Exploring historic changes in musical communication: Deconstructing emotional cues in preludes by Bach and Chopin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing body of research analyzing musical scores suggests mode’s relationship with other expressive cues has changed over time. However, to the best of our knowledge, the perceptual implications of these changes have not been formally assessed. Here, we explore how compositional choices of 17th- and 19th-century composers (J. S. Bach and F. Chopin, respectively) differentially affect emotional communication. This novel exploration builds on our team’s previous techniques using commonality analysis to decompose intercorrelated cues in unaltered excerpts of influential compositions. In doing so, we offer an important naturalistic complement to traditional experimental work—often involving tightly controlled stimuli constructed to avoid the intercorrelations inherent to naturalistic music. Our data indicate intriguing changes in cues’ effects between Bach and Chopin, consistent with score-based research suggesting mode’s “meaning” changed across historical eras. For example, mode’s unique effect accounts for the most variance in valence ratings of Chopin’s preludes, whereas its shared use with attack rate plays a more prominent role in Bach’s. We discuss the implications of these findings as part of our field’s ongoing effort to understand the complexity of musical communication—addressing issues only visible when moving beyond stimuli created for scientific, rather than artistic, goals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".