Browsing by Subject "Tonality"
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Item The Effects of Tempo and Tonality on Emotion: A Musicological Approach to Mass Communication Research on Music Effects(2020-07) Guanchez, InesThe present study’s goal was to test the effects of the tempo and tonality of a video’s music score on emotions. Emotions were selected from three theoretical frameworks: Posner’s two-dimensional model, Balkwill and Thompson’s music-oriented basic emotion model, and Zentner et al.’s Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS). By designing this study based on musicology research, this study can speak to music-related research in the mass communication field. It was hypothesized that tempo would have effects on arousal, tonality on valence, and that there would be clearer effects on GEMS than on basic emotions. A 2 (tonality: minor, major) x 2 (tempo: slow, fast) between-subjects experimental design was used, with 470 participants randomly assigned to one of the four conditions. A film music score was transposed for piano and four versions were recorded: Fast in minor key, fast in major key, slow in minor key, and slow in major key. Participants watched a neutrally-valenced video superimposed with the music from their respective condition, followed by a questionnaire addressing their emotions and possible confounding variables. Results indicated that tempo had an effect on arousal and the GEMS emotion of peace, while tonality had an effect on valence, the basic emotion of happiness, and the GEMS emotions of joy, transcendence, nostalgia, and peace, thereby supporting the hypotheses. Finally, individuals with musical proficiency experienced stronger levels of induced emotions, however, music proficiency did not affect tempo and tonality effects. Implications for the mass communication field are discussed further.Item Effects of timing and context on pitch comparisons between spectrally segregated tones.(2011-12) Borchert, Elizabeth Marta OlsenPitch, the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency (F0), is an important cue for understanding aspects of both music and speech. Much research has been devoted to pitch, with most being dedicated to measuring listeners' ability to judge pitch differences between sounds that are otherwise identical. However, in the natural environment, pitch comparisons are often made between different speech sounds (or different musical instruments), which differ not only in pitch but also in timbre. This dissertation investigates factors that affect normal-hearing listeners' ability to perceive and discriminate pitches of tones that differ in timbre due to being filtered into segregated spectral regions. The first study shows that the timing of tone presentation affects discrimination ability: listeners have difficulties comparing the F0s of sequentially presented sounds, and are much better able to perform the task when the tones are presented simultaneously. A follow-up experiment reveals that rather than explicitly comparing F0s, listeners seem to use a perceptual fusion cue when the tones are presented simultaneously; performance worsens when perceptual fusion is disrupted by asynchronous presentation or by auditory stream segregation induced with captor tones. A further study reveals that listeners' difficulty comparing sequentially presented tones of different timbres persists despite intensive training, and that individual differences in sequential tone discrimination cannot be reliably predicted based on musical experience or on analytical versus synthetic listening mode. Since pitch comparisons often occur within a musical context, the remainder of the thesis investigates the effect of a musical context on sequential pitch discrimination. Regardless of the predictability of the brief context, pitch discrimination generally improves for targets presented following a melodic context that establishes a tonal center corresponding to the pitch of the target tone. This effect of tonality is stronger for discrimination of different-timbre tone pairs than for same-timbre tone pairs. One interpretation of these findings is that sequential different-timbre pitch discrimination is limited more by cognitive factors, which are influenced by tonal context, than is same-timbre discrimination. The interactions between pitch, timbre, and context described in this thesis provide challenges for our understanding of how we perceive pitch in complex listening situations.