Is there a 'rise-fall temporal archetype' of intensity in electroacousti music?
Roger Thornton Dean, Freya Bailes · Canadian acoustics · 2008
We seek to identify recurrent temporal structures in a range of musics, which may relate to affect.Huron proposed a 'ramp archetype' in intensity patterns, based on his study of Western classical score notations [2,3].He observed more notations for 'crescendo' (increases in loudness) than 'diminuendo' (decreases), and estimated that crescendi occupied greater lengths of notational time than diminuendi.Since the word ramp can refer to both rises and falls, we will discuss a possible 'rise-fall temporal archetype'.Huron proposed that rises occupy greater time than falls, and that this may optimise attention, since rises may share features of environmental sonic looming.We made specific predictions from this theory: first, that within most successive rise-fall pairs, rises last longer than falls.Since there are limits to the maximum and minimum intensities, commonly the intensity range covers the whole possible range, and so rises and falls on average involve similar magnitude intensity changes.Thus we predict, second, the rate of intensity change during a (longer) ramp is smaller than that in the succeeding (shorter) damp.The critical feature for a listener is probably perceptual loudness, but here we investigate the only possible surrogate for it in the case of the complex sonic textures of computer music, physical sound intensity.Huron did not make acoustic measurements.We are undertaking computational analysis of recordings within various music genres, to asess whether these predictions are upheld, and to extend them to other possible analogues of such archetypes beyond dynamics.Here we present such analysis of an anthology of Canadian computer music.