Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

532 | HOW THE MIND WORKSand when they are played simultaneously as part of a chord or harmony.The emotional connotations of musical intervals are not exactly universal,because people need to be familiar with an idiom to experiencethem, but they are not arbitrary either. Infants as young as four monthsold prefer music with consonant intervals such as a major third to musicwith dissonant intervals such as a minor second. And to learn the morecomplex emotional colorings of music, people do not have to be conditionedPavlov-style, say, by hearing intervals paired with joyful dr melancholylyrics or by hearing them while in a joyful or a melancholy mood. Aperson merely has to listen to melodies in a particular idiom over time,absorbing the patterns and contrasts among the intervals, and the emotionalconnotations develop automatically.Those are the pitches; how are they strung into melodies? Jackendoffand Lerdahl show how melodies are formed by sequences of pitches thatare organized in three different ways, all at the same time. Each patternof organization is captured in a mental representation. Take the openingof Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land":This land is your land,this land is my land, from Ca-li- for- nia, to the New York Is-landi^4i>JJrirrTrrJ J iffT r jJ r iJU JjNjs J J iffiThe first representation is called a grouping structure. The listenerfeels that groups of notes hang together in motifs, which in turn aregrouped into phrases, which are grouped into lines or sections, which aregrouped into stanzas, movements, and pieces. This hierarchical tree issimilar to the phrase structure of a sentence, and when the music haslyrics, the two partly line up. The grouping structure is shown here bythe brackets beneath the music. The snatches of melody for "This land isyour land" and for "this land is my land" are the smallest-sized chunks.When they are joined together, they form a larger chunk. That largerchunk is joined with the combined chunk "from California to the NewYork Island" into a still larger chunk, and so on.The second representation is a metrical structure, the repeatingsequence of strong and weak beats that we count off as "ONE-two-THREE-four, ONE-two-THREE-four." The overall pattern is summed up inmusical notation as the time signature, such as 4/4, and the majorboundaries of the structure itself are demarcated by the vertical lines