From: malcolm@apple.com
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 94 22:58:10 -0800
Subject: Music Perception at the Hearing Seminar
Message-Id: <9403030658.AA10480@apple.com>

Don't forget... this week's CCRMA Hearing Seminar starts Thursday (today
when most of you read this) at 1:15PM.  We're meeting again with the
Graduate Seminar.

This week Carol Krumhansl will be talking about her work with music
perception.  Come to CCRMA to find out more.

-- Malcolm

------- Forwarded Message


	Who:	Carol Krumhansl (Cornell and Stanford CAS)
	What:	Perceptual aspects of twentieth-century music
	When:	Thursday March 3 at 1:15PM <<<<<<---- Note Different Time
	Where:	CCRMA Ballroom (biggest room at the Knoll at Stanford)

From: krumhans@casbs.Stanford.EDU (Carol Krumhansl, Cornell)
Subject: Re: CCRMA Talk

	Abstract for Seminar at CCRMA, March 3, 1994

	Carol Krumhansl
	Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
	Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA

One of the central questions in the psychology of music concerns the effect
of musical experience, training, and acculturation on the perception of
music.  I will summarize four experimental studies that investigate this
question using materials from 20th century music.  The first experiment
investigated listeners' abilities to hear two different simultaneous keys
or tonalities.  A bitonal passage from Stravinsky's Petroushka was used in
the experiment.  Two groups of listeners participated, one highly familiar
with this particular piece of music.  Experience had little effect on the
results.  All listeners showed some influence of the two keys, but were
unable to attend to them separately.  Overall, the results were better
accounted for by theoretical proposals concerning partitioning of the
octatonic collection.

The second experiment investigated the perception of tonal organization in
twelve-tone serial music.  The materials for this experiment were drawn
from Schoenberg's Wind Quintet and String Quartet, No. 4.  Listeners were
all musically trained, but varied in the extent of academic music training.
 Academic training had a large effect in this experiment, with the
responses of these listeners more consistent with theoretical proposals
concerning this style of composition.  All listeners, however, were able to
classify the various transformations of the series (retrograde, inversion,
and retrograde inversion) with above chance accuracy, suggesting that the
series may serve as a basis for unifying a composition.

The next experiment examined the experience of form and time during a piece
by Stockhausen, Klavierstuck IX. Listeners showed consistent agreement as
to where major boundaries were located, and identified features as defining
those boundaries that are largely consistent with Lerdahl & Jackendoff's
grouping principles.  Listeners' judgments of the location of extracts from
the piece were fairly accurate, reflecting good retention of the piece in
memory.  However, systematic deviations from veridical time judgments were
found such that the sense of time passing was faster during the beginning
and end of the piece than during the middle.  A similar effect was found in
a parallel experiment using a piece by Mozart suggesting a general
psychological principle may underlie both temporal functions.

The final experiment examined memory for the musical surface using a piece,
Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensites, written in a style unfamiliar
to one of the groups of listeners and familiar to the other.  Listeners
heard the first half of the piece, and then were probed with segments that
were: a) extracts from the part of the piece they had heard, b) extracts
from the remainder of the piece, c) various transformations of sections of
the piece.  All listeners were able to recognize the first type of segment
accurately, and generalize to the second type.  The pattern of confusions
on the third type of segment indicated listeners were sensitive to pitch
contour and the global correlation between register and tone duration.