ORIGIN, OBJECTIVE AND PROCEDURE OF THIS BOOK  

I the preface, I describe my own personal motives why I set out to write this book. I am doing this because I believe that for many music listeners there are pieces of music that captivate them, and that they want to know in more detail what the reasons are.

 

INTRODUCTION TO THE TERM OF MELODY

This section aims to give an introduction to what composers and music theorists have understood by the term of melody in the past. It should not be forgotten that even in the 18th and 19th centuries, very prominent harmonic theories were written, while the statements on the structures of melodies remained very vague, nebulous and often almost mystical. And even if one asks students today what the essence of melodies is, the answers are often similarly imprecise. Since the aim of the book is to provide exact and precise statements, I will begin by providing this small historical overview in a book that aims to lighten the nebulous character of the essence of melodies.

 

MELODY AND MUSIC IN A PSYCHO – BIOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Here, I provide the larger theoretical frame of reference within which the statements of this book are situated. Melodies as a musical element, which is inherent in almost all musical expressions, are a sequence of physical events which, at least in the western world, are both an expression of the psychological conditioning of the musician and have an effect on the psyche of the listeners. In that melodies as physical events have effects on the listeners’ psyche, they intervene in their biological system, their organism, from the brain to the tips of their toes.

Melodies are music psychology applied by composers and improvisers. Music theory describes what is going on in the musical surface of a piece of music. Music psychology as a discipline of cognitive science explains why melodic operations work. These findings can be helpful for anyone who deals with melodies as a listener or musician.

 A major goal of my work is to describe the reasons why melodies are successful. They are so because they respond to the cognitive machinery of the human being, a machinery that is closely related to human emotions and in which tonal music serves as a means of communication that is similar to language in many ways.

 

MUSIC PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS IN COMPOSED MELODIES I

After outlining the theoretical framework in the previous section, I begin to apply cognitive science and information theory findings very concretely to two of the three musical examples examined in this book. One is a composition from the baroque, namely Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Inventio 4” and the other is a piece from the American Songbook, namely “My funny Valentine” by Richard Rodgers. I show how statistical learning leads listeners to intuitively determine the tonality of the pieces, to create hierarchies that distinguish important notes from less important ones, and to experience the relationship between tension and resolution. For this examination, as for any other in this book, I will show what the melodic-interval operations that composers have set up in the musical surface consist of, and what mental processes they lead to. In other words, it always involves the perception and construction of melodic events.

 

MUSIC PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS IN COMPOSED MELODIES II

In this section, I continue with this approach, but I now focus on the piece “My funny Valentine“, which is not only a well-known work of American popular music, but has also been a jazz standard for a long time. A first focus in this section is to show how composers probably unconsciously use the principles of psychological distance to create emotional effects. A second focus is to illustrate how the Gestalt lawsderived from perceptual psychology find their manifestation in the melodic-interval operations.

 

MUSIC PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS IN COMPOSED MELODIES III

While I talk about the construction of melodic-interval events in earlier sections, this section deals with melodic-temporal operations. On the one hand, basic musical concepts are clarified from a music-psychological point of view, as they are not explained by music theory. This results in important questions such as what the concept of form actually means in its psychological dimension. And form, in turn, is the result of the enormously important mental mechanism of grouping – a concept or mechanism whose importance for understanding and creating melodies cannot be overestimated.

 

MENTAL STORAGE OF EVENTS

Hearing and creating melodies roughly speaking concerns 3 time levels: past, present and future. In order to be able to identify one or more events of a melody as its climax, we must have at least an approximate memory of which events took place before. At the same time, each sequence of melodic events arouses the expectation of future events. In order to show these connections and their significance for emotions, I present in Section 6 the different forms of storing past events, forms of a kind of absolute present, and how we extrapolate the probability of future events from past events.

Whether melodies can be remembered and how quickly the mental processing of melodic events, the perceptual fluency, takes place, has a great impact on whether melodies are liked or perceived as beautiful.

 

SYMMETRY

Building on the finding that perceptual fluency has a major impact on whether listeners like a melody, it is important to examine which structures in a melody provide for accelerated mental processing. An eminently important candidate for this is the creation of symmetrical relationships. In this section, I not only develop basic components for my own theory of symmetry in horizontal tonal events. I also show, as almost the whole book does, by means of musical examples and diagrams, which symmetrical relations play a role.

 

CONFIRMATION AND VIOLATION OF EXPECTATIONS

Modern music psychology has recognized the great importance of building up and violating expectations for the emotions of listeners. For this reason, I dedicate this section to this topic and in a certain way continue my explanations from earlier sections. Here, it is important to me to show that listeners expect permanently symmetrical conditions of different manifestations and that the reduction of symmetry is always unconsciously processed as a surprise.

 

MUSIC PSYCHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES IN IMPROVISED MELODIES

I pursue the approach of the whole book, but this section is now devoted to improvised melodies rather than composed ones. These are the horizontal tone sequences that jazz pianist Keith Jarrett plays over the chord progression of the piece “Too young to go steady“.

Two central questions play a major role here. The first is to ask: what are the melodic strategies with which the build-up and release of tension can be shaped? The second central question is: With which melodic operations is it possible to invent melodies over a period of 6 minutes, which create the impression of a continuous whole for the listeners?

I essentially refer to three melodic strategies and their manifold differentiations. These are the strategies of matching, coherence and cohesion. With the last two terms I build a bridge back to the beginning, where I already talk about coherence and cohesion, which are originally linguistic concepts, namely in the context of music, communication and narrative texts.

 

Epilogue

The epilogue does not give a summary of the contents of the book. Rather, it gives a preview of what work might follow this book.