Timbre, Form, and Musical Process

Timbre—the distinctive palette of sounds instruments make individually and collectively—is a primary resource for performers and composers.  This project investigates how timbre may be used over time in pieces of music for expressive purposes, using acoustic and musical analyses and behavioral studies.   Participants are sought for experiments ranging from 20 minutes to 1 hour in length, with compensation based on the length of a session.   Students wishing to be involved as assistants will need background in one or more of the following:  statistics, Javascript or Python programming, musical analysis, and experience with music recording and production software such as Audacity, ProTools, Logic, or Cubase.

 

Wayfinding in Music Listening

Our experience of music is complex and we often use metaphorical language to describe it to ourselves and others.  This study takes wayfinding in journeying through a landscape as its guiding metaphor, investigating how listeners make use of different features and events of a piece of music as they make sense of it over time. Participants are sought for experiments ranging from 20 minutes to 1 hour in length, with compensation based on the length of a session.   Students wishing to be involved as assistants will need background in one or more of the following:  statistics, Javascript or Python programming, musical analysis, and experience with music recording and production software such as Audacity, ProTools, Logic, or Cubase.

 

Phenomenology of Metric Irregularity

This project explores the qualitative experiences of metric irregularity in popular music, defined as asymmetrical, non-isochronous, and/or mixed meters. Conducting semi-structured interviews, we analyze verbal descriptions/metaphors/affects, accompanying physical gestures, and motions while listening to better understand the nature and variability of entraining to irregular grooves.

 

Relational Salience in Music Perception and Cognition

This project investigates how listeners integrate structural relationships within musical schemata, ranging from contrapuntal (Gjerdingen, 2007) to phrase-based (Caplin, 2013) patterning. Structure-Mapping Theory (Gentner, 2010; Bourne, 2015) suggests that musical contrast is privileged when scaffolded by underlying similarity, and we explore whether this phenomenon is borne out in listening activities.

 

Music in Cultural Context

All musical interactions reside in a cultural context. Music styles and traditions operate according to particular collections of rules and tendencies, and individuals grow up in communities and societies in which they gain familiarity with those rules. What happens when music crosses cultural boundaries? How do people respond to music that is culturally unfamiliar? What can those responses tell us about how music is learned?

  • Morrison, S. J., Demorest, S. M., & Pearce, M. T. (2018). Cultural distance: A computational approach to exploring cultural influences on music cognition. In M. Thaut & D. Hodges (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198804123.013.3
  • Demorest, S. M., Morrison, S. J., Nguyen, V. Q., & Bodnar, E. N. (2016). The effect of contextual variables on cultural bias in music memory. Music Perception 33, 590-600. doi: 10.1525/MP.2016.33.5.590
  • Demorest, S. M., & Morrison, S. J. (2016). Quantifying culture: The cultural distance hypothesis for melodic expectancy. In J. Y. Chiao, S. C. Li, R. Seligman, & R. Turner (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience (183-196). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Morrison, S. J., Demorest, S. M., Campbell, P. S, Bartolome, S. J., & Roberts, J. C. (2012). Effect of intensive instruction on elementary students’ memory for culturally unfamiliar music. Journal of Research in Music Education 60, 363-374. doi:10.1177/0022429412462581
  • Morrison, S. J., & Demorest, S. M. (2009). Cultural constraints on music perception and cognition. Progress in Brain Research 178, 67-77.
  • Demorest, S. M., Morrison, S. J., Stambaugh, L. A., Beken, M., Richards, T. L., & Johnson, C. (2009). Music comprehension among Western and Turkish listeners: fMRI investigation of an enculturation effect. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp048.
  • Morrison, S. J., Demorest, S. M., & Stambaugh, L. A. (2008). Enculturation effects in music cognition: The role of age and musical complexity. Journal of Research in Music Education 56, 118-129.
  • Demorest, S. M., Morrison, S. J., Beken, M. N., & Jungbluth, D. (2008). Lost in translation: An enculturation effect in music memory performance. Music Perception 25, 213-223.
  • Demorest, S. M., & Morrison, S. J. (2003). Exploring the influence of cultural familiarity and expertise on neurological responses to music. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 112-117.
  • Morrison, S. J., Demorest, S. M., Aylward, E. H., Cramer, S. C., & Maravilla, K. R. (2003). An fMRI investigation of cross-cultural music comprehension. Neuroimage, 20, 378-384.

 

Music and Multimodality

Music is a multimodal experience. The human experience of music is not only a product of what one hears, but also of what one sees and how one moves. This line of research poses questions about the interaction of auditory and visual information, and the way in which this interaction influences how one evaluates and gains meaning from music. Does the way in which a performer moves change the way an audience experiences a musical performance? How do conductors—performers whose primary means of music-making is movement—contribute to the perceived quality of a performance?

  • Lorenz, T., & Morrison, S. J. (2023). Focus of alignment and performance accuracy among wind band musicians in situations of audio-visual asynchrony. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356231153064
  • Morrison, S. J., & Silvey, B. (2022). Conducting. In G. McPherson (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Music Performance: Insights from Education, Musicology, Psychology, Science and Medicine. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190056285.013.13
  • Meals, C. D., Morrison, S. J., & Confredo, D. A. (2019). The effects of temporal action-sound congruence on evaluations of conductor quality. Music & Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204319891968
  • Kumar, A. B, & Morrison, S. J. (2016). The conductor as visual guide: Gesture and perception of musical content. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 1049. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01049
  • Price, H. E., Mann, A., & Morrison, S. J. (2016). Effect of conductor expressivity on ensemble evaluations by nonmusic majors. International Journal of Music Education 34, 135-142. doi: 10.1177/0255761415617925
  • Morrison, S. J., & Selvey, J. D. (2014). The relationship of conductor expressivity and choral ensemble performance. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 199, 7-18. doi: 10.5406/bulcouresmusedu.199.0007
  • Morrison, S. J., Price, H. E., Smedley, E. S., & Meals, C. L. (2014). Conductor gestures influence evaluations of ensemble performance. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 806. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00806
  • Morrison, S. J., Price, H. E., Geiger, C. G., & Cornacchio, R. A. (2009). The effect of conductor expressivity on ensemble performance evaluation. Journal of Research in Music Education 57, 37-49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429409332679

 

Textural Cues Corpus Study

This project examines 100 songs each randomly sampled from the McGill billboard corpus and its recent equivalent (years 1992-2022), and encodes any use of textural cues between formal boundaries in each song. The two sets (i.e., McGill billboard and subsequent years from 1992-2022) are then compared regarding the frequency of textural cues.

 

In Motion: Attentional Shifts and Modeling Sources of Timing Errors

This project examines how the simultaneous responsibilities of visual design (e.g., marching arts drill formations and choreography) introduce sources of timing imprecision in ensembles that move and play. We analyze verbal data and eye tracking findings from interviews with marching arts performers tasked with evaluating their head cam recordings from ensemble rehearsals.