The cognitive reality of prolongational structures in tonal music
Isabel Cecilia Martínez · 2007
ii 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