Tonal Cognition

Tonal music is mainly applied to genres in Western Classical music. Western music is broken down into four periods Baroque(1600-1750), Classical(1750-1820), Romantic(1800-1900), and Modern/Contemporary(1900-present). Music can be broken down in various ways, but the most basic understanding starts with a set of twelve pitch classes or the chromatic scale. These 12 notes are recycled eight notes, and this allows for a composer to have a fairly endless amount of note combinations. This pitch class is further organized into a set of seven pitches called a diatonic scale. In this scale, tonal hierarchies do occur. Tonal hierarchies are very important in Western music and allow the listener to follow important themes in a variety of music. Musical events are not all equal in how important they are. For example, some are structurally important, while others musical events are mainly ornamental. Ornaments are expressive additions to a piece of music but are not originally part of the music. Another part of this tonal hierarchy is dynamic qualities and how the audience connects with powerful psychological effects. If you play a piece of music backward, it would completely alter the original identity because every dynamic relationship between pitches would be reversed. There have been two hierarchies that have been distinguished in music cognition. Tonal hierarchies have already been discussed, and event hierarchies, which a specific pitch-time events that come from ongoing sequences of musical events. Music always has a start and an end. The twelve tones are all possible starting points. These starting points are called tonics. Each tonic is the beginning of each scale(seven pitches). The twelve tones are also part of the intra-key hierarchies with a 'probe tone' method. The tonic is just one of the reference points on a scale. The dominant is the fifth note in the scale, and the median is the third note of the scale. If we combine the tonic, median, and dominant, we would hear a larger musical unit called a chord. Our brains are very complex, but music is a complex phenomenon that causes, "Multiple brain areas were depicted in the last decades as being of high value for music processing, and further analyses in the neuropsychology field uncover the implications in emotional and cognitive activities" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10605363/). There are two models within tonal hierarchies. The first model is called the Tonal Pitch Space Theory(TPST). This theory discusses how music is viewed as a multiterminal space. The second model is called MUSical ACTivation(MUSACT). In this model tonal hierarchy is expressed by various patterns that spread automatically towards key units, chords, and tones. The influence of tonal hierarchies on Western music has led to several experiments that chord priming and harmonic priming. In the chord priming experiment, the participants had to identify if the target chord was in or out of tune. Harmonic priming is the creation of ever-changing chords and scales to keep the listener engaged. This type of priming is stronger than repetitive priming, because if a melody is repeated, then there is a chance the listener will not be continuously engaged in the music.