Music cognition and the cognitive psychology of film structure

Canadian Psychology, Nov 2002 by Annabel J Cohen

Music Cognition

Music is a multidimensional and hierarchical stimulus and can be explored from the psychoacoustics of a single tone to the perception of interrelationships between sections of large-scale works. Such topics as sequential memory, perception of rhythm and tonality, aesthetic judgment, and the effects of musical experience are only some of the areas represented by hundreds of articles, journals, and books on music cognition (cf. Deutsch, 1999).

The discipline of music cognition delineates knowledge about musical structure, but it is musical structure as defined by psychologists. For example, consider the concept of tonality. As Arnheim has stated, "...most works of art are organized around a primary center, to which the others are subordinated... ." (1992, p. 31, see also Arnheim, 1988). In music, the concept of central reference is often associated with tonality. Tonality may be defined by psychologists as the perceived central reference tone, chord, or key in a piece of music. Various experimental techniques have been developed to identify this perceived central reference, for example, by having listeners sing the most important tone during a musical excerpt (Cohen, 1991), or rate the goodness of fit of individual tones to a whole excerpt (Krumhansl & Toivanienen, 2001). The results are typically consistent with music theory. A precise definition of tonality, specified as above by operations under certain contexts, should satisfy psychologists and music scientists although perhaps not all music theorists.8

Short sequences of tones have often been the focus of music cognition research, but large-scale structures and musical motifs within them have been studied as well (e.g., Cook, 1987, 1993; Krumhansl, 1998; Marvin & Brinkman, 1999). Although there is much research still to be conducted on music issues, new information can be readily derived given both the developed methodologies and related data available. In contrast, there has been almost no research on the perception of film structure. Recall that Bordwell and Thompson (1979, p. 46; 1999, p. 87) state that there has been no systematic study of how film may be based on repetitions and variations. Carroll (1980, p. 3) also noted this deficiency: "Cinema theorists have typically looked far beyond simple structural relations like synonymy in favor of analyzing complex aesthetic or political relations."9 The argument here is that if parallels between music and film structure are found, then the same mental processes serving musical structures may also serve the similar film structures. Such an idea has precedents in the Gestalt psychologists' laws of organization (e.g., Ash, 1995, p. 226, 236; Wertheimer, 1938) and in the empirical aesthetics of Daniel Berlyne (1974) who demonstrated in the context of information theory general influences on aesthetic judgments of visual and auditory patterns. The first step in the argument is to illustrate the music-like structures in a film, and so we now begin to examine The Red Violin in this light.