Search PubMed⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

C L Krumhansl

Publications and source records attributed to C L Krumhansl.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

An exploratory study of musical emotions and psychophysiology.

A basic issue about musical emotions concerns whether music elicits emotional responses in listeners (the 'emotivist' position) or simply expresses emotions that listeners recognize in the music (the 'cognitivist' position). To address this, psychophysiological measures were recorded while listners heard two excerpts chosen to represent each of three emotions: sad, fear, and happy. The measures covered a fairly wide spectrum of cardiac, vascular, electrodermal, and respiratory functions. Other subjects indicated dynamic changes in emotions they experienced while listening to the music on one of four scales: sad, fear, happy, and tension. Both physiological and emotion judgements were made on a second-by-second basis. The physiological measures all showed a significant effect of music compared to the pre-music interval. A number of analyses, including correlations between physiology and emotion judgments, found significant differences among the excerpts. The sad excerpts produced the largest changes in heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance and temperature. The fear excerpts produced the largest changes in blood transit time and amplitude. The happy excerpts produced the largest changes in the measures of respiration. These emotion-specific physiological changes only partially replicated those found for nonmusical emotions. The physiological effects of music observed generally support the emotivist view of musical emotions.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Pitch and rhythmic patterns affecting infants' sensitivity to musical phrase structure.

The present studies were undertaken to learn more about the nature of the cues that underlie infants' perception of musical phrase structure. Experiment 1 demonstrated that infants in Krumhansl and Jusczyk's (1990) study were responding to the phrase structure instead of to the beginnings and endings of Mozart minuet stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that infants treat musical passages with pauses inserted at phrase boundaries much as they do unaltered versions of the same passages. Experiments 3 and 4 indicated that the direction of change in pitch height and tone duration is critical to obtaining longer orientation times to musical passages that are segmented at phrase boundaries. Finally, Experiment 5 demonstrates that different effects found for the forward and reversed versions of the passages with inserted pauses are not the result of an intrinsic preference for the forward versions.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1993

Isolating the dynamic attributes of musical timbre.

Three experiments examined the dynamic attributes of timbre by evaluating the role of onsets in similarity judgments. In separate experiments, subjects heard complete orchestral instrument tones, the onsets of those tones, and tones with the onsets removed ("remainders"). Ratings for complete tones corresponded to those for onsets, indicating that the salient acoustic attributes for complete tones are present at the onset. Ratings for complete tones also corresponded to those for remainders, indicating that the salient attributes for complete tones are present also in the absence of onsets. Subsequent acoustic analyses demonstrated that this pattern of similarity was due to the centroid frequencies and amplitude envelopes of the tones. The results indicate that the dynamic attributes of timbre are not only present at the onset, but also throughout, and that multiple acoustic attributes may contribute to the same perceptual dimensions.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1992

Perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre.

These experiments examined perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre. Experiment 1, through the use of the Garner classification tasks, found that pitch and timbre of isolated tones interact. Classification times showed interference from uncorrelated variation in the irrelevant attribute and facilitation from correlated variation; the effects were symmetrical. Experiments 2 and 3 examined how musical pitch and timbre function in longer sequences. In recognition memory tasks, a target tone always appeared in a fixed position in the sequences, and listeners were instructed to attend to either its pitch or its timbre. For successive tones, no interactions between timbre and pitch were found. That is, changing the pitches of context tones did not affect timbre recognition, and vice versa. The tendency to perceive pitch in relation to other context pitches was strong and unaffected by whether timbre was constant or varying. In contrast, the relative perception of timbre was weak and was found only when pitch was constant. These results suggest that timbre is perceived more in absolute than in relative terms. Perceptual implications for creating patterns in music with timbre variations are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Memory for musical surface.

This study of memory for music presented listeners with the first half of a short piano piece, O. Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités. The piece is written according to a unique compositional principle that rigidly couples values of pitch (chroma and octave), duration, and dynamics. Listeners heard test excerpts, which were judged in terms of whether or not they might have come from the piece (either from the part they had heard or from the remainder of the piece). Even in the first block of trials, listeners were able to recognize segments from the part of the piece they had heard, suggesting surprisingly accurate memory for surface characteristics. Listeners were also able to generalize to the rest of the piece, accurately judging segments from the part of the piece they had not heard. However, performance on four kinds of transformed segments showed that the abstraction of a piece's surface characteristics adopts rather loose criteria. Even highly trained professional musicians informed of the compositional constraints before the experiment were not sensitive to the specific couplings between musical parameters. Rather, listeners appeared to be sensitive to contour (the pattern of increasing and decreasing pitch) and global correlations between pitch height and duration, dynamics, and interval size. Performance did not change with repeated hearings of the music.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Mental representations for musical meter.

Investigations of the psychological representation for musical meter provided evidence for an internalized hierarchy from 3 sources: frequency distributions in musical compositions, goodness-of-fit judgments of temporal patterns in metrical contexts, and memory confusions in discrimination judgments. The frequency with which musical events occurred in different temporal locations differentiates one meter from another and coincides with music-theoretic predictions of accent placement. Goodness-of-fit judgments for events presented in metrical contexts indicated a multileveled hierarchy of relative accent strength, with finer differentiation among hierarchical levels by musically experienced than inexperienced listeners. Memory confusions of temporal patterns in a discrimination task were characterized by the same hierarchy of inferred accent strength. These findings suggest mental representations for structural regularities underlying musical meter that influence perceiving, remembering, and composing music.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

Independent temporal and pitch structures in determination of musical phrases.

In two experiments we addressed the roles of temporal and pitch structures in judgments of melodic phrases. Musical excerpts were rated on how good or complete a phrase they made. In Experiment 1, trials in the temporal condition retained the original temporal pattern but were equitonal; trials in the pitch condition retained the original pitch pattern but were equitemporal; and trials in the melody condition contained both temporal and pitch patterns. In Experiment 2, one pattern (pitch or temporal) was shifted in phase and recombined with the other pattern to create the pitch and temporal conditions. In the melody condition, both patterns were shifted together. In both experiments, ratings in the temporal and pitch conditions were uncorrelated, and the melody condition ratings were accurately predicted by a linear combination of the pitch and temporal condition ratings. These results were consistent across musicians with varying levels of experience.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Tonal hierarchies in the music of north India.

Cross-culturally, most music is tonal in the sense that one particular tone, called the tonic, provides a focus around which the other tones are organized. The specific organizational structures around the tonic show considerable diversity. Previous studies of the perceptual response to Western tonal music have shown that listeners familiar with this musical tradition have internalized a great deal about its underlying organization. Krumhansl and Shepard (1979) developed a probe tone method for quantifying the perceived hierarchy of stability of tones. When applied to Western tonal contexts, the measured hierarchies were found to be consistent with music-theoretic accounts. In the present study, the probe tone method was used to quantify the perceived hierarchy of tones of North Indian music. Indian music is tonal and has many features in common with Western music. One of the most significant differences is that the primary means of expressing tonality in Indian music is through melody, whereas in Western music it is through harmony (the use of chords). Indian music is based on a standard set of melodic forms (called rags), which are themselves built on a large set of scales (thats). The tones within a rag are thought to be organized in a hierarchy of importance. Probe tone ratings were given by Indian and Western listeners in the context of 10 North Indian rags. These ratings confirmed the predicted hierarchical ordering. Both groups of listeners gave the highest ratings to the tonic and the fifth degree of the scale. These tones are considered by Indian music theorists to be structurally significant, as they are immovable tones around which the scale system is constructed, and they are sounded continuously in the drone. Relatively high ratings were also given to the vadi tone, which is designated for each rag and is given emphasis in the melody. The ratings of both groups of listeners generally reflected the pattern of tone durations in the musical contexts. This result suggests that the distribution of tones in music is a psychologically effective means of conveying the tonal hierarchy to listeners whether they are familiar with the musical tradition. Beyond this, only the Indian listeners were sensitive to the scales (thats) underlying the rags. For Indian listeners, multidimensional scaling of the correlations between the rating profiles recovered the theoretical representation of scales described by theorists of Indian music.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Cross-Cultural Comparison↗
PubMed1984

Independent processing of visual form and motion.

Rotating or stationary targets were presented simultaneously with a random-dot mask which was itself either rotating or stationary. Observers were required to judge both the form of the target and its motion; these target attributes were manipulated orthogonally in the experiment. The results support the hypothesis that under these conditions figural information is encoded independently from motion information. On a trial-by-trial basis within conditions of target and mask motion combinations, performance in the two tasks was independent. Across conditions, different effects were observed in the two dependent measures. Form judgments were generally more accurate for rotating than for stationary targets, particularly when the mask was stationary. Motion judgments showed frequent intrusions from the motion of the mask, so that most errors occurred when target and mask were dissimilar in terms of their motion. The results show differential interference of the random-dot mask on the encoding of the two independent stimulus attributes, and support the possibility of separate processing of figural and motion information.

Form Perception↗
PubMed1982

Density versus feature weights as predictors of visual identifications: comment on Appelman and Mayzner.

Appleman and Mayzner's application of the distance-density model to confusion data is compared with Keren and Baggen's application of the feature-matching model. In both applications, the distinctive features of two stimuli are predictors of the number of confusion errors. However, the models differ in that the feature-matching model assigns weights to the features and assumes that the shared feature weights also affect the probability of confusion. In contrast, the distance-density model assumes that the number of confusions between two stimuli is affected by the number of stimuli in the entire stimulus set that are similar to the two stimuli (density). The two models are compared in the context of a set of digit identification data.

Discrimination Learning↗