Chord Priming Beyond Associative Networks

by Nart Bedin ATALAY

Middle East Technical University

Informatics Institute

Department of Cognitive Science

bedin@ii.metu.edu.tr

Music, Sound Waves, Mental Structure (2)

Mental Representation of Music:

Tone, Chord, Meter, Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Meter, From… etc.

Listening, Analysis, Literate, Illiterate (3)

Listening as Analysis

Listening as Reconstruction

Literate Listening

Illiterate Listening

Remembering Melodies

Distinguishing Different Styles

Reacting Emotionally

Memorization

Identification

Transformation

Representation of Harmony (4)

MUSACT Bharucha (1987) GTTM Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1983)

Basics (5)

12 Notes

Chord

Key An abstract concept that defines notes and chords of a piece

The Circle of Fifths

Harmony The study of well-formed and preferred chord progressions

Basics (6)

Interactive Activation – Constraint Satisfaction Network

Input: Notes Layer Output: Notes - Chords - Keys Layers

MUSACT (7)

MUSACT, The Circle (9)

Psychological Data (10)

PRIME TARGET

related

unrelated

(G Major)(C Major Well-Formed)

(C Major Ill-Formed)

Reaction Time: Subjects react faster to well-formed targets than ill-formed targets when prime and target are related; subjects react faster to ill-formed targets than well-formed targets when prime and target unrelated.

Second Chord - Well-Formed? Ill-formed?

Accuracy: Subjects tend to describe ill-formed targets as well-formed when prime and target are related; subjects tend to describe well-formed targets as ill-formed when they are unrelated.

Bharucha & Stoeckig (1986, 1987)

(F# Major)

Single Chord

Hypothetical Experimental Data and Behavior of MUSACT (11)

Chord priming is not related with psycho-physical similarity of prime and target. (Bharucha & Stoeckig: 1987)

Chord priming is independent from the type of priming which is a result of similarity between prime and target. (Tekman & Bharucha: 1998)

Chord priming is independent from explicit knowledge of prime and target. (Justus & Bharucha: 1998)

Chord Priming Experiments (12)

Acquisition (13)

MUSACT is an end state representation of learned harmonic knowledge.

Expectation as a pattern recognition with incomplete stimuli. Autoassociative network. Nodes represent chromatic scale. The network learns the similarity between scales. (Bharucha & Olney: 1989)

Acquisition of harmonic knowledge by exposure to chord sequences. A sequential network. The network is exposed to the sequences which embody the transition probabilities of chords. The network learned the conditional probability distributions of chord functions. (Bharucha & Todd: 1989)

Building architecture of MUSACT by only exposing to the sequences. Unsupervised Self-Organizing Maps. The sequences are consistent with the statistical distributions of chords. (Tillman, Bigand & Bharucha: 2002)

Harmonic Priming Effect (14)

PRIME TARGET

related

unrelated

(C Major Well-Formed)

(C Major Ill-Formed)

Chord Sequence

C - a - d - G - C - F - C F- g – a – C –F – Bb – F - C

There is an effect of harmonic function on the expectation of chords. (Bigand & Pineau: 1997)

The effect of harmonic function and the effect of local priming are separate effects but not independent. (Tillmann, Bigand & Pineau: 1998)

Scrambling the chords in the sequence does not change the priming effect. Tillmann & Bigand 2001

Explanation of MUSACT (15)

MUSACT has done well with global priming experiments.

Harmonic function: Addition of single chord activations through time.

Neapolitean Sixth As A Chordal Function (16)

a b w c (well-formed) a b c w (ill-formed)

w functions as a member of the set A only in some conditions

MUSACT fails to capture this. Why?

Psychological Experiment (17)

PRIME TARGET

related

unrelated

(C Major Well-Formed)

(C Major Ill-Formed)

Chord Sequence

Single Chord

Unrelated becomes Neapolitan Sixth in Chord Sequence

Result: Subjects show priming effect with N6 chord in chord sequences

We need another explanation for the representation of chords. It should combine all results within a single

architecture. It should represent N6 sixth as an emergent property.

Musicology Cognitive Science