This thesis comprises two manuscripts prepared for scholarly journals. Chapter 2 comprises an article entitled “Exploring Historic Changes in Musical Communication: Deconstructing Emotional Cues in Preludes by Bach and Chopin.”, which examines emotion perception in historic prelude sets by J.S. Bach and F. Chopin. This work connects psychological research on perceived musical emotion to musicological research describing changes in music structure. Using a technique called commonality analysis to deconstruct cues’ individual and joint roles in predicting participants’ perceived emotions, the chapter clarifies how music’s conveyed emotion can differ in compositions from different eras. Chapter 3 comprises an article entitled “Parsing Musical Patterns in Prelude Sets: Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Epistemologies in Historical Music Research”. This chapter bridges gaps between qualitative and quantitative research on music history through an analytical approach engaging with both fields. Specifically, cluster analyses of Bach and Chopin’s preludes reveal notable differences in the composers’ expressive toolkits, consistent with work from historical and empirical music research. Through a novel analytical framework, the chapter illustrates a method for detecting groups of pieces demarcated by salient musical differences, assessing cues’ importance within these groups, and determining the most influential cue values for each group. Together, these articles provide new insight into the subtle sonic relationships influencing musical meaning and emotion perception. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Music’s capacity to express emotion has received considerable attention in psychological and musicological research. Whereas efforts from psychology clarify the musical cues for emotion through perceptual experiments, efforts from musicology track changes in compositional practice over time—finding changing relationships between music’s cues for emotion in historically diverse compositions. To date, the implications of these changing musical relationships for emotion perception remain unclear. This thesis analyzes musical scores and listeners’ emotion ratings to gain insight into music’s structural changes throughout history and their implications for perceived emotion. By applying statistical techniques to (i) detect musical patterns in prelude sets by J.S. Bach and F. Chopin and (ii) clarify how cue relationships influence emotion perception, this thesis sheds light on the relationship between music’s historic context and its emotional meaning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27012 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Anderson, Cameron J. |
| Contributors | Schutz, Michael, Psychology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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