Le 1er juillet 2017
de 15h00 à 15h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Séance - Semiotics and Semantics of Tonality and Harmony
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Duilio D’Alfonso
In the field of tonal cognition studies, the Generative Theory of Tonal Music (by Lerdahl and Jackendoff) is the milestone from which a plenty of theoretical and empirical researches flourished in the last decades, aimed at deepening aspects of the theory. A main issue regarding GTTM is widely recognized: the approach is static, and the structural descriptions are given for the entire musical passage under analysis. Now, recalling that the prolongational reduction gives an account for the tensing–relaxing patterns in tonal music, my purpose is to illustrate a temporal-dependent model of the inference of such prolongational trees, inspired by dynamic grammars for natural languages, in the framework of the so-called “dynamic turn” in theoretical linguistics. The model is based on the assumption that listeners predict the recovering of the tonal sense. This starting disposition is the main goal of the comprehension process, gradually fulfilled as the listening to music goes on, by recursively generating sub-goals. Thus, a left-to-right parsing system is outlined, a system going on by alternating scanning, predictions, and revision steps. Partiality is allowed, to the extent that stored partial trees play the role of the structural context. The formal grammar apparatus adopted is “categorial”, borrowed by the linguistic paradigm of categorial grammars (Lambek et al.), and the objective is that of formalizing the role of expectation in the real–time growth and revision of mental representations, in tonal music processing.
