Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff’s 'A Generative Theory of Tonal Music' (GTTM) has only received limited attention in Danish music theory. Yet, its influence is irrefutable in terms of introducing the ‘cognitive paradigm’, which changed analytical focus from musical structure to the listening process. Recently, music cognition research has gained territory in Denmark, thus warranting a re-assessment of GTTM and its legacy. This paper provides an overview of GTTM outlining typical points of criticism. These include a simplified view on music, an unresolved conflict between global and local listening, an occasionally underspecified rule system, and unsubstantiated claims of universality and innateness based on intuition rather than cross-cultural research. GTTM’s reception and legacy is discussed in terms of 1) empirical testing, 2) theoretical refinement, 3) rule quantification, 4) computational implementation, and 5) application. Empirical findings have repeatedly emphasized the significance of surface structure and non-hierarchical, real-time listening, and models acquiring knowledge through unsupervised, statistical learning have largely replaced rule-based ones in cognitive modelling. This allows researchers to account for cultural differences, which Lerdahl and Jackendoff were strongly ambiguous about. Moreover, GTTM has not been widely acknowledged by analysts, is hardly included in the theory curriculum, and is primarily cited by present-day theorists to justify simple claims about hierarchical organization. Nevertheless, GTTM was instrumental in establishing a link between music theory and psychology, which has encouraged empirical research with music-theoretical implications within the fields of music cognition, experimental psychology, computational modelling, and cognitive neuroscience.
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Perspectives of New Music
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Many studies about musical meter have made a mistake that the target of research is exist in musical stimuli in its complete form. However, without human cognition, music is not yet music but merely physical difference of sounds. Therefore, the essence of music exits not in stimuli but in human cognition. This study postulate that human understands music by means of schemas as in cognitive sciences. Therefore, metrical structure of music can be regarded as the direct reflection of this schema, because for listner's easiness, composers and performer make music correspond to human cognitive schemas. Thus, we can extrapolate the nature of the schema by research of general characteristics of musical works. (This is a draft English translation of Chapter 1 from my dissertation in Japanese.)
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Music Theory Online, Vol. 19, No. 4
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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 component that, according to Schenkerian theory, is present in the concept of prolongation. Alternative views of human cognition, related to the study of embodied knowledge and metaphorical thinking, were pursued in order to answer this question. In part 2 it was hypothesised that prolongation would be experienced as a structural metaphor. The interrupted structure, an archetypal organization of tonal music, was investigated on the assumption that this underlying configuration, interacting with cognition, primes in music perception the activation of an image-schematic structure - involving force. By means of a cross-domain mapping process, the listener projects that image-schematic structure onto the sonic organization of the piece, understanding the interrupted structure as a sonic iii unfolding of the force schema. The results confirmed the hypothesis: prolongation has a relevant status as imagined cognition. Structural metaphors operate as idealized models of cognitive processing that listeners activate during their experience of music.
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Perspectives of New Music 30/1: 158-183
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