Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Systematic Musicology: A Historical Interdisciplinary Perspective Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

25. Musical Syntax I: Theoretical Perspectives

Authors : Martin Rohrmeier, Marcus Pearce

Published in: Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

The understanding of musical syntax is a topic of fundamental importance for systematic musicology and lies at the core intersection of music theory and analysis, music psychology, and computational modeling. This chapter discusses the notion of musical syntax and its potential foundations based on notions such as sequence grammaticality, expressive unboundedness, generative capacity, sequence compression and stability. Subsequently, it discusses problems concerning the choice of musical building blocks to be modeled as well as the underlying principles of sequential structure building. The remainder of the chapter reviews the main theoretical proposals that can be characterized under different mechanisms of structure building, in particular approaches using finite-context or finite-state models as well as tree-based models of context-free complexity (including the Generative Theory of Tonal Music) and beyond. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main issues and questions driving current research and a preparation for the subsequent empirical chapter Musical Syntax II.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter Auditory Working Memory
next chapter Musical Syntax II: Empirical Perspectives
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Literature
25.1
M. Steedman: The blues and the abstract truth: Music and mental models. In: Mental Models in Cognitive Science, ed. by A. Garnham, J. Oakhill (Erlbaum, Mahwah 1996) pp. 305–318
25.2
M.T. Pearce, M. Rohrmeier: Music cognition and the cognitive sciences, Top. Cogn. Sci. 4(4), 468–484 (2012)CrossRef
25.3
M. Christiansen, N. Chater: Toward a connectionist model of recursion in human linguistic performance, Cogn. Sci. 23, 157–205 (1999)CrossRef
25.4
D. Sudnow: Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (MIT Press, Cambridge 1978)
25.5
25.6
25.7
25.8
E. Aldwell, C. Schachter: Harmony & Voice Leading (Thomson Schirmer, New York 2003)
25.9
I. Cross: Cognitive science and the cultural nature of music, Top. Cogn. Sci. 4(4), 668–677 (2012)CrossRef
25.10
J. Kippen, B. Bel: Modelling music with grammars. In: Computer Representations and Models in Music, ed. by A. Marsden, A. Pople (Academic Press, London 1992) pp. 207–238
25.11
S. Marcus: The Eastern Arab system of melodic modes: A case study of Maqam Bayyati. In: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. The Middle East (Routledge, New York 2003) pp. 33–44
25.12
D.R. Widdess: Aspects of form in North Indian ālāp and dhrupad. In: Music and Tradition: Essays on Asian and Other Musics Presented to Laurence Picken (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1981) pp. 143–182
25.13
A. Sorace, F. Keller: Gradience in linguistic data, Lingua 115(11), 1497–1524 (2005)CrossRef
25.14
B. Aarts: Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2004)
25.15
B. Aarts: Syntactic Gradience: The Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2007)
25.16
W. Caplin: Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford Univ. Press, New York, Oxford 1998)
25.17
E. Aldwell, C. Schachter: Harmony and Voice Leading, 2nd edn. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego 1989)
25.18
25.19
N. Chomsky: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT Press, Cambridge 1965)
25.20
N. Chater: Reconciling simplicity and likelihood principles in perceptual organisation, Psychol. Res. 103, 566–581 (1996)
25.21
25.22
D.J.C. MacKay: Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2003)MATH
25.23
R. Cilibrasi, P.M.B. Vitanyi, R. de Wolf: Algorithmic clustering of music based on string compression, Comput. Music J. 28, 49–67 (2004)CrossRef
25.24
M.M. Marin, H. Leder: Examining complexity across domains: Relating subjective and objective measures of affective environmental scenes, paintings and music, PLoS ONE 8(8), e72412 (2013)CrossRef
25.25
P.D. Grünwald: The Minimum Description Length Principle (MIT Press, Cambridge 2007)
25.26
A. Perfors, J.B. Tenenbaum, T. Regier: The learnability of abstract syntactic principles, Cognition 118(3), 306–338 (2011)CrossRef
25.27
C. Kemp, J.B. Tenenbaum: The discovery of structural form, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105(31), 10687–10692 (2008)CrossRef
25.28
25.29
S. Kostka, D. Payne: Tonal Harmony (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1984)
25.30
E. Narmour: The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity: The Implication-Realization Model (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London 1992)
25.31
C.L. Krumhansl: Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1990)
25.32
B. De Haas, M. Rohrmeier, R. Veltkamp, F. Wiering: Modeling harmonic similarity using a generative grammar of tonal harmony. In: Proc. 10th Int. Soc. Music Inf. Retr. Conf. (ISMIR 2009), Kobe, ed. by K. Hirata, G. Tzanetakis, K. Yoshii (2009) pp. 549–554
25.33
S. Koelsch: Towards a neural basis of processing musical semantics, Phys. Life Rev. 8(2), 89–105 (2011)
25.34
L.R. Slevc, A.D. Patel: Meaning in music and language: Three key differences: Comment on ``Towards a neural basis of processing musical semantics'' by Stefan Koelsch, Phys. Life Rev. 8(2), 110–111 (2011)
25.35
U. Reich: The meanings of semantics: Comment on ’Towards a neural basis of processing musical semantics’ by Stefan Koelsch, Phys. Life Rev. 8(2), 120–121 (2011)
25.36
W.T. Fitch, B. Gingras: Multiple varieties of musical meaning: Comment on ``Towards a neural basis of processing musical semantics'' by Stefan Koelsch, Phys. Life Rev. 8(2), 108–109 (2011)
25.37
F. Lerdahl: Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford Univ. Press, New York 2001)
25.38
M. Rohrmeier: Towards a generative syntax of tonal harmony, J. Math. Music 5(1), 35–53 (2011)CrossRef
25.39
M. Lehne, M. Rohrmeier, S. Koelsch: Tension-related activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala: An fMRI study with music, Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 9(10), 1515–1523 (2013)CrossRef
25.40
25.41
G.J. Balzano: The pitch set as a level of description for studying musical pitch perception. In: Music, Mind and Brain, ed. by M. Clynes (Plenum, New York 1982) pp. 321–351CrossRef
25.42
L. Euler: Tentamen Novae Theoriae Musicae (Academia Scientiae, St. Petersburg 1739), reprint: Broude Bros., New York 1968
25.43
G. Weber: Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, Vol. 1–4 (Schott, Mainz 1830)
25.44
J. Pressing: Cognitive isomorphisms between pitch and rhythm in world musics: West Africa, the Balkans and Western tonality, Stud. Music 17, 38–61 (1983)
25.45
H.C. Longuet-Higgins: Letter to a musical friend, Music Rev. 23, 244–248 (1962)
25.46
H.C. Longuet-Higgins: Second letter to a musical friend, Music Rev. 23, 271–280 (1962)
25.47
R.N. Shepard: Structural representations of musical pitch. In: Psychology of Music, ed. by D. Deutsch (Academic Press, New York 1982) pp. 343–390CrossRef
25.48
D. Tymoczko: A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2011)
25.49
25.50
P. Janata, J.L. Birk, J.D. van Horn, M. Leman, B. Tillmann, J.J. Bharucha: The cortical topography of tonal structures underlying Western music, Science 298(5601), 2167–2170 (2002)CrossRef
25.51
G. Jäger, J. Rogers: Formal language theory: refining the Chomsky hierarchy, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B 367(1598), 1956–1970 (2012)CrossRef
25.52
J.E. Hopcroft, J.D. Ullman: Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation (Addison-Wesley, Reading 1979)MATH
25.53
G. Rozenberg, A. Salomaa (Eds.): Handbook of Formal Languages (Springer, New York 1997)MATH
25.54
G. Wiggins: Computer models of (music) cognition. In: Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, ed. by P. Rebuschat, M. Rohrmeier, I. Cross, J. Hawkins (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2012) pp. 169–188
25.55
M.A. Rohrmeier, S. Koelsch: Predictive information processing in music cogntion. A critical review, Int. J. Psychophysiol. 83(2), 164–175 (2012)CrossRef
25.56
T.C. Bell, J.G. Cleary, I.H. Witten: Text Compression (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1990)
25.57
S. Bunton: On-Line Stochastic Processes in Data Compression, Doctoral Dissertation (University of Washington, Seattle 1996)
25.58
D. Huron: Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (MIT Press, Cambridge 2006)
25.59
J.-P. Rameau: Traite de l’harmonie reduite a ses principes naturels (J.B.C. Ballard, Paris 1722)
25.60
W. Piston: Harmony (W.W.Norton, New York 1948)
25.61
R.O. Gjerdingen: Learning syntactically significant temporal patterns of chords, Neural Netw. 5, 551–564 (1992)CrossRef
25.62
V. Byros: Meyer's anvil: Revisiting the schema concept, Music Anal. 31(3), 273–346 (2012)CrossRef
25.63
V. Byros: Towards an ``archaeology'' of hearing: schemata and eighteenth-century consciousness, Musica Humana 1(2), 235–306 (2009)
25.64
D. Conklin, I.H. Witten: Multiple viewpoint systems for music prediction, J. New Music Res. 24(1), 51–73 (1995)CrossRef
25.65
M.T. Pearce: The Construction and Evaluation of Statistical Models of Melodic Structure in Music Perception and Composition, Doctoral Dissertation (Department of Computing, City University, London 2005)
25.66
L.R. Rabiner: A tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and selected applications in speech recognition, Proc. IEEE 77(2), 257–285 (1989)CrossRef
25.67
S. Kostka, D. Payne: Tonal Harmony (McGraw-Hill, New York 1995)
25.68
M. Rohrmeier: A generative grammar approach to diatonic harmonic structure. In: Proc. 4th Sound Music Comput. Conf., ed. by Spyridis, Georgaki, Kouroupetroglou, Anagnostopoulou (2007) pp. 97–100
25.69
D.R. Hofstadter: Goedel, Escher, Bach (Basic Books, New York 1979)
25.70
I. Giblin: Music and the Generative Enterprise: Situating a Generative Theory of Tonal Music in the Cognitive Sciences, Doctoral Dissertation (University of New South Wales, Sydney 2008)
25.71
F. Lerdahl, R. Jackendoff: A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (MIT Press, Cambridge 1983)
25.72
M. Steedman: A generative grammar for jazz chord sequences, Music Percept 2(1), 52–77 (1984)CrossRef
25.73
H. Riemann: Musikalische Syntaxis (Breitkopf Härtel, Leipzig 1877)
25.74
T. Christensen: The Schichtenlehre of Hugo Riemann, Theory Only 6(4), 37–44 (1982)
25.75
H. Schenker: Der Freie Satz. Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien (Margada, Liège 1935)
25.76
F. Lerdahl: Cognitive constraints on compositional systems. In: Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation and Composition, ed. by J.A. Sloboda (Clarendon, Oxford 1988) pp. 231–259
25.77
A. Keiler: Bernstein’s ‘‘The Unanswered Question’’ and the problem of musical competence, Music. Q. 64(2), 195–222 (1978)CrossRef
25.78
A. Keiler: Two views of musical semiotics. In: The Sign in Music and Literature, ed. by W. Steiner (Univ. Texas Press, Austin 1981) pp. 138–168
25.79
D. Tidhar: A Hierarchical and Deterministic Approach to Music Grammars and its Application to Unmeasured Preludes (dissertation.de, Berlin 2005)
25.80
I. Deliège: Grouping conditions in listening to music: An approach to Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s grouping preference rules, Music Percept 4(4), 325–360 (1987)CrossRef
25.81
R. Jackendoff: Foundations of Language – Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2003)
25.82
R. Jackendoff: A parallel architecture perspective on language processing, Brain Res 1146, 2–22 (2007)CrossRef
25.83
C. Roads: Grammars as representations for music. In: Foundations of Computer Music, ed. by C. Roads, J. Strawn (MIT Press, Cambridge 1985) pp. 403–442
25.84
J. Sundberg, B. Lindblom: Generative theories for describing musical structure. In: Representing Musical Structure, ed. by P. Howell, R. West, I. Cross (Academic Press, London 1991) pp. 245–272
25.85
P.N. Johnson-Laird: Jazz improvisation: A theory at the computational level. In: Representing Musical Structure, ed. by P. Howell, R. West, I. Cross (Academic Press, London 1991) pp. 291–325
25.86
S.M. Shieber: Evidence against the context-freeness of natural language. In: The Formal Complexity of Natural Language, ed. by W.J. Savitch, E. Bach, W. Marsh, G. Safran-Navah (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht 1987) pp. 320–334
25.87
A.K. Joshi, K.V. Shanker, D. Weir: The Convergence of Mildly Context-Sensitive Grammar Formalisms. Technical Report No. MS- CIS-90-01 (Univ. of Pennsylvania, Department of Computer and Information Science 1990)
25.88
M. Steedman: The Syntactic Process (MIT Press, Cambridge 2001)
25.89
E.P. Stabler: Computational perspectives on minimalism. In: Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, ed. by C. Boeckx (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2011) pp. 617–643
25.90
25.91
D. Cope: Computer modelling of musical intelligence in EMI, Comput. Music J. 16(2), 69–83 (1992)CrossRef
25.92
P. Mavromatis: A hidden Markov model of melody production in Greek church chant, Comput. Musicol. 14, 93–112 (2005)
Metadata
Title
Musical Syntax I: Theoretical Perspectives
Authors
Martin Rohrmeier
Marcus Pearce
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book
Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology

Print ISBN: 978-3-662-55002-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-662-55004-5

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55004-5_25

Premium Partners

    Image Credits