant eigen-co-vector very close to h. Certain selections of the linear forms hn are displayed in Muzzuli coordinates as ball-like point clouds within a suitable cuboid containing the origin. As an open problem remains the estimation of the musical relevance of Newton's chromatic mode, and chromatic modes in general. As a possible direction of further investigation it is proposed to study the exo-mode of Newton's chromatic mode

Bach and Busoni Essentials in A Chaotic World

The study analyses the manifestation of structural change from the Bach Violin Chaconne (BWV1004, c.1720) to the Bach-Busoni piano transcription (c.1897). This article explores the use of two-dimensional music abstraction for vertical (pitch height) and horizontal (time) and its signal insignificant identified bariolage sections in music. Bariolage excerpts are chosen for they are implied sounds captured in repeatability and recontextuality. The first part of the article offers an excerpt of the Bariolage from violin at bars (113-120) and its parallel piano transcription at bars (118-125). Significant expressions of registral change utilizing different voice parts (Soprano, Alto, Tenor) offer a wider expansion with piano. These excerpts were chosen after reviewing the original Bach Chaconne and its essentials in analytical aesthetics for the projection of beauty in symmetry-asymmetry-chaos in composition. This study captures the aesthetics of the beautiful from the original score of the violin Chaconne at (bars 89-96) and (bars 113-120) for Bach-Busoni piano transcription. Further, there are recommendations for future studies to explore vertical spaces and mathematical sequences embedded in the music in other sections. The findings of this study were implied through new music analytical formats to be applied in composition, pedagogy, and performance practice.

The tone system of Ruc and tonogenesis in Vietic languages

Rục, a dialect of the ethnic group of Chứt spoken in the mountainous area in Quảng Bình province, has been describing as a tonal language with four tones characterized by pitch (F0), voice quality and laryngeal features; however, there has been no experimental study on the tone system of Rục. In Summer 2019, we recorded 20 Ruc speakers (10 women) reading a wordlist including 66 words made of five vowels /iː, ɛː, uː, ɔː, aː/ in combination with different dental and velar onsets and the four tones. The results show that the four tones in Rục are differentiated by pitch height and pitch contour. Moreover, spectral measurements (H1-H2, H1-A1, H1-A2 and CPP) indicate that two low-register tones (derived from voiced onsets) have a breathy voice compared to a modal voice in two high-register tones (derived from voiceless onsets). In words with the two low-register tones, vowels tend to be pronounced with a higher aperture (a lower F1) than in high-register tones context. These results support and update theories on tonongenesis and registrogenesis in Vietic languages and Mon-Khmer languages in general.

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

Previous research conducted on the cross-cultural perception of music and its emotional content has established that emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a rudimentary level. Here, we report a cross-cultural study with participants originating from two tribes in northwest Pakistan (Khow and Kalash) and the United Kingdom, with both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western and non-Western harmonisation styles, and whether cultural familiarity with a harmonic idiom such as major and minor mode would consistently relate to emotion communication. The results indicate that Western concepts of harmony are not relevant for participants unexposed to Western music when other emotional cues (tempo, pitch height, articulation, timbre) are kept relatively constant. At the same time, harmonic style alone has the ability to colour the emotional expression in music if it taps the appropriate cultural connotations. The preference for one harmonisation style over another, including the major-happy/minor-sad distinction, is influenced by culture. Finally, our findings suggest that although differences emerge across different harmonisation styles, acoustic roughness influences the expression of emotion in similar ways across cultures; preference for consonance however seems to be dependent on cultural familiarity.

The Autosegmental-Metrical Theory of Intonational Phonology

The chapter outlines the basic principles of the autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory of intonational phonology. AM posits that at the phonological level intonation consists of a string of L(ow) and H(igh) tones (i.e. a string of tonal autosegments) that associate with metrical heads and phrasal boundaries. Phonetically, tones are realized as tonal targets, specific f0 points defined by their scaling and alignment; scaling refers to the pitch height of the tonal target, and alignment to the synchronization of the target with the segmental material that reflects its phonological association (typically stressed syllables and boundary-adjacent syllables). The chapter explains these essential tenets of AM in some detail and discusses how they differ from those of other models of intonation and what consequences these differences have for modelling and predicting the realization of pitch contours. The chapter presents the basics of phonological representation and phonetic modelling in AM, and briefly touches on intonational meaning and AM applications.

Comparing Word Affect and Tone Affect: Comment on Sun and Cuthbert 2017

In the article "Emotion Painting: Lyric, affect, and musical relationships in a large lead-sheet corpus", Sun and Cuthbert (2017) explored the correlations between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Several musical features did indeed turn out to be highly correlated with the affect of the lyrics. However, correlations between other features, particularly mode-related musical features and lyric affect, were either insignificant or even contradicted previous research. In the current commentary, it is argued that the difference between the musical features that show significant correlations and those that do not is that the former have a local musical effect whereas the latter tend to affect the mood of a whole phrase or piece, and that the way Sun and Cuthbert estimate lyric affect for sentences or song may not be appropriate. Furthermore, a few remarks are made about the way Sun and Cuthbert treat multi-syllable words and about some basic assumptions concerning the relation between music and lyrics in a song. Nevertheless, the authors are praised for their innovative and interesting work, while several alternative and additional analyses (for example with scale-degree qualia and syncopations) are proposed.