Jonah Katz

We argue that electronic dance music (EDM) exhibits a parallel structural organization to that which has been proposed for cartoons (comics) after the model of hierarchical structure proposed in theoretical linguistics. According to this parallel, both systems are governed by general cognitive mechanisms for the narrative organization of tension and release, which are not modality-specific. We show that notions from visual narrative analysis, such as an Establisher–Initial–Peak–Release template, can be applied directly to EDM tracks as an Intro/Breakdown–Buildup–Core–Outro/Cut template. In doing so, we focus on how to formally define and operationalize relevant notions such as Breakdown, Buildup, and Core. As part of our analysis, we show that the scene-setting Establisher segments of visual narratives map onto two distinct categories in EDM: they correspond to intro sections at the beginning of a track and to breakdown sections in the middle of a track; we strengthen the analogy to visual narrative analysis by introducing refinements such as a pre-drop break that often occurs at the end of a buildup segment. To adjudicate between competing hypotheses on the hierarchical structure of a given EDM track, we demonstrate that analytical tests from linguistics and visual narrative analysis can be successfully applied. By introducing these analytical tools, this article sets the stage for further explorations in the linguistically informed analysis of the structure and meaning of EDM.

This paper reviews some basic elements of musical structure, drawing from work in traditional and cognitive musicology, ethnomusicology, psychology, and generative textsetting. Music features two different hierarchical representational components that can both be visualised in grid notation: metrical structure and event hierarchies (also referred to as Time‐Span Reduction). Metrical structure is an abstract pattern of stronger and weaker points in time that form a temporal ‘scaffold’ against which auditory events occur, but is partly independent from those occurring events. Event hierarchies encode the constituency (referred to as grouping ) and prominence of actually‐occurring musical events. Basic principles of these components are illustrated with examples from Western children's, folk, and popular song. The need for both metrical hierarchy and event hierarchy is illustrated using mismatches between metrical and rhythmic structure. The formal, conceptual, and empirical features of musical metre are quite different from linguistic stress and prosody, despite the frequent analogies drawn between them. Event hierarchies, on the other hand, are shown to resemble linguistic prosodic structure with regard to all of these features.

This paper develops a model of lenition in Campidanese Sardinian. The model treats lenition (and its inverse, fortition) as a predictable consequence of gradient changes in duration associated with prosodic structure. A more typical approach to lenition processes in Campidanese and other languages is to treat them as changes in phonological features. I show here that a phonetic model operating on the output of phonological computations avoids some of the analytical problems associated with such phonological analyses, unifies the phonetic and phonological description of lenition, and captures the relationship between prosody, lenition and duration. While the detailed simulations here are specific to Campidanese, I suggest that the model is broadly applicable to languages with intervocalic lenition processes such as voicing, spirantisation and tapping.

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of specific acoustic patterns on word learning and segmentation in 8- to 11-year-old children and in college students.Method: Twenty-two children (ages 8;2–11;4 [years;months]) and 36 college students listened to synthesized “utterances” in artificial languages consisting of six iterated “words,” which followed either a phonetically natural lenition–fortition pattern or an unnatural (cross-linguistically unattested) antilenition pattern. A two-alternative forced-choice task tested whether they could discriminate between occurring and nonoccurring sequences. Participants were exposed to both languages, counterbalanced for order across subjects, in sessions spaced at least 1 month apart.Results: Children showed little evidence for learning in either the phonetically natural or unnatural condition nor evidence of differences in learning across the two conditions. Adults showed the predicted (and previously attested) interaction between learning and phonetic condition: The phonetically natural language was learned better. The adults also showed a strong effect of session: Subjects performed much worse during the second session than the first.Conclusions: School-age children not only failed to demonstrate the phonetic asymmetry demonstrated by adults in previous studies but also failed to show strong evidence for any learning at all. The fact that the phonetic asymmetry (and general learning effect) was replicated with adults suggests that the child result is not due to inadequate stimuli or procedures. The strong carryover effect for adults also suggests that they retain knowledge about the sound patterns of an artificial language for over a month, longer than has been reported in laboratory studies of purely phonetic/phonological learning.Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13641284

This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been language-specific and/or prosodic in nature: stress, intonation, final lengthening, etc. Spirantization, while often prosodically conditioned, is different from all of these patterns in that it concerns a segmental alternation. Moreover, the effects reported here are for speakers of a language, American English, that only sporadically displays spirantization, and not in the phonological contexts used in the experiment. This suggests that the results may reflect more general properties of speech perception and word boundary detection, rather than a perceptual processing strategy transferred directly from English. As such, the studies offer partial support for theories of lenition rooted in notions of perceptual-acoustic continuity and disruption.

This paper describes the construction and analysis of a corpus of harmonic progressions from 12-bar blues forms included in the jazz repertoire collection The Real Book. A novel method of coding and analyzing such corpus data is developed, with a notion of “possible harmonic change” derived from the corpus and logit mixed-effects regression models that describe the difference between actually occurring harmonic events and possible but non-occurring ones in terms of various sets of theoretical constructs. Models using different sets of constructs are compared using the Bayesian Information Criterion, which assesses the accuracy and efficiency of each model. The principal results are that: (1) transitional probabilities are better modeled using root-motion and chord-frequency information than they are using pairs of individual chords; (2) transitional probabilities are better described using a mixture model intermediate in complexity between a bigram and full trigram model; and (3) the difference between occurring and non-occurring chords is more efficiently modeled with a hierarchical, recursive context-free grammar than it is as a Markov chain. The results have implications for theories of harmony, composition, and cognition more generally.

Duinker and Martin's excellent study presents a wealth of new data, findings, and analyses. It represents a welcome focus on the details of musical aspects of hip-hop, as well as an effort to combine those details with more global aspects of recordings in order to clarify what our notions of hip-hop 'style' or 'sound' are based on. The examination of instrumental backgrounds and production parameters is particularly novel. I would suggest, however, that the study could have benefitted from the use of details pertaining to flow, particularly in the examination of trends over time and stylistic sub-groupings. I show that several parameters pertaining to the complexity, rhythmic placement, and repetitiveness of rhymes help track changes in hip-hop style over time, distinguish between more and less similar songs, and capture effects of apparent time within the same actual time period.