Building an authentic listener: Applying a passive exposure-based training paradigm to detecting differences among compositional styles.

摘要

Background in music history. Around 1600, there was a shift in compositional style whoseudmost significant feature was the increasingly free use of unprepared and/or incorrectly resolveduddissonance. It caused controversy at the time (Artusi vs. Monteverdi), and its proponentsudargued that it was justifiable as a means of text expression. It can be argued that, in order to beudshocked at the "illegal" treatment of dissonances, a listener would have to be familiar withud"legal" behaviour of dissonances. Modern audiences, when exposed to seconda pratica music,udtend not to react with same degree of alarm. One can argue that this is because lateruddevelopments in music, to which the audiences have been exposed, go much farther in theiruddissonance treatment than the music of the seconda pratica composers.udBackground in psychology. Previous studies have shown that participants can rapidly developudboth knowledge and subjective preference for grammatical structure following only a limitedudexposure to unfamiliar musical systems. Familiarity with musical structure has been shown toudplay a role in influencing the degree of emotional engagement experienced by participantsudwhile listening to music. The differences among the musical stimuli used in these studies areudoften maximised; in some cases, an entirely artificial musical grammar is used.udAims. Can we, through exposure to a training set, build enough familiarity in modern listenersudof the conventional rules of dissonance treatment, that they experience seconda pratica musicudas odd or alarming in some way? Our experiment is a pilot study to test the feasibility of suchudan approach to this problem.udMain contribution. We constructed an experiment in which a group of participants, drawnudfrom among undergraduate students in music and psychology, were asked to rate two differentudpieces of Monteverdi (to represent seconda pratica), both before and after being exposed to audtraining set composed of either Monteverdi or Palestrina (to represent prima pratica). Alludpieces were presented once only without repetition. The training sets were chosen to minimiseudthe effect of performers' interpretation on the listener, in an attempt to isolate compositionaludstyle as the most salient difference. Our results showed a significant difference in the rating ofudthe Monteverdi pieces as "familiar" between the different groups. Other variables did not haveuda significant impact. This finding implies a degree of internalisation of the differences inudmusical grammar, and suggests that this paradigm for study might profitably be extended in theudfuture.udImplications. Our research has implications for any situation in which a teacher, performer, orudcomposer is attempting to communicate musical meaning to an audience that is unfamiliar withudthe style in question. If a fairly brief training period is sufficient to build an appreciation in audsample of untrained listeners, for differences that are as relatively subtle as those betweenudMonteverdi and Palestrina, then a presenter of unfamiliar or new music might use suchudknowledge to consciously structure the listening experience.