A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science / This thesis examines how emotion is conveyed in music from different eras, and attempts to reconcile differences between psychological and music-theoretical approaches. Chapter 1 introduces the concepts embodied by the two manuscripts within this thesis. Chapters 2 and 3 describe two separate but related complimentary research projects. Chapter 2, entitled “Breaking with Common Practice: Exploring Modernist Musical Emotion”, compares perceived emotion in prelude sets by D. Shostakovich, F. Chopin, and J.S. Bach. This work seeks to clarify the relationship between historic changes in music’s structure and conveyed emotion, particularly in the twentieth century–which remains largely unexplored. Building on previous work, we used commonality analysis to break down the unique and joint contributions of various cues to perceived emotion and provide insight into their changing roles in the twentieth century. The work described in Chapter 3, “Cleaning up our work: Applying decision hygiene to analysis of musical structure”, was inspired by previous attempts in diverse fields (e.g., medicine, judicial sentencing) to resolve unwarranted disagreement, and used a novel procedure to distinguish genuine disagreement from disagreement that is not reflective of true differences of opinion amongst music theorists. Unlike other fields involving judgement, individual theorists’ unique perspectives are valuable. Therefore, rather than forcing inauthentic agreement, our procedure clarified and enhanced individual perspectives in musical analysis. Taken together, the research described in Chapters 2 and 3 bridge the gap between epistemologically different approaches to disseminating musical knowledge–cognition and theory. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Music’s expressive capabilities has inspired scholarship from psychology, music theory, musicology, and philosophy for centuries. Although research in psychology has produced consensus about how certain musical elements contribute to its emotional meaning, musicological research shows that music’s structure evolved across history. Little research has explored emotional communication in music from the twentieth century, raising important questions about how emotion is conveyed in the music of our time. This oversight may contribute to continuing disagreement between music psychologists and music theorists on how music’s structure affects its perceived meaning. Thus, by bridging the gap between theory and cognition, this thesis aims to: (i) shed light on the role of music’s evolving structure–particularly in the twentieth century–on perceived emotion; and (ii) reduce error in music analysis while preserving valuable differences in theorists’ perspectives through applying a novel method inspired by optimized decision-making procedures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/29127 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Delle Grazie, Massimo J. |
| Contributors | Schutz, Michael, Psychology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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