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The fictional Dr. Strabismus sets out to write a new comprehensive theory of music. But music's tendency to deconstruct itself combined with the complexities of postmodernism doom him to failure. This is the parable that framesThe Sense of Music,a novel treatment of music theory that reinterprets the modern history of Western music in the terms of semiotics. Based on the assumption that music cannot be described without reference to its meaning, Raymond Monelle proposes that works of the Western classical tradition be analyzed in terms of temporality, subjectivity, and topic theory. Critical of the abstract analysis of musical scores, Monelle argues that the score does not reveal music'ssense.That sense--what a piece of music says and signifies--can be understood only with reference to history, culture, and the other arts. Thus, music is meaningful in that it signifies cultural temporalities and themes, from the traditional manly heroism of the hunt to military power to postmodern \"polyvocality.\" This theoretical innovation allows Monelle to describe how the Classical style of the eighteenth century--which he reads as a balance of lyric and progressive time--gave way to the Romantic need for emotional realism. He argues that irony and ambiguity subsequently eroded the domination of personal emotion in Western music as well as literature, killing the composer's subjectivity with that of the author. This leaves Dr. Strabismus suffering from the postmodern condition, and Raymond Monelle with an exciting, controversial new approach to understanding music and its history.

Edward T. Cone was one of the most important and influential music critics of the twentieth century. He was also a master lecturer skilled at conveying his ideas to broad audiences.Hearing and Knowing Musiccollects fourteen essays that Cone gave as talks in his later years and that were left unpublished at his death. Edited and introduced by Robert Morgan, these essays cover a broad range of topics, including music's position in culture, musical aesthetics, the significance of opera as an art, setting text to music, the nature of twentieth-century harmony and form, and the practice of musical analysis. Fully matching the quality and style of Cone's published writings, these essays mark a critical addition to his work, developing new ideas, such as the composer as critic; clarifying and modifying older positions, especially regarding opera and the nature of sung utterance; and adding new and often unexpected insights on composers and ideas previously discussed by Cone. In addition, there are essays, such as one on Debussy, that lead Cone into areas he had not previously examined.Hearing and Knowing Musicrepresents the final testament of one of our most important writers on music.

Well-known for leading audiences to a new appreciation of Verdi as a subtle and elaborate musical thinker, Pierluigi Petrobelli here turns his attention to the intriguing question of how musical theater works. In this collection of lively, penetrating essays, Petrobelli analyzes specific operas, mainly by Verdi, in terms of historical context, musical organization, and dramaturgical conventions. Originally published in 1995. ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This new investigation of the Brandenburg Concertos explores musical, social, and religious implications of Bach's treatment of eighteenth-century musical hierarchies. By reference to contemporary music theory, to alternate notions of the meaning of \"concerto,\" and to various eighteenth-century conventions of form and instrumentation, the book argues that the Brandenburg Concertos are better understood not as an arbitrary collection of unrelated examples of \"pure\" instrumental music, but rather as a carefully compiled and meaningfully organized set. It shows how Bach's concertos challenge (as opposed to reflect) existing musical and social hierarchies. Careful consideration of Lutheran theology and Bach's documented understanding of it reveals, however, that his music should not be understood to call for progressive political action. One important message of Lutheranism, and, in this interpretation, of Bach's concertos, is that in the next world, the heavenly one, the hierarchies of the present world will no longer be necessary. Bach's music more likely instructs its listeners how to think about and spiritually cope with contemporary hierarchies than how to act upon them. In this sense, contrary to currently accepted views, Bach's concertos share with his extensive output of vocal music for the Lutheran liturgy an essentially religious character.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? InMozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

How does the constant presence of music in modern life - on iPods, in shops and elevators, on television - affect the way we listen? In this title, the author investigates many sounds that surround us and argues that this ubiquity has led to different kinds of listening.

The musical signal produced by plucked instruments often exhibits non-stationarity due to variations in the pitch and amplitude, making pitch estimation a challenge. In this paper, we assess different transcription processes and algorithms applied to signals captured by optical sensors mounted on a pipa—a traditional Chinese plucked instrument—played using a range of techniques. The captured signal demonstrates a distinctive arched feature during plucking. This facilitates onset detection to avoid the impact of the spurious energy peaks within vibration areas that arise from pitch-shift playing techniques. Subsequently, we developed a novel time–frequency feature, known as continuous time-period mapping (CTPM), which contains pitch curves. The proposed process can also be applied to playing techniques that mix pitch shifts and tremolo. When evaluated on four renowned pipa music pieces of varying difficulty levels, our fully time-domain-based onset detectors outperformed four short-time methods, particularly during tremolo. Our zero-crossing-based pitch estimator achieved a performance comparable to short-time methods with a far better computational efficiency, demonstrating its suitability for use in a lightweight algorithm in future work.

Music shows tremendous promise in pain relief, especially when considering its non‐pharmacological nature. However, our understanding of the precise mechanisms behind music‐induced analgesia (MIA) remains poor. The positive emotional state induced by music is one of the key components explaining MIA. To test this possibility and reveal its neural correlates, the present study applied nociceptive laser stimuli to 28 healthy participants when their liked or disliked songs were played as background music, or when they were resting in silence. Differences among conditions were quantified by self‐reports of pain intensity and unpleasantness, as well as brain activations in response to acute laser stimuli. As expected, liked music significantly lowered pain ratings to acute painful stimuli compared to disliked music and no music. Consistent with this observation, brain activations in response to acute painful stimuli were deceased within brain areas encoding sensory components of pain, such as the right precentral and postcentral gyri (PreCG/PoCG), brain areas related to affective components of pain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral putamen, and brain areas associated with motor control and avoidance reactions to pain, such as the left cerebellum, when liked music was played in the background in comparison to disliked music. Importantly, the relationship between music listening and differences in pain ratings of two music conditions was mediated by the magnitude of right PreCG/PoCG and left cerebellum activations. These findings deepened our understanding of the analgesic benefits of background liked music, a property relevant to clinical applications. Background liked music decreased subjective ratings to acute painful stimuli. The analgesic effect of liked music was likely associated with emotional modulation. Brain activity in the PreCG/PoCG and cerebellum mediated the link between music and pain.

Speech coding is a method to reduce the amount of data needs to represent speech signals by exploiting the statistical properties of the speech signal. Recently, in the speech coding process, a neural network prediction model has gained attention as the reconstruction process of a nonlinear and nonstationary speech signal. This study proposes a novel approach to improve speech coding performance by using a gated recurrent unit (GRU)-based adaptive differential pulse code modulation (ADPCM) system. This GRU predictor model is trained using a data set of speech samples from the DARPA TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus actual sample and the ADPCM fixed-predictor output speech sample. Our contribution lies in the development of an algorithm for training the GRU predictive model that can improve its performance in speech coding prediction and a new offline trained predictive model for speech decoder. The results indicate that the proposed system significantly improves the accuracy of speech prediction, demonstrating its potential for speech prediction applications. Overall, this work presents a unique application of the GRU predictive model with ADPCM decoding in speech signal compression, providing a promising approach for future research in this field.