Background in Historical Musicology. In addition to making inferences about historicaludperformance practice, it is interesting to ask questions about the experience of historical listeners.udIn particular, how might their perception vary from that of present-day listeners (and listeners atudother time points, more generally) as a function of the music to which they were exposedudthroughout their lives.udBackground in Music Cognition. To illustrate the approach, we focus on the cognitive processudof expectation, which has long been of interest to musicians and music psychologists, partlyudbecause it is thought to be one of the processes supporting the induction of emotion by music.udRecent work has established models of expectation based on probabilistic learning of statisticaludregularities in the music to which an individual is exposed. This raises the possibility ofuddeveloping simulations of historical listeners by training models on the music to which theyudmight have been exposed.udAims. First, we aim to develop a framework for creating and testing simulated perceptual modelsudof historical listeners. Second, we aim to provide simple but concrete illustrations of how theudsimulations can be applied in a preliminary approach. These are intended as illustrative feasibilityudstudies to provide a springboard for further discussion and development rather than fully fledgedudexperiments in their own right. Third, we aim to appeal to the expertise of historical musicologistsudin identifying useful research questions and appropriate constraints for the simulations, so theseudcan be used to complement existing evidence on the perception of music by historical listeners.udMain contribution. Our primary contribution is to develop and illustrate a framework which weudbelieve can shed light on the perception of music by historical listeners and, in particular, howudlisteners of different periods might have generated different predictions to music as a function ofuddifferences in their musical experiences. The framework we develop involves several steps. First,udidentifying a research question; second, selecting a corpus (or corpora) to represent the musicaludexperience of the listener(s) we want to simulate; third, identify the central musical features ofudinterest and use them to develop a representation scheme for the selected compositions; finally,udthe model parameters are selected and the models are trained on the selected corpora to simulateudparticular listeners. We identify and discuss the decisions that must be made at each step. Finally,udwe illustrate the framework by training models on a range of corpora from different stylisticudtraditions from different locations and points in history, including analyses at the level of entireudcollections, individual compositions, and individual events.udImplications. The results of our illustrative analyses suggest that the trained models behave asudwe hypothesised, demonstrating sensitivity to stylistic similarities which could illuminate howudlisteners from different eras might have experienced musical structures. However, the approachudis in need of expertise in historical musicology to establish clear and relevant research questionsudand to select appropriate parameters for the simulations. With such additional input, we believeudsimulated listeners will provide important insights, alongside other evidence, into the question ofudhow our forebears experienced the music of their time.
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