“The experience of involuntary musical imagery (INMI or “earworms”)-having a tune spontaneously enter and repeat in one’s mind-can be attributed to a wide range of triggers, including memory associations and recent musical exposure. “Dissecting an earworm: Melodic features and song popularity,” by K. My mind kept returning to music I was working on at the time. This happened so powerfully to me that I had a hard time focusing on his text as I read. His analogies and explanations not only make each concept crystal clear, an imaginative musical mind will eagerly dream up ways to apply them. Levitin explores two themes essential to our work: expectation and memory. This has become a classic text for music enthusiasts, though it is of great use to music makers, as well. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Statistical analyses of vocal melodies from four different continents are consistent with this simple explanation. Skips tend toward the extremes of a melody’s tessitura, and from those extremes, a melody has little choice but to retreat by changing direction. Although this tendency is often attributed to listeners’ expectations, it might arise more simply from constraints on melodic ranginess or tessitura. In melodies from a wide variety of cultures, a large pitch interval tends to be followed by a change of direction. “Why Do Skips Precede Reversals? The Effect of Tessitura on Melodic Structure,” by Paul Von Hippel and David Huron LINK provides a summary of Naramour’s work on melody (the volumes cited above). Narmour has served as the President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and has been a guest professor and lecturer at Oxford University, Stanford University, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Regarding melodic structure, be sure to click on: “Contour, Continuity, and Reduction.”Įugene Narmour’s ground-breaking volumes, The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures and The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity are influential and widely read throughout the world. This web page contains an extensive outline of the component parts of music, which aims to help composers keep hold of their bearings as they create melody. “Composer’s Tools: An Interactive Idea List,” by Kenneth R.
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