Annotation for Swain, Joseph P.
The Need for Limits in Hierarchical Theories of Music
Annotation (by Bill Tilghman):
- In an attempt to relate recent studies regarding human perceptual
limits to persuasive hierarchical theories of music, Swain argues
that a strict limitation needs to be applied to any hierarchical
theory: at any level of musical structure there can be no more
than three of four musical events. This number is derived from
George A. Miller's classic "seven-plus-or-minus-two" designation
of working memory capacity, revised downward by Swain on the
basis of more recent experimental evidence. Swain's model does
offer some flexibility, however, in that the limitation of three
or four events can be exceeded if this larger number of events
forms a musical constituent. Musical constituents are
overlearned structures such as scales, arpeggios, or conventional
chord progressions or temporal patterns whose familiarity
reflects the listener's cultural preparation in a particular
musical style. Grouping or "chunking" based on cultural
experience or on the Gestalt priciples of proximity and
similarity, combined with hierarchical structuring into levels of
limited scope, provides the necessary reductions in processing
load to make comprehension of extended musical structures
possible. In Swain's view, one of the main benefits of his
limitation is that the analyst may be forced to search for
structural devices and procedures that might otherwise have been
ignored. Thus, apparent constraints on movement length, which
seem to be associated with particular styles, might be more
richly explained as constraints that arise from characteristics
of the musical structure itself. Swain argues this point using
exmples by Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.
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