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A study examines the relationship between variations in melodic ornamentation and perceived emotion in contemporary performances of a Handel sonata. Results show that modern musicians are successfully able to use ornamentation to communicate emotion.

The study indicates that the grace notes found in Beethoven's compositions were timed differently from their structural counterparts. A model of grace-note duration is proposed to account for the results.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HARMONY PERCEPTION IN understanding tonal melodies has been extensively studied, but underlying processes of implied harmonic perception remain unexplored. This study explores how listeners perceive implied harmony in real-time while hearing tonal melodies by addressing two questions: How is each tone of a tonal melody harmonically interpreted and integrated into the previous tones? How do harmonic expectations of "what" chord will follow and "when" the chord change will occur affect the processing? Participants with music training listened to tonal melodies and responded to target tones by singing their pitches as quickly as possible. The target tones implied an expected or an unexpected chord; they occurred at expected or unexpected times. The results showed that sing-back reaction times (RTs) were shorter for: 1) tones implying an expected chord; and 2) chord changes occurring at expected times, suggesting that harmonic expectations facilitate the processing of tonal melodies. Also, RTs became shorter over the presentation of successive target tones implying the same chord, suggesting that implied harmony becomes clearer as more tones belonging to a single chord are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ACOUSTIC PERIODICITY IS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR for discriminating consonant and dissonant intervals. While previous studies have found that the periodicity of musical intervals is temporally encoded by neural phase locking throughout the auditory system, how the nonlinearities of the auditory pathway influence the encoding of periodicity and how this effect is related to sensory consonance has been underexplored. By measuring human auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) to four diotically presented musical intervals with increasing degrees of dissonance, this study seeks to explicate how the subcortical auditory system transforms the neural representation of acoustic periodicity for consonant versus dissonant intervals. ABRs faithfully reflect neural activity in the brainstem synchronized to the stimulus while also capturing nonlinear aspects of auditory processing. Results show that for the most dissonant interval, which has a less periodic stimulus waveform than the most consonant interval, the aperiodicity of the stimulus is intensified in the subcortical response. The decreased periodicity of dissonant intervals is related to a larger number of nonlinearities (i.e., distortion products) in the response spectrum. Our findings suggest that the auditory system transforms the periodicity of dissonant intervals resulting in consonant and dissonant intervals becoming more distinct in the neural code than if they were to be processed by a linear auditory system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for the musicologist Dirk-Jan Povel is presented.