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The Cognitive Reality of the Prolongational DOCTORAL THESIS The cognitive reality of prolongational structures in tonal music Martinez, Isabel Award date: 2007 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Oct. 2021 THE COGNITIVE REALITY OF PROLONGATIONAL STRUCTURES IN TONAL MUSIC BY ISABEL CECILIA MARTINEZ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ROEHAMPTON UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF SURREY 2007 for Ana Laura, Juliana and Emilio ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the psychological implications of prolongation, a structural phenomenon of tonal music, which is described in the musicological literature as an elaborative process in which some pitch events - such as chords and notes - remain as if they were sounding even though they are not physically present. In spite of its theoretical value as an analytical device, the question of prolongation as experienced still remains. Its cognitive scope was thoroughly explored in two groups of experiments: in part 1 prolongation was hypothesized as a constituent organization, in which the linear continuity of the voice-leading as it unfolds is parsed into syntactical units with beginnings and endings. The listener’s capacity to identify prolongational boundaries was tested under experimental conditions that explored the moment-to-moment sensitivity to prolongation in music-attending tasks. A clear ontology of prolongation as a constituent percept, at foreground reductional levels of the underlying structure, emerged unequivocally from the experimental results. However, this research did not fully explain an imaginative component that, according to Schenkerian theory, is present in the concept of prolongation. Alternative views of human cognition, related to the study of embodied knowledge and metaphorical thinking, were pursued in order to answer this question. In part 2 it was hypothesised that prolongation would be experienced as a structural metaphor. The interrupted structure, an archetypal organization of tonal music, was investigated on the assumption that this underlying configuration, interacting with cognition, primes in music perception the activation of an image-schematic structure - involving force. By means of a cross-domain mapping process, the listener projects that image-schematic structure onto the sonic organization of the piece, understanding the interrupted structure as a sonic ii unfolding of the force schema. The results confirmed the hypothesis: prolongation has a relevant status as imagined cognition. Structural metaphors operate as idealized models of cognitive processing that listeners activate during their experience of music. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT..........................................................................................................................II TABLE OF CONTENTS.................................................................................................... IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ XI CHAPTER I THE CONCEPT OF HIERARCHY IN MUSIC THEORY ..................................................1 I.1 MODELLING HIERARCHY: THEORETICAL MODELS OF UNDERLYING STRUCTURE.............1 I.2 THE CONCEPT OF PROLONGATION ..................................................................................6 I.2.1 Prolongation as a component of the underlying musical structure.......................6 I.2.2 Prolongation in three hierarchical theories of music..........................................13 I.2.2.1 The model of underlying structure by H. Schenker......................................13 I.2.2.2 The generative theory of tonal music by Lerdahl and Jackendoff................21 I.2.2.3 The implication-realization model by L. Meyer- E. Narmour......................27 I.2.3 Summary: prolongation as theorized...................................................................30 CHAPTER II PSYCHOLOGICAL BASES OF MUSIC HIERARCHY...................................................45 II.1. PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY AND EVIDENCE.................................................................45 II.1.1.-The nature of cognitive hierarchies: characteristic features and psychological evidence........................................................................................................................50 II.1.1.1 Approaching hierarchies: analytical dimensions.........................................52 iv II.2. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY OF HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE IN MUSIC: PRINCIPLES AND MODELS OF MUSIC HIERARCHY ..................................................................................62 II.2.1 Some cognitive principles of hierarchical structure in music............................66 II.2.1.1 Tonal hierarchies and event hierarchies. .....................................................66 II.2.1.2 Melodic anchoring.......................................................................................70 II.2.2. Static models of hierarchical processing ..........................................................72 II.2.3. Dynamic models of hierarchical processing .....................................................79 CHAPTER III PROLONGATION AS EXPERIENCED: SOME PRECURSORS ....................................85 III.1 ABSTRACTION OF HIERARCHICAL LEVELS .................................................................85 III.2 CATEGORIZATION OF THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE BY FAMILIARITY ......................92 III.3 OUR OWN PREVIOUS INVESTIGATION.........................................................................94 III.3.1 Abstraction of hierarchical tonal structure ......................................................94 III.3.2 Categorization of the underlying voice-leading by similarity...........................95 III.4 PROLONGATION AS EXPERIENCED: SUMMARY AND PROSPECTS ...............................107 CHAPTER IV EXPERIENCING PROLONGATION AS A LINGUISTIC CONSTITUENT ................112 IV.1 MODELLING SYNTAX: CONSTITUENCY AND DEPENDENCY AS TWO STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS IN TONAL MUSIC........................................................................................112 IV.1.1 Constituency ....................................................................................................116 IV.1.2 Dependency .....................................................................................................118 IV.1.3 The relationship between constituency and dependency.................................120 IV.2 PROLONGATIONAL STATUS OF THE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE....................................122 v IV.3 CONSTITUENCY AND ATTENTION TO MUSIC.............................................................129 IV.3.1 The concept of attention in cognitive psychology ...........................................129 IV.3.2 Attending to music hierarchy as a constituent organization...........................135 IV.3.3 Assessment of attention to the syntactic structure: the click technique ..........140 IV.4 SUMMARY: THE ASSUMPTION OF PROLONGATION AS A CONSTITUENT IN MUSIC ATTENDING .....................................................................................................................149 CHAPTER V EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES PART 1: PROLONGATION AS A LINGUISTIC CONSTITUENT ................................................................................................................153 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................153 V.1 EXPERIMENT V.1: SENSITIVITY TO CLOSURE IN EMBEDDED AND LINEAR CONSTITUENT CONTEXTS .......................................................................................................................156 V.1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................156 V.1.1.1 Aim............................................................................................................158 V.1.2 Method ..............................................................................................................159 V.1.2.1 Subjects .....................................................................................................159 V.1.2.2 Stimuli .......................................................................................................159 V.1.2.3 Apparatus ..................................................................................................163 V.1.2.4 Procedure...................................................................................................163 V.1.2.5 Design .......................................................................................................164 V.1.3 Results...............................................................................................................165
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