{"id":219,"date":"2016-04-28T20:13:26","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T20:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/?page_id=219"},"modified":"2016-04-28T20:49:56","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T20:49:56","slug":"melody-is-emergent","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/melody-is-emergent\/","title":{"rendered":"Melody is Emergent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melody is Emergent<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The visual system is not a camera and the auditory system is not a tape recorder. Not only do we not see what is \u201cthere\u201d, we do not hear what is \u201cthere\u201d either.\u00a0 The world that we experience is the result of a creative process, a process that organizes sense data into information that is useful for the kind of animals that we are.\u00a0 Consider something as simple as three disks laid down in an arbitrary arrangement:<\/p>\n

\"triangle(1)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

How many things are in this picture? The instructions to a computer to draw this figure only require the mention of 3 objects, where they are and how big they are, and what their shape is.\u00a0 But there are not 3 things in this picture. There are 4.\u00a0 The fourth thing in this picture is the triangle.\u00a0 The triangle emerges from the three disks and is part of the information conveyed by the sense data. There is a lot of information in a triangle, much more than you might think if you confined your attention to the disks that form the sense data. The triangle has a boundary and this leads to its having an interior and an exterior.\u00a0 The inside and outside of the triangle are created, they are not in the disks.\u00a0 Triangles also have angles and we can see the angles even when the sides are not drawn in.\u00a0 Once we see the angles we also see that triangles point.\u00a0 That is, triangles create impressions of direction.\u00a0The next figure is a triangle that points to the right:<\/p>\n

\n

\"arrow(2)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To get this triangle to point unambiguously to the right a base has been added so that it becomes an arrow.\u00a0 Without the base this equilateral triangle would sometimes point upwards or downwards to the left.\u00a0 In fact you can use your mind to make the triangle point up or down and when you do that the arrow will stop looking like an arrow and instead look like some kind of odd shape.\u00a0 The interior of this arrow has been painted black \u2013 or has it?\u00a0 If we see the arrow as being painted then it does look like it has been painted black.\u00a0 If we see the arrow as being cut out of a piece of white paper and laid on a surface that is black then the arrow looks like a window \u2013 it does not have any color.\u00a0 There literally is more in both of these figures than what meets the eye.\u00a0 The \u201cmore\u201d is due to perceptual organization or what psychologists call Gestalt.\u00a0 Gestalt is in part the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.\u00a0 What the whole being greater than the sum of the parts means here is the disks are seen as being part of something \u2013 a triangle.\u00a0 The disks exist in the visual world, the triangle is in the mind of the observer.\u00a0 Roger Shepard, an eminent cognitive psychologist, put the situation most clearly; perception is informed hallucination.<\/p>\n

The mind not only create objects in space, it also creates objects in time.\u00a0 Auditory objects do not have names like dog or cat and are generally referred to abstractly as auditory scenes.\u00a0 Some examples of auditory scenes are bird calls, speech sounds, the sound of splashing or eating and so on.\u00a0 The idea here is that the auditory system pieces together discrete pieces of sound into events that involve substantial amounts of time.\u00a0 Music is an excellent example of this process.\u00a0 The individual notes are like the vertices of a triangle.\u00a0 And just like the triangle emerges from the entire collection of vertices, the melody in a piece of music arises only when the notes are perceived to be together<\/em> and part of something bigger.\u00a0 In a melody we hear not only the notes but also the relations between notes.\u00a0 Musicians know all about these relations and use them to create anticipation, resolution, suspension, and drive to name a few of the Gestalt properties of music.<\/p>\n

Auditory scenes are different from visual scenes in that some kind of memory system is implicated in hearing.\u00a0 In order for an auditory scene to emerge from a sequence of sounds, the sequence has to be kept alive in a memory bank for at least a few seconds.\u00a0 The memory system that creates auditory scenes in general, and music in particular, is what I am interested in and what the 40 bpm limit on metronomes is ultimately about.\u00a0 You can experience the activity of your memory systems by pressing the button marked performance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

PERFORMANCE<\/a><\/p>\n

Hopefully you just heard a little bit of Erik Satie.\u00a0 This piece is played at 90 bpm.\u00a0 Press the button marked slow<\/em> and you can hear the exact same piece played at about 45 bpm.<\/p>\n

SLOW<\/a><\/p>\n

Now the piece sounds a little sketchy.\u00a0 What has changed by changing the tempo?\u00a0 The notes are the same, they have not changed.\u00a0 This piece was created digitally in a synthesizer and the note values and lengths are fixed. The only thing that has changed is the rate at which the notes are fed into the sequencer.\u00a0 Obviously the tempo has changed but more than that, the contour has changed.\u00a0 It has begun to disintegrate. The individual notes are beginning to stand out in relief and separate from the piece that embeds them.\u00a0 The complete destruction of the contour can be heard by pressing the button really slow<\/em>.<\/p>\n

REALLY SLOW
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Now the tempo has been reduced by another factor of 3 to about 15 bpm.\u00a0 Nothing of the contour remains.\u00a0 Each note is an island.\u00a0 Evidently the memory system that create musical contour out of individual notes breaks down when the notes are too separated.<\/p>\n

The memory system that creates musical experience is only indirectly based on beat velocity measured as beats per minute.\u00a0 It is more directly based on the time between beats or the beat period.\u00a0 Metronome designers could have labeled the wand in terms of period and 40 bpm would be relabeled as 1.5 seconds.\u00a0 The metronome limit of 40 bpm is telling us that composers should not expect conductors to wait 1.5 seconds to move their hand to the next position.\u00a0 From the Satie example it is also obvious that composers should not expect listeners to wait much more than a second for notes to arrive if they expect their music to be intelligible.\u00a0 The research that I discuss in this article is about what a couple of seconds means for human information processing.<\/p>\n

Previous: Implicit Working Memory<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Next: Measuring the Coherence Threshold<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melody is Emergent The visual system is not a camera and the auditory system is not a tape recorder. Not only do we not see what is \u201cthere\u201d, we do not hear what is \u201cthere\u201d either.\u00a0 The world that we experience is the result of a creative process, a process that organizes sense data into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-219","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"site-graphic":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"ecw255","author_link":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/author\/ecw255\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Melody is Emergent The visual system is not a camera and the auditory system is not a tape recorder. Not only do we not see what is \u201cthere\u201d, we do not hear what is \u201cthere\u201d either.\u00a0 The world that we experience is the result of a creative process, a process that organizes sense data into…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/gilden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}