Ville Langfeldt: Holistic identification of musical harmony.

Field of study: Music Education

Summary

The dissertation explores holistic harmony identification. Aural training theorist Gary S. Karpinski depicts this as the most effective and precise form of harmonic listening, but a clear definition and understanding of its nature have been lacking. There has also been a lack of pedagogical strategies for advancing the development of such listening skills in aural training students—indeed, Karpinski questions whether such strategies are possible at all.

The dissertation consists of three parts. The first part is a theoretical study, in which the concept of holistic harmony identification is explored broadly through a combination of Gestalt theory and an ecological approach to perception. The study closes with a discussion of possible pedagogical approaches, including a “metaphorical” approach to harmonic listening. This approach is based on the claim that hearing a chord or progression as something is a way of acknowledging and verbalizing its holistic quality.

The dissertation’s second part is a qualitative document analysis that further explores “metaphorical listening.” Through an analysis of 20 textbooks on harmony, examples of cross-domain mapping in esthetic descriptions of chords and progressions are recorded and discussed. The main aim is to examine whether certain metaphor structures are more recurrent than others, which might suggest a relevance for harmonic aural training. The study’s theoretical framework is conceptual metaphor theory.

The third part is a statistical study that examines one of the metaphors found in the document analysis: harmonic luminosity, or the idea that harmony can express “brightness” and “darkness.” The phenomenon is examined empirically through a web-based experiment with 236 participants. The study shows that harmonic luminosity is likely more perceptually complex than it is portrayed in textbooks using this metaphor. The results also indicate that harmonic luminosity might require some degree of perceptual learning.

The dissertation’s main contribution is a conceptual framework for holistic harmony identification, which both elucidates the concept and enables more targeted pedagogical approaches. In a further exploration of such approaches, novel perspectives on the role of metaphor in musical harmony are offered.

The dissertation

Title: Holistic identification of musical harmony: A theoretical and empirical study.

The dissertation is a monograph, and it is written in English.

The dissertation is available in NMH's digital archive.