(This system is purely for practical learning purposes and makes no presumption whatsoever about the logic behind a composer's language.) By putting a
nontonal piece "into a key," our traditionally trained ears can make use of the harmonic context known since childhood.
As mentioned above, most reported studies have explored the features of English, a
nontonal language, while limited attention has been paid to Mandarin, a tonal language spoken by many people.
For instance, subjects from tonal language cultures (e.g., Chinese) performed better than those from
nontonal language cultures (e.g., French) in pitch discrimination [107].
Vibrato may contribute to the tendency of listeners to allow for more mistuning from singers than from violinists, but researchers have yet to test for that possibility." More research could also address a question e-mailed by reader Nathan Meleen, who asks how speakers of tonai languages, which use changes in pitch to distinguish between otherwise identical words, might fare in identifying off-key crooning compared with speakers of
nontonal languages.
Essays include discussion of new editing methods for transcribing the polyphonic Notre Dame conductus repertoire; John Bull's "Art of Canon" and plainsong-based counterpoint in the late Renaissance; the cognitive processes involved in music, drawing on Jung's eight cognitive processes; the sinfonias of Bach; basic formal structures in music; Wolf's "An eine Aolsharfe"; the teleological aspects of
nontonal music; and satire in twentieth-century music by Mahler, Shostakovich, and Lebic.
Nibert (2005) offers as evidence the lack of transparency in the structure and meaning of intonation, and Ladd (2008) notes that the paralinguistic and emotion-based characteristics often associated with intonation cause many to see it as a nonlinguistic feature in
nontonal languages.
Musicianship, another form of auditory expertise, also extends to benefits of speech processing; musicians who are
nontonal language speakers have enhanced pitch tracking to linguistically relevant vowel contours, similar to that of tonal language speakers [31].
Each of these pieces provide a unique glimpse into Hersch's musical style: "Nocturne," a sophisticated sound esthetic and linear control; "Little Spinning Song," the primacy of outer-voice counterpoint and its influence on the resulting
nontonal harmonic progression; and, "Chorinho," a characteristic left-hand accompaniment and the role of invertible counterpoint in generating tuneful melodies.
In Korgbara, where the comparison was made between English, a familiar
nontonal language (and one spoken by the listener), and Igbo, a previously unheard tonal language, it is uncertain that relevant language-independent cues were even available, let alone sufficient, to facilitate an identification with much probative value.
In spoken form, English is a
nontonal language and its phonological characteristics are processed primarily by the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain (Lieberman, 2000).
On the basis of a considerable dataset, Rialland and Robert (2001) recently published an overview of the intonation of Wolof, a Niger-Congo language which is
nontonal and has fixed stress.
In a discussion that draws examples from Powell's Setting for Guitar (1986), Anthony Kroyt Brandt calls pitch fields organized in this way Powell's "favored tableau type" and suggests that "the resultant structural 'resonance' is a
nontonal analog of the resonance of octaves in tonal music." (5) We shall incorporate a similar feature into the pitch fields we construct further on in this article.