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There is an important aspect of musical apprehension that need to be understood if we are to explore how a given mind is able to build up musical structure. That is how the impression of a tonal center arises and what actually causes it to be perceived as an unresolved tension.
First off, I will make it clear that to my knowledge, there are so far no definite, absolute structural principals which would allow an algorithm to explicitly determine that a sequence of notes should in principal cause a given person to perceive those notes as build up a sense of tension around a given key. This is important, because all mechanical key prediction techniques seem to rely on statistics, machine learning and various methods of approximation that pick up estimations of patterns, but which lack any definite, theoretical core aside from that of human intuition.1 However, if we assume we can collectively judge our own internal sense of tonality and, in describing it to others, figure out to what extent a given description of a species* of tonal experience matches up to our own experience, for a given piece of music, then we should be able to gauge what aspects of that experience we share in common.
Moreover, what it means to be tonal, or what it means for a given note or key to be a 'tonic' (in a piece of music as perceived in a given mind) is ambiguous in that there seem to be several related and overlapping, but still meaningfully differentiable, phenomena that this idea of tonality refers to. In my own previous articles I have naturally used some of these ideas interchangeably, in addition to extending them with new senses. The nebulousness of these ideas naturally arises out of their interconnection, it is difficult to absolutely separate these fundamentally related phenomena, even though parts of them can absolutely be distinguished via recognizing how they interact with specific mental phenomena.
The first, and most commonly referenced of these ideas is the harmonic aspect of tonality, i.e. the recognition that harmonies can be built out of triads (C, E, G for major, A,C, E for minor) that these triads relate to the more general idea of an isomorphic key structure, within which all harmonies built from a given root will be perceptually similar in structure to those built the same way from a different root, while at the same time, triadic harmonies which share a root can be inverted (i.e. by moving the base note up an octave), resulting in a chord that shares certain properties with the 'uninverted' chord, while still differing in other ways.
The second I will identify is the melodic or scalar, i.e. the idea that sequences of notes, played sequentially within a given scale, will tend to have a specific character, that can potentially be "broken out of" by emphasizing notes outside of that scale. The idea of being "in a key" in this general, melodic sense, is similar and essentially equivalent to being "in a scale"—when there is no 'global tonic' that demands resolution the major and minor 'modes' can be treated like any other scales that don't necessarily strongly resolve to a specific tonic, even though cadences within these scales will still be perceived in a characteristic way. This includes things like being perceived as being "in a mode" or "in the whole tone scale".
Next, there is the global thematic, i.e. the experience, of a person with EVP, that a melody played in a major or minor scale is specifically unresolved and may ultimately need to be ended with an V-I chord cadence that finishes off the total structure of thematic material that had been developed up to that point and resolves to a chord based on the specific tonic note that is perceived to be the center of the whole piece (or at least the phrase that is currently in need of resolution, as long as that phrase is resolved totally). This generally depends on the harmonic and melodic aspects identified above to work, but is in a meaningful sense beyond them, as it requires the possession of EVP, for the listener to be actively keeping track of the theme in their mind and acknowledging what aspects of it are unresolved—searching for an ultimate resolution to it, and for the music to be structured to that such a listener will perceive its structural dissonance as a call to perceive further thematic resolution.
Then, strongly related to the previous, the rhythmic/structural thematic period. This is something novel that I have chosen to identify as a tonic, because while it is meaningfully related to these other aspects of tonality, and I have previously referred to it as a kind of tonic, it is very easily arguable that this is not really something that should be referred to as a tonic at all. This covers several different kinds of 'false' cadences, temporary modulations/tonicizations, and in general anything that results in the feeling the structure of a theme has ended, but in a way that doesn't result in a fully global resolution of structural tension. It is naturally controversial how 'real' these specific kinds of 'phantom tonics' are, in the sense of how it is they actually compare to a full, 'perfect' 'authentic' candential resolution of structure, or how they relate to the notes around them in terms of construction of scales, but I've decided to put them in this general category to make it clear that I have referred to them and and will refer to them as tonics even though I am well aware that this is highly contestable. This specifically covers things like phrases/motifs which establish a structural end point, but end in something which isn't a cadence to an implied global tonal center (as in the examples of the famous motif of Beethoven's 5th symphony, first movement and the themes of the 7th symphony, second movement, which were employed in the articles of Variant Construction). As such, this definition effectively considers anything which functions like a cadence to be 'tonal' in a wide reaching sense, and identifies the tonic with a perceived structural function.
Also, to clear up some potential confusion, I will also try to make clear what things should not be mistakenly referred to as tonal. Chiefly, the idea that 'consonant sounding' music is tonal, while 'dissonant sounding' music is atonal is understandable but essentially mistaken view based around the misapprehension of what these terms were coined to refer to, due to people making judgments based on their impressions of music that has been labeled these particular things. Getting into what I believe people specifically should refer to specific types of music as in general is something I want to touch upon, but only to a certain extent. I want to describe in greater detail, how specific works may be considered 'tonal' in different ways, but at the same time I don't want to police people and dictate how they ought to use specific works, which have a sense that works in most conversation. The rest of this article will provide more detailed clarifications of species of tonality that I want to define and draw attention to.
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*The term species used here is something I intend to delineate in very specific ways shortly.
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Much existing music theory implicitly assumes that the mind attempting to engage with it possesses certain qualities in common with that of the writer, and that they will basically be able to comprehend the music and ideas discussed in the same general way that they do, or if not, that this can be 'corrected' by engaging in appropriate study in much the same way that the study of anything else might allow the student to grasp a given subject. But in a certain way, I am claiming that this is not quite the case. Rather, it seems to be that minds, in apprehending music, will experience it in fundamentally different ways, such that the only way the minds can be made the same with regard to the kind of experience they undergo is to radically alter at least one of the individual minds so that the discreet form of mental processing they undergo matches up with the other(s). Only then can a more or less complete understanding be properly reconciled in full and made to agree. So, in a way, it seems to be possible that just about any individual can actually 'learn' to comprehend music according to the common understanding a given body of work assumes, but the nature of the learning process is possibly radically different from what we ordinarily think of as learning, for it is a series of discreet stages that are potentially triggered by outside stimuli as opposed to a sustained and gradual process.
The degree to which methods of musical training themselves actually stimulate the development of the modal faculties, and the degree which the faculties themselves explicitly rely on training to form, are open questions that will need to be studied in much greater detail in order to be better understood. It may well be that no explicit training at all is necessary for the activation of the faculties; many people have reported experiences2 which imply that they have possessed both EVP and SGP from a young age, before engaging in any training that might have triggered their development. Because of this, it is feasibly possible that someone at any given age, and from any given background, may or may not have possession of a given faculty, and hence my or may not be capable of having a given species of tonal experience.
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Now I will begin to describe the specific nature of various tonal species as I have experienced them, explaining how it is that the nature or a given experience is contingent on the modal faculties one possesses. Note that where I use the word 'tonal' here without any other qualifications, I'm referring specifically to the experience of key center tension by those with at least EVP, as opposed to any other sense.
But, firstly, before going into this, I will need to make clear the difference between the objective and subjective aspects of what I'm going to describe. The terms given in bold red are objective, in that they describe the nature in a piece of music in a way that is independent of a single given person's apprehension of it, while the terms in bold blue are subjective, in that they describe the particular nature of the experience of an individual listener who might possess certain faculties as they listen to a given piece.3
Intertonal: Intertonal passages of music are what I have experienced as the foundation of tonality, as what is fundamental to tonal music before the additional possibilities supplied by SGP are enabled by its power. To an EVA-SGN, intertonal passages will entirely comprise their whole experience of tonality, they will not experience any sense that music is "in a key", that there is a need to return to a particular tonic in order to resolve a feeling of tension, without it being an 'intertonal' experience of tonality. I will define the qualities of experiencing a passage as being intertonal through the following criteria:
A musical theme of sufficient length, and structured in order to create the expectation of a return to a tonic, is perceived. To illustrate what this is not, I will contrast this with something insufficient; a short three note arpeggio sequence comprising of simply a tonic, mediant and dominant, with each note having the same duration and offset from each other. This can outline a harmony of a major scale, but will not itself create a direct experience of there being an unresolved tension, unless it is further elaborated on (an example of which can be seen in the opening of Bach's Violin Concerto in E Major). That tonal tension is experienced as being through a specific theme is essential to this definition of intertonality. EVA-SGNs will not experience tonal tension of any kind at all without this feeling being formed through the expression of a specific theme, experienced through a single 'voice' (musical line)—though with an intertonal experience, multiple 'voices' may be perceived together, each having their own effective tonal center, each generally resolving into a final ultimate chord that consists of the union of the structural 'tonic' of each voice.4
This is an example of an arpeggio that, on its own, fails to be intratonal (or ultratonal) and thus lacks 'hard-tonality'.
A feeling of tension (which is comprised by the above mentioned expectation to return to a tonic) is created through this by having part of the theme composed in such a way that it will feel melodically dissonant5 if the listener does not use their language faculty in order to reinterpret this dissonance as an incompleteness, such that the passage of music feels that has simply not yet been finished and would be melodically consonant and whole only if it were to be completed (this is to be considered a property of hard-tonality, in which intertonality is included). This requires EVP to be active (as in EVPA). EVPNs are, in contrast, not capable of performing this act of reinterpreting dissonance as incompleteness/anticipation of further resolution. This anticipation of completeness will naturally cause the listener to feel a need to resolve to a specific tonic, namely what is experienced as the key of the passage.
This will be perceived in a specific way. It is important to understand that everything I am describing here will be actively felt as part of the experience of intertonality, barely anything here is an abstraction derived from reasoning about a collection of such experiences after the fact, but rather should be apparent to someone experiencing it directly. When you feel a passage of music as possessing intertonality, you will feel "in the back of your mind" that there is a clear and unambiguous need to return to a very particular note, and save for this return to the tonal center the whole passage will feel incomplete and dissatisfying. If this is not felt (and it should be clear if it is) then chances are that you are not experiencing music intertonally, either because you aren't listening to appropriate music, you have not yet been able to parse a given passage as being a given theme (which is especially crucial for EVA-SGNs and will be explored in more detail shortly), you lack EVP, or you possess SGP in addition to EVP and hence have more freedom to mentally "break the rules" of music that would otherwise be perceived wholly intertonally. Importantly, even if you can't name the specific key or understand how it is constructed, you should at least in principal be able to hum the note that would be the tonic or end point if you are physically able to do so.6
Now, this definition of intertonality will in itself not be that useful unless definitions of other types of tonal and non-tonal (and possibly ambiguously tonal) music are given in contrast. As I have hinted, it is possible to experience tonal tension through other species of tonality, but in intertonality this will occur only strictly through instances of themes which are canonical sequences. The very idea of tonal tension, which is the key to the idea of the tonal center/tonality, is itself a generalization of intertonality. But I've chosen to cover the specific category of intertonality first in order to provide a concrete basis of experience for comparison.
Certain works of CPE Bach exemplify music that can be experienced intertonally. The reason for this, is that most works of the classical repertoire contain substantial structure based around variant addition that will pull away from returning to the tonal center of the work in favor of partially repeating sections of thematic material, which is generally annoyingly unsatisfying for EVA-SGNs (who are the primary 'audience' for intertonal experience, as SGPAs will have the capacity to experience tonality in ways that transcend it). CPE Bach's concertos, along with many works in jazz and progressive rock, will, instead of building up monumental architectural structures, choose to more frequently play the structural end of a theme so that it is complete and 'stand alone', before moving on to the next musical phrase in succession, such that in that the last note of the previous theme instance and the first note of the next will be distinct and wholly contained within each individual theme instance (though different themes in different voices can overlap). Collectively these works that may be perceived to be coherent to an EVA-SGN, even if they may be perceived as having 'additional structure' when SGP is gained, may be considered laxly-intertonal music. Laxly-intertonal music can also be experienced extratonaly when SGP is gained and this additional structural significance becomes perceptible. Music that isn't laxly-intertonal, and which requires SGP to be made sense of (such as ultratonal music, covered below) may be experienced as being degenerately-intertonal if listened to by an EVASGN.
Contratonal: So, in order to contrast with the experience of music as being tonal, I'll introduce the concept of 'contra-tonal' musical experience. This idea is distinct from intertonality, as it specifically refers to the experience of kinds of music which can be comprehended as being satisfying to listen to without necessarily being perceived as having a tonal center, such that it actually is perceived as lacking a tonal center and also not possessing any kind of 'pseudo-tonal' structure (meaning it is not perceived as having variant structure of any kind). This category induces the apprehension of certain kinds of music that could, optionally, be perceived as having a tonal center assuming the person possesses SGP (in which case they will perceive the music supertonally), but specifically discludes laxly-intertonal music, (that will only be appreciated by those who possess EVP and who actively listen to the tension and release generated by the development of a theme through to the return to the tonic at a cadence) and ultratonal music (which demands both EVP and SGP). Prelude 1 in C major of J.S. Bach's WTC Book 1 is a prime example of music of this sort, there is no barrier to the perception of it as being harmonious, consonant and satisfying (though the music itself may be felt to sound 'naive' in this state) even without EVP. Contratonal experience is naturally how EVN-SGN listeners perceive music that they don't perceive to be dissatisfying due to excessive structural demands. Certain 'modal' music may be contratonal.
Supertonal: This category (the contratonal) relates to a further species of experience that is in turn defined in contrast to it, that of the 'super-tonal'. A supertonal experience is one where, a person possessing both EVP and SGP is able to interpret music that might otherwise be experienced as being 'contratonal' as having a tonal center, where a person with EVP but not SPG would fail to explicitly perceive this tonality. This is achieved through the capability (via SGP and variant structure) of piecing together melodic fragments within a musical work (which themselves do not form distinct themes that are sufficient in structure as to be intertonal) such that they end up creating the perception of a tonal center and structures of tension around it. Not all work perceptible as being contratonal will be super-tonal perceptible, but those that are can be considered semitonal. The WTC book 1 prelude also serves as a supertonal work to those who are capable of perceiving it as such.
Semitonal: Works that are both potentially perceptible as contratonal and supertonal. Much pop-music will be in this category, in the sense that it will be felt to possess tonal function (through supertonality) by EVASGAs, despite being perfectly listenable by EVNSGNs (as contratonalality). However despite the possibility of supertonality granting additional structural possibilities to works, most pop-music, when heard supertonally, will not gain much of this, and will instead simply be experienced more or less the same as it would be in contratonal experience, but with the additional sense of perceptible tonic. I hope this specifically helps clarify the debate about whether pop-music is 'really tonal'.
Ultratonal: Music that must be perceived with the full capacity provided by both EVP and SGP and which will fail to provide meaningful resolution for individual passages most of the time if this is not the case. This describes the perception of that music assuming a person is EVASGA. A great deal of common practice music, especially that which might be said to be in sonata form (though there are many semitonal sonatas, like Beetoven's 'Pathetique' and 'Moonlight' sonatas) is covered by this. Ultratonal music builds on intertonal music by including aspects that forces EVASGAs to interpret in ways that EVASGNs are not capable of. Ultratonal music, when experienced by an EVASGN who cannot do this, may be considered a degenerately-intertonal experience.
Extratonal: As in the section describing intertonality, this is where music that might otherwise be experienced as being intertonal (given a lack of SGP) will be experienced as gaining a richer structure through SGP, even though it isn't ultratonal.
Linguistic: Covers any music that will feel dissonant and not 'make sense' without EVP.
Hard-Tonal: 'Linguistic' music that specific discludes 'pseudo-tonal' music (such as 'atonal' and particularly experimental 'modal' music) which might otherwise be 'linguistic'. Includes laxly-intertonal and ultratonal music, but not semitonal.
Laxly-Intertonal: Objective classification for music that will be perceived intertonally by EVA-SGNs.
Pseudo-tonal: This concept of 'pseudo-tonality' is one I must introduce carefully. It doesn't refer to any one specific type of experience, but rather is used as a way of contrasting a variety of musical experiences that aren't considered to be traditionally tonal, but which share particular aspects in common with certain species of 'properly' tonal experience. For example, what is commonly (but unfortunately) termed 'atonal' music is potentially covered by this broad portmanteau category, specifically as a kind music that completely excludes any tendency to imply a specific key center (though I can't comment on this tradition too much as I barely appreciate it myself and couldn't say how its structure might be appreciated). In the specific case of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, which I include in this category, the music is structured so as to provide repetitive patterns that allow the music to be experienced (by SGPAs) as a kind of variant structure layered over a base structure of motific cells that may be considered canonical sequence fragments, which happen to not define a single unique and unambiguous key center.*
These categories should allow me to discuss the nature of how different listeners will experience different kinds of works.
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*This kind of structure might be labeled 'pseudo-ultratonal' (given that it requires SPG in order to link the structures with each other), but I'm not going to commit to this specific name.
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I've established numerous times that EVPAs will not perceive tonal tension at all, though their perception of a given 'part' of a piece of music—individual notes, bars and sections—will be influenced by the surrounding context in respect to the beat patterns and scales used and the emotions that are evoked. EVPAs may still perceive a certain phenomena that may be called tension, namely the feeling of a verse section of a song progressing towards a chorus, but this is distinct from tonal tension that 'demands' a specific candential resolution. This lack of candential demand allows much pop/rock music to fade out at the end instead of needing to explicitly resolve any built up structure.7
EVA-SGN listeners will be capable of perceiving tonality through intertonality, but there are certain important limitations they will experience beyond the structural implications of not being able to cognize variant structure. One of these is that, in comparison to what an EVA-SGA ought to be capable of, the SGPN listener will have a much greater need to memorize and commit to long term memory the individual themes in a given piece of tonal music. EVA-SGNs may be able to get a feel for the themes of a given tonal work, even if it contains significant variant structure, by repeated listening to a piece. In doing so they may, over time, progressively get a better feel for both what the themes are, and also get better at identifying how individual instances may be canonical transformations of each other (and hence, in a sense identified as "the same theme"). This can take many listens in order to progressively refine, and may initially fatigue the listener such that, for the sake of their memory, they will greatly benefit from rest and recuperation.
EVA-SGA listeners, in contrast, are able to much more rapidly take in the overall structure of a piece, learning to immediately identify repetitions of passages and sections and assimilate them into an overall structure that they may be able to learn to mentally track and update as the stream of sound provides more information and context. Here, the initial need for commitment of themes to long term memory is greatly lessened, and in fact there seems to be a much more substantial 'buffer', seemingly in working memory, that is able to dynamically keep track of the music and how it changes as it is being listened to.
This ability to keep track of musical structure contrasts with the experience I had as an SGPN of often feeling 'lost' in the structure of a piece, with a given instance of a theme feeling structurally equivalent to another and so what precedes and follows it feeling irrelevant, leading me to have little inherant reason to care or feel sure about how the section of music I was currently listening to would lead to the next or 'develop' (given I could perceive thematic development, and not that of the variant structure). Also lacking EVP causes an even greater sense of confusion when dealing with complex—with respect to the thematic and variant structure—music.
Attaining SGP actually answered a lot of niggling questions I had about other people's perception which were bugging me. One of those was that of why professional music critics (historically) felt they were capable of judging a given piece on the first or second listen. Now, I will grant the possibility that maybe they were simply better than me through great practice, but even then it felt odd that even after years of experience assimilating certain idioms, introducing to myself a new piece of tonal music in a genre I was familiar with still took such significant effort. If it really was the case that it was simply matter of practicing even more, then I couldn't see why anyone besides professional musicians and aristocrats with the time, culture and resources to do so would be capable of learning to listen to art music naturally. I also couldn't reconcile this with claims I'd heard of people intuitively picking up an appreciation for J.S.Bach's music as young children without paying conscious attention to its structure (which wasn't at all like my intertonal experience of the music at the time, possessing only EVP).
With SGP I could feel a great reduction in the effort needed to 'keep up' with the musical structures I perceived as they unfolded through the piece. This is in spite of the actually greater total complexity of structure that SGP enables the perception of. In a way, this perception of additional structure in supertonal experience seems to relax the requirements compared to the strictness of parsing themes in intertonal experience, which seems to more intently demand that the listener explicitly, deliberately hold the expectation of the tonal center of each theme in a given voice in their head being played. The supertonal experience allows the listener to withhold both this expectation of return to an explicit cadence, and the need to have to consciously identify any given passage as being a variation of a given memorized theme. Because of this, they can simply listen to a passage that seemingly leads nowhere to any particular resolution and accept it for what it is, with only the simple expectation that the piece will continue on and complete it somehow, and that they may come to feel and understand this in a broad sense as long as they pay enough basic attention while continuing to listen.
However, this ability to 'trust' the music to fulfill certain expectations is conventional in the sense that it seems you can get better at it by familiarizing yourself with what music in a given genre, written in a certain context, generally does. This allows you to better prepare for what natural expectations are likely to be violated and how to mentally adjust to potential alternate ways of resolving them. For instance, knowing that a theme that has been introduced may be 'violated' by having its implicit cadence interrupted by an intermediary passage because you have experience with other pieces that do this may help you better adjust to this happening in a given piece if it is new to you. And yet, in accordance with everything I have discussed so far, this particular violation can only be adjusted to if the listener actually possesses SGP. Otherwise, even if they are explicitly aware of the possibility of someone accounting for the violation, they will have access to no mental mechanism that allows them to deal with it until they themselves develop SGP. This is the same for other abilities that are restricted to particular faculties.
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Many other aspect of musical appreciation, seem to be 'conventional' in this way, improving gradually as the listener becomes familiar with particular sounds and conventions, despite the dependence they have on particular modal faculties.
EVN-SGNs can develop their listening capabilities significantly in particular ways even if they have yet to attain any further faculty:
-The ability to accurately identify the fact that a given individual note exists in itself and is played by a given instrument, despite many other sounds occurring at the same time, is such a skill that can be progressively developed. Attaining EVP will significantly aid this, by providing a much greater potential ability to identify and track multiple instrumental streams of music, while also changing the timbrel qualities that they perceive that make them stand out easier, but the skill is still very much trainable in its absence despite this.
-The ability to evaluate the pitch of a given note relative to other notes near it (feeling whether or not it is the same or otherwise how its pitch class differs in context, possibly through the span of many other notes) is also trainable. EVP will add the natural reference point of the tracked tonal center, but lacking this is not a barrier to pitch training.
EVA-SGNs can:
-Become better at learning and identifying themes through practice.
-Improve at the ability to keep track of a larger number of voices simultaneously (thought this is something that is fundamentally improved by attaining SGP).
EVA-SGAs can:
-Familiarize themselves with the conventions of various musical styles in order to learn how different composers will imply variant structure and expect the listener to readjust their perception to account for this.
This is naturally not an exhaustive list of every skill the can be developed with regards to comprehension of musical structure, but it should give an overview of the major kinds of skills that should be attainable given a student possesses a given level of attunement to the faculties they possess. The attainment of individual modal faculties will still result in sudden quantum leaps of ability in ways that are beyond the possibilities of a person otherwise, despite more gradual learning being possible within them.
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1 Refer to the to-be-published article on key finding algorithms.
2 A particular example of a person who has self reported experiencing meaningful engagement with 'ultratonal' music at a very young age who I want to draw attention to is Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. This is because he is one of the first people to propose the possibility of recursively experiencing hierarchical key structures in music and to suggest that this may have particular cognitive importance.
3 Here, objective properties (of a work of art) are defined in terms of how people who's minds possess certain attributes are expected to apprehend it, and hence in terms of the subjective. And once the nature of this subjectivity is recognized in a particular way, that it can be characterized in terms of the experience of an individual subject, which can be clarified via all the same attributes as the objective view, the nature of the distinction between the objective and the subjective here may become apparent essentially as the matter of convenience it is. In general, subjectivity is considered distinct from objective classification due to our lack of understanding of the complexity and nuance of the human mind, and everything 'objective' ultimately presents itself to consciousness via means that can be considered subjective, but in principle, with complete knowledge of mental activity, there ought to be nothing subjective that couldn't be treated objectively, by considering what a mind with a specific structure and composition should feel when particular activity take place in it, given that there really are static metaphysical 'laws' governing the actual expression of consciousness that might be discoverable.
4 The EVA-SGN subject, though capable or perceiving an ultimate chord as a resolution satisfying the tonal centers of multiple voices synchronously, will not itself simultaneously perceived as a harmony or 'harmonically unified chord'. i.e. To those lacking Super Grammar, but whom are capable of perceiving music intertonally through EVP, will be able to interpret a given chord (where appropriate) as being several distinct notes that each conclude the cadence of a separate vocal line or as being a single experience of harmony, but not both at the same time (as long as we are talking about a given set of notes that respectively both constitute the chord and serve as ultimate cadences to distinct voices in polyphony, additional supporting harmonies may naturally be added as long that they aren't interpreted as separate voices in themselves). This is effectively a claim, not that apprehension of both harmony and tonality is actually impossible, but that SGP is required in order to effectively perceive both simultaneously. As such, SGP seems to allow the perception of more 'exotic' harmonic structures.
Note that when I speak of harmony, or being harmonically unified here, I mean nothing especially technical. I only mean the feelings that naturally arise on hearing a series of note together in a chord, which are generally absent when the same notes are heard bare and individually unaccompanied. I'm simply saying that these feelings will be absent if and when such a chord is experienced as polyphony in the context of an intertonal experience.
5 I use dissonance in these places in a specific way. I'm not referring to harmonic dissonance, where a note that directly clashes with another is played at the same time, but to a sense of unease resulting from an unsatisfying melodic sequence. To an EVPN, all melodic sequences which might otherwise result in developing musical tension within a tonal idiom will simply immediately be perceived as dissonant in this way.
6 Many people, in trying to understand music theory, will naturally come across the idea of tonality, yet have difficulty understanding it. In many cases, I believe that this is because they basically have no actual experience of tonality at all, even though their instructors (whether they be books or teachers) believe otherwise. On a certain level it is vaguely acknowledged by many that not everyone experiences tonality and even harmony the same way, as many cross cultural psychological experiments will attest to, but in practice many teachers assume a certain experience of harmony and tonality is possessed by the student, and that any 'deficiencies' can either be gradually 'corrected' through learning, or that otherwise the student may simply be inherently incapable of grasping the material due to how their perception is built up. This, I believe, simply doesn't capture the whole picture, as it doesn't account for the leaps of perceptual change that I and others have experienced, nor do these views account for why, if our perceptions of harmony, tonality and structure can differ, they don't seem to differ in entirely arbitrary ways (i.e. while people can learn to appreciate unusual musical forms, you can't just 'make up' arbitrary forms of music and train people to perceive your invented patterns as being being beautiful in general).
This seems to result in a conception of faux-tonality in many cases, people who are not yet capable of actually experiencing music tonally may end up mistaking their own experience of particular impressions of melodies based around a given (major or minor) scale as being what tonality properly is, without realizing that they may simply be listening to music is such a way that it is actually in some sense being experienced modally (i.e. as Ionian instead of being within a major tonality) or as dissonance 5 (where a leading tone that isn't immediately resolved may simply be felt to be unpleasant).
7 There is some debate over whether most pop music is 'traditionally tonal'. Some might argue that it is not structured around the goal of developing and progressing towards a tonic, and hence not tonal in the sense that Heinrich Schenker would have meant. Others might say that, despite this difference of structure, that they perceive the music to have a tonic anyway, and so may be considered tonal, even if the music isn't driven towards an 'inevitable' tonal resolution. I believe I may be able to clear some of this issue up. To reiterate what I have already said, people who do not possess Encompassing Voice will not perceive tonal tension. They may hear a melody as being appropriate to a scale, and hence desire consonance, but will not perceive dissonant or leading harmonies as a prompt to desire resolution. This doesn't mean they will hate all tones that may be perceived as somewhat dissonant in themselves, but will not feel that tones that are intended to imply a voice leading structure actually serve this purpose and will generally find them dissatisfying to listen to. As such, from my experience, they will not perceive pop music as being traditionally tonal (which is difference from simply being harmonious).
So then what of those with EVP (but not necessarily SGP)? Now the perception of tonality is contingent on a number of things, but still I will not say that even those with Encompassing Voice will perceive verse-chorus structured pop music as being tonal. EVPAs must keep track of specific themes and do so with the intent of perceiving them as leading towards a cadence. This is not impossible to deliberately do, but doing so does not only require deliberate concentration and reinterpretation of the music, but it will lead to an interpretation that is unnaturally unsatisfying (as tension will not be dynamically developed and resolved) and artificial. As such it is much more natural to not bother trying to interpret tonality into the music or reading into to structure it doesn't have, and so EVA-SGNs in particular will typically not perceive pop music to be tonal in a particularly meaningful way, relaxing demand for tonal perception of these songs.
So now I've lead into the final question, what happens if we add Supper Grammar into the mix? This is probably the most interesting part, and I believe it may shed considerable light on this issue. Since EVA-SGAs are capable of experiencing music supertonally, this adds some ambiguity to things. While pop music that won't be interpreted intertonally still won't demand the listener experience tonal tension, it's possible the SGPA listener may perceive an implied tonic via the harmonic structure of the music. This won't strictly demand resolution, but since SGP allows the listener to suspend the demand to lead straight back to the tonic, and perceive unresolved parts as part of a larger structure in which tonality is implicit, the SGPA experience of pop can be felt to be supertonal, and hence closer to their experience of traditional tonality than that of the SGPN, even if there is no actual resolving structure.
Moreover, what it means to be tonal, or what it means for a given note or key to be a 'tonic' (in a piece of music as perceived in a given mind) is ambiguous in that there seem to be several related and overlapping, but still meaningfully differentiable, phenomena that this idea of tonality refers to. In my own previous articles I have naturally used some of these ideas interchangeably, in addition to extending them with new senses. The nebulousness of these ideas naturally arises out of their interconnection, it is difficult to absolutely separate these fundamentally related phenomena, even though parts of them can absolutely be distinguished via recognizing how they interact with specific mental phenomena.
The first, and most commonly referenced of these ideas is the harmonic aspect of tonality, i.e. the recognition that harmonies can be built out of triads (C, E, G for major, A,C, E for minor) that these triads relate to the more general idea of an isomorphic key structure, within which all harmonies built from a given root will be perceptually similar in structure to those built the same way from a different root, while at the same time, triadic harmonies which share a root can be inverted (i.e. by moving the base note up an octave), resulting in a chord that shares certain properties with the 'uninverted' chord, while still differing in other ways.
The second I will identify is the melodic or scalar, i.e. the idea that sequences of notes, played sequentially within a given scale, will tend to have a specific character, that can potentially be "broken out of" by emphasizing notes outside of that scale. The idea of being "in a key" in this general, melodic sense, is similar and essentially equivalent to being "in a scale"—when there is no 'global tonic' that demands resolution the major and minor 'modes' can be treated like any other scales that don't necessarily strongly resolve to a specific tonic, even though cadences within these scales will still be perceived in a characteristic way. This includes things like being perceived as being "in a mode" or "in the whole tone scale".
Next, there is the global thematic, i.e. the experience, of a person with EVP, that a melody played in a major or minor scale is specifically unresolved and may ultimately need to be ended with an V-I chord cadence that finishes off the total structure of thematic material that had been developed up to that point and resolves to a chord based on the specific tonic note that is perceived to be the center of the whole piece (or at least the phrase that is currently in need of resolution, as long as that phrase is resolved totally). This generally depends on the harmonic and melodic aspects identified above to work, but is in a meaningful sense beyond them, as it requires the possession of EVP, for the listener to be actively keeping track of the theme in their mind and acknowledging what aspects of it are unresolved—searching for an ultimate resolution to it, and for the music to be structured to that such a listener will perceive its structural dissonance as a call to perceive further thematic resolution.
Then, strongly related to the previous, the rhythmic/structural thematic period. This is something novel that I have chosen to identify as a tonic, because while it is meaningfully related to these other aspects of tonality, and I have previously referred to it as a kind of tonic, it is very easily arguable that this is not really something that should be referred to as a tonic at all. This covers several different kinds of 'false' cadences, temporary modulations/tonicizations, and in general anything that results in the feeling the structure of a theme has ended, but in a way that doesn't result in a fully global resolution of structural tension. It is naturally controversial how 'real' these specific kinds of 'phantom tonics' are, in the sense of how it is they actually compare to a full, 'perfect' 'authentic' candential resolution of structure, or how they relate to the notes around them in terms of construction of scales, but I've decided to put them in this general category to make it clear that I have referred to them and and will refer to them as tonics even though I am well aware that this is highly contestable. This specifically covers things like phrases/motifs which establish a structural end point, but end in something which isn't a cadence to an implied global tonal center (as in the examples of the famous motif of Beethoven's 5th symphony, first movement and the themes of the 7th symphony, second movement, which were employed in the articles of Variant Construction). As such, this definition effectively considers anything which functions like a cadence to be 'tonal' in a wide reaching sense, and identifies the tonic with a perceived structural function.
Also, to clear up some potential confusion, I will also try to make clear what things should not be mistakenly referred to as tonal. Chiefly, the idea that 'consonant sounding' music is tonal, while 'dissonant sounding' music is atonal is understandable but essentially mistaken view based around the misapprehension of what these terms were coined to refer to, due to people making judgments based on their impressions of music that has been labeled these particular things. Getting into what I believe people specifically should refer to specific types of music as in general is something I want to touch upon, but only to a certain extent. I want to describe in greater detail, how specific works may be considered 'tonal' in different ways, but at the same time I don't want to police people and dictate how they ought to use specific works, which have a sense that works in most conversation. The rest of this article will provide more detailed clarifications of species of tonality that I want to define and draw attention to.
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*The term species used here is something I intend to delineate in very specific ways shortly.
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Much existing music theory implicitly assumes that the mind attempting to engage with it possesses certain qualities in common with that of the writer, and that they will basically be able to comprehend the music and ideas discussed in the same general way that they do, or if not, that this can be 'corrected' by engaging in appropriate study in much the same way that the study of anything else might allow the student to grasp a given subject. But in a certain way, I am claiming that this is not quite the case. Rather, it seems to be that minds, in apprehending music, will experience it in fundamentally different ways, such that the only way the minds can be made the same with regard to the kind of experience they undergo is to radically alter at least one of the individual minds so that the discreet form of mental processing they undergo matches up with the other(s). Only then can a more or less complete understanding be properly reconciled in full and made to agree. So, in a way, it seems to be possible that just about any individual can actually 'learn' to comprehend music according to the common understanding a given body of work assumes, but the nature of the learning process is possibly radically different from what we ordinarily think of as learning, for it is a series of discreet stages that are potentially triggered by outside stimuli as opposed to a sustained and gradual process.
The degree to which methods of musical training themselves actually stimulate the development of the modal faculties, and the degree which the faculties themselves explicitly rely on training to form, are open questions that will need to be studied in much greater detail in order to be better understood. It may well be that no explicit training at all is necessary for the activation of the faculties; many people have reported experiences2 which imply that they have possessed both EVP and SGP from a young age, before engaging in any training that might have triggered their development. Because of this, it is feasibly possible that someone at any given age, and from any given background, may or may not have possession of a given faculty, and hence my or may not be capable of having a given species of tonal experience.
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Now I will begin to describe the specific nature of various tonal species as I have experienced them, explaining how it is that the nature or a given experience is contingent on the modal faculties one possesses. Note that where I use the word 'tonal' here without any other qualifications, I'm referring specifically to the experience of key center tension by those with at least EVP, as opposed to any other sense.
But, firstly, before going into this, I will need to make clear the difference between the objective and subjective aspects of what I'm going to describe. The terms given in bold red are objective, in that they describe the nature in a piece of music in a way that is independent of a single given person's apprehension of it, while the terms in bold blue are subjective, in that they describe the particular nature of the experience of an individual listener who might possess certain faculties as they listen to a given piece.3
Intertonal: Intertonal passages of music are what I have experienced as the foundation of tonality, as what is fundamental to tonal music before the additional possibilities supplied by SGP are enabled by its power. To an EVA-SGN, intertonal passages will entirely comprise their whole experience of tonality, they will not experience any sense that music is "in a key", that there is a need to return to a particular tonic in order to resolve a feeling of tension, without it being an 'intertonal' experience of tonality. I will define the qualities of experiencing a passage as being intertonal through the following criteria:
A musical theme of sufficient length, and structured in order to create the expectation of a return to a tonic, is perceived. To illustrate what this is not, I will contrast this with something insufficient; a short three note arpeggio sequence comprising of simply a tonic, mediant and dominant, with each note having the same duration and offset from each other. This can outline a harmony of a major scale, but will not itself create a direct experience of there being an unresolved tension, unless it is further elaborated on (an example of which can be seen in the opening of Bach's Violin Concerto in E Major). That tonal tension is experienced as being through a specific theme is essential to this definition of intertonality. EVA-SGNs will not experience tonal tension of any kind at all without this feeling being formed through the expression of a specific theme, experienced through a single 'voice' (musical line)—though with an intertonal experience, multiple 'voices' may be perceived together, each having their own effective tonal center, each generally resolving into a final ultimate chord that consists of the union of the structural 'tonic' of each voice.4
This is an example of an arpeggio that, on its own, fails to be intratonal (or ultratonal) and thus lacks 'hard-tonality'.
A feeling of tension (which is comprised by the above mentioned expectation to return to a tonic) is created through this by having part of the theme composed in such a way that it will feel melodically dissonant5 if the listener does not use their language faculty in order to reinterpret this dissonance as an incompleteness, such that the passage of music feels that has simply not yet been finished and would be melodically consonant and whole only if it were to be completed (this is to be considered a property of hard-tonality, in which intertonality is included). This requires EVP to be active (as in EVPA). EVPNs are, in contrast, not capable of performing this act of reinterpreting dissonance as incompleteness/anticipation of further resolution. This anticipation of completeness will naturally cause the listener to feel a need to resolve to a specific tonic, namely what is experienced as the key of the passage.
This will be perceived in a specific way. It is important to understand that everything I am describing here will be actively felt as part of the experience of intertonality, barely anything here is an abstraction derived from reasoning about a collection of such experiences after the fact, but rather should be apparent to someone experiencing it directly. When you feel a passage of music as possessing intertonality, you will feel "in the back of your mind" that there is a clear and unambiguous need to return to a very particular note, and save for this return to the tonal center the whole passage will feel incomplete and dissatisfying. If this is not felt (and it should be clear if it is) then chances are that you are not experiencing music intertonally, either because you aren't listening to appropriate music, you have not yet been able to parse a given passage as being a given theme (which is especially crucial for EVA-SGNs and will be explored in more detail shortly), you lack EVP, or you possess SGP in addition to EVP and hence have more freedom to mentally "break the rules" of music that would otherwise be perceived wholly intertonally. Importantly, even if you can't name the specific key or understand how it is constructed, you should at least in principal be able to hum the note that would be the tonic or end point if you are physically able to do so.6
Now, this definition of intertonality will in itself not be that useful unless definitions of other types of tonal and non-tonal (and possibly ambiguously tonal) music are given in contrast. As I have hinted, it is possible to experience tonal tension through other species of tonality, but in intertonality this will occur only strictly through instances of themes which are canonical sequences. The very idea of tonal tension, which is the key to the idea of the tonal center/tonality, is itself a generalization of intertonality. But I've chosen to cover the specific category of intertonality first in order to provide a concrete basis of experience for comparison.
Certain works of CPE Bach exemplify music that can be experienced intertonally. The reason for this, is that most works of the classical repertoire contain substantial structure based around variant addition that will pull away from returning to the tonal center of the work in favor of partially repeating sections of thematic material, which is generally annoyingly unsatisfying for EVA-SGNs (who are the primary 'audience' for intertonal experience, as SGPAs will have the capacity to experience tonality in ways that transcend it). CPE Bach's concertos, along with many works in jazz and progressive rock, will, instead of building up monumental architectural structures, choose to more frequently play the structural end of a theme so that it is complete and 'stand alone', before moving on to the next musical phrase in succession, such that in that the last note of the previous theme instance and the first note of the next will be distinct and wholly contained within each individual theme instance (though different themes in different voices can overlap). Collectively these works that may be perceived to be coherent to an EVA-SGN, even if they may be perceived as having 'additional structure' when SGP is gained, may be considered laxly-intertonal music. Laxly-intertonal music can also be experienced extratonaly when SGP is gained and this additional structural significance becomes perceptible. Music that isn't laxly-intertonal, and which requires SGP to be made sense of (such as ultratonal music, covered below) may be experienced as being degenerately-intertonal if listened to by an EVASGN.
Contratonal: So, in order to contrast with the experience of music as being tonal, I'll introduce the concept of 'contra-tonal' musical experience. This idea is distinct from intertonality, as it specifically refers to the experience of kinds of music which can be comprehended as being satisfying to listen to without necessarily being perceived as having a tonal center, such that it actually is perceived as lacking a tonal center and also not possessing any kind of 'pseudo-tonal' structure (meaning it is not perceived as having variant structure of any kind). This category induces the apprehension of certain kinds of music that could, optionally, be perceived as having a tonal center assuming the person possesses SGP (in which case they will perceive the music supertonally), but specifically discludes laxly-intertonal music, (that will only be appreciated by those who possess EVP and who actively listen to the tension and release generated by the development of a theme through to the return to the tonic at a cadence) and ultratonal music (which demands both EVP and SGP). Prelude 1 in C major of J.S. Bach's WTC Book 1 is a prime example of music of this sort, there is no barrier to the perception of it as being harmonious, consonant and satisfying (though the music itself may be felt to sound 'naive' in this state) even without EVP. Contratonal experience is naturally how EVN-SGN listeners perceive music that they don't perceive to be dissatisfying due to excessive structural demands. Certain 'modal' music may be contratonal.
Supertonal: This category (the contratonal) relates to a further species of experience that is in turn defined in contrast to it, that of the 'super-tonal'. A supertonal experience is one where, a person possessing both EVP and SGP is able to interpret music that might otherwise be experienced as being 'contratonal' as having a tonal center, where a person with EVP but not SPG would fail to explicitly perceive this tonality. This is achieved through the capability (via SGP and variant structure) of piecing together melodic fragments within a musical work (which themselves do not form distinct themes that are sufficient in structure as to be intertonal) such that they end up creating the perception of a tonal center and structures of tension around it. Not all work perceptible as being contratonal will be super-tonal perceptible, but those that are can be considered semitonal. The WTC book 1 prelude also serves as a supertonal work to those who are capable of perceiving it as such.
Semitonal: Works that are both potentially perceptible as contratonal and supertonal. Much pop-music will be in this category, in the sense that it will be felt to possess tonal function (through supertonality) by EVASGAs, despite being perfectly listenable by EVNSGNs (as contratonalality). However despite the possibility of supertonality granting additional structural possibilities to works, most pop-music, when heard supertonally, will not gain much of this, and will instead simply be experienced more or less the same as it would be in contratonal experience, but with the additional sense of perceptible tonic. I hope this specifically helps clarify the debate about whether pop-music is 'really tonal'.
Ultratonal: Music that must be perceived with the full capacity provided by both EVP and SGP and which will fail to provide meaningful resolution for individual passages most of the time if this is not the case. This describes the perception of that music assuming a person is EVASGA. A great deal of common practice music, especially that which might be said to be in sonata form (though there are many semitonal sonatas, like Beetoven's 'Pathetique' and 'Moonlight' sonatas) is covered by this. Ultratonal music builds on intertonal music by including aspects that forces EVASGAs to interpret in ways that EVASGNs are not capable of. Ultratonal music, when experienced by an EVASGN who cannot do this, may be considered a degenerately-intertonal experience.
Extratonal: As in the section describing intertonality, this is where music that might otherwise be experienced as being intertonal (given a lack of SGP) will be experienced as gaining a richer structure through SGP, even though it isn't ultratonal.
Linguistic: Covers any music that will feel dissonant and not 'make sense' without EVP.
Hard-Tonal: 'Linguistic' music that specific discludes 'pseudo-tonal' music (such as 'atonal' and particularly experimental 'modal' music) which might otherwise be 'linguistic'. Includes laxly-intertonal and ultratonal music, but not semitonal.
Laxly-Intertonal: Objective classification for music that will be perceived intertonally by EVA-SGNs.
Pseudo-tonal: This concept of 'pseudo-tonality' is one I must introduce carefully. It doesn't refer to any one specific type of experience, but rather is used as a way of contrasting a variety of musical experiences that aren't considered to be traditionally tonal, but which share particular aspects in common with certain species of 'properly' tonal experience. For example, what is commonly (but unfortunately) termed 'atonal' music is potentially covered by this broad portmanteau category, specifically as a kind music that completely excludes any tendency to imply a specific key center (though I can't comment on this tradition too much as I barely appreciate it myself and couldn't say how its structure might be appreciated). In the specific case of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, which I include in this category, the music is structured so as to provide repetitive patterns that allow the music to be experienced (by SGPAs) as a kind of variant structure layered over a base structure of motific cells that may be considered canonical sequence fragments, which happen to not define a single unique and unambiguous key center.*
These categories should allow me to discuss the nature of how different listeners will experience different kinds of works.
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*This kind of structure might be labeled 'pseudo-ultratonal' (given that it requires SPG in order to link the structures with each other), but I'm not going to commit to this specific name.
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I've established numerous times that EVPAs will not perceive tonal tension at all, though their perception of a given 'part' of a piece of music—individual notes, bars and sections—will be influenced by the surrounding context in respect to the beat patterns and scales used and the emotions that are evoked. EVPAs may still perceive a certain phenomena that may be called tension, namely the feeling of a verse section of a song progressing towards a chorus, but this is distinct from tonal tension that 'demands' a specific candential resolution. This lack of candential demand allows much pop/rock music to fade out at the end instead of needing to explicitly resolve any built up structure.7
EVA-SGN listeners will be capable of perceiving tonality through intertonality, but there are certain important limitations they will experience beyond the structural implications of not being able to cognize variant structure. One of these is that, in comparison to what an EVA-SGA ought to be capable of, the SGPN listener will have a much greater need to memorize and commit to long term memory the individual themes in a given piece of tonal music. EVA-SGNs may be able to get a feel for the themes of a given tonal work, even if it contains significant variant structure, by repeated listening to a piece. In doing so they may, over time, progressively get a better feel for both what the themes are, and also get better at identifying how individual instances may be canonical transformations of each other (and hence, in a sense identified as "the same theme"). This can take many listens in order to progressively refine, and may initially fatigue the listener such that, for the sake of their memory, they will greatly benefit from rest and recuperation.
EVA-SGA listeners, in contrast, are able to much more rapidly take in the overall structure of a piece, learning to immediately identify repetitions of passages and sections and assimilate them into an overall structure that they may be able to learn to mentally track and update as the stream of sound provides more information and context. Here, the initial need for commitment of themes to long term memory is greatly lessened, and in fact there seems to be a much more substantial 'buffer', seemingly in working memory, that is able to dynamically keep track of the music and how it changes as it is being listened to.
This ability to keep track of musical structure contrasts with the experience I had as an SGPN of often feeling 'lost' in the structure of a piece, with a given instance of a theme feeling structurally equivalent to another and so what precedes and follows it feeling irrelevant, leading me to have little inherant reason to care or feel sure about how the section of music I was currently listening to would lead to the next or 'develop' (given I could perceive thematic development, and not that of the variant structure). Also lacking EVP causes an even greater sense of confusion when dealing with complex—with respect to the thematic and variant structure—music.
Attaining SGP actually answered a lot of niggling questions I had about other people's perception which were bugging me. One of those was that of why professional music critics (historically) felt they were capable of judging a given piece on the first or second listen. Now, I will grant the possibility that maybe they were simply better than me through great practice, but even then it felt odd that even after years of experience assimilating certain idioms, introducing to myself a new piece of tonal music in a genre I was familiar with still took such significant effort. If it really was the case that it was simply matter of practicing even more, then I couldn't see why anyone besides professional musicians and aristocrats with the time, culture and resources to do so would be capable of learning to listen to art music naturally. I also couldn't reconcile this with claims I'd heard of people intuitively picking up an appreciation for J.S.Bach's music as young children without paying conscious attention to its structure (which wasn't at all like my intertonal experience of the music at the time, possessing only EVP).
With SGP I could feel a great reduction in the effort needed to 'keep up' with the musical structures I perceived as they unfolded through the piece. This is in spite of the actually greater total complexity of structure that SGP enables the perception of. In a way, this perception of additional structure in supertonal experience seems to relax the requirements compared to the strictness of parsing themes in intertonal experience, which seems to more intently demand that the listener explicitly, deliberately hold the expectation of the tonal center of each theme in a given voice in their head being played. The supertonal experience allows the listener to withhold both this expectation of return to an explicit cadence, and the need to have to consciously identify any given passage as being a variation of a given memorized theme. Because of this, they can simply listen to a passage that seemingly leads nowhere to any particular resolution and accept it for what it is, with only the simple expectation that the piece will continue on and complete it somehow, and that they may come to feel and understand this in a broad sense as long as they pay enough basic attention while continuing to listen.
However, this ability to 'trust' the music to fulfill certain expectations is conventional in the sense that it seems you can get better at it by familiarizing yourself with what music in a given genre, written in a certain context, generally does. This allows you to better prepare for what natural expectations are likely to be violated and how to mentally adjust to potential alternate ways of resolving them. For instance, knowing that a theme that has been introduced may be 'violated' by having its implicit cadence interrupted by an intermediary passage because you have experience with other pieces that do this may help you better adjust to this happening in a given piece if it is new to you. And yet, in accordance with everything I have discussed so far, this particular violation can only be adjusted to if the listener actually possesses SGP. Otherwise, even if they are explicitly aware of the possibility of someone accounting for the violation, they will have access to no mental mechanism that allows them to deal with it until they themselves develop SGP. This is the same for other abilities that are restricted to particular faculties.
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Many other aspect of musical appreciation, seem to be 'conventional' in this way, improving gradually as the listener becomes familiar with particular sounds and conventions, despite the dependence they have on particular modal faculties.
EVN-SGNs can develop their listening capabilities significantly in particular ways even if they have yet to attain any further faculty:
-The ability to accurately identify the fact that a given individual note exists in itself and is played by a given instrument, despite many other sounds occurring at the same time, is such a skill that can be progressively developed. Attaining EVP will significantly aid this, by providing a much greater potential ability to identify and track multiple instrumental streams of music, while also changing the timbrel qualities that they perceive that make them stand out easier, but the skill is still very much trainable in its absence despite this.
-The ability to evaluate the pitch of a given note relative to other notes near it (feeling whether or not it is the same or otherwise how its pitch class differs in context, possibly through the span of many other notes) is also trainable. EVP will add the natural reference point of the tracked tonal center, but lacking this is not a barrier to pitch training.
EVA-SGNs can:
-Become better at learning and identifying themes through practice.
-Improve at the ability to keep track of a larger number of voices simultaneously (thought this is something that is fundamentally improved by attaining SGP).
EVA-SGAs can:
-Familiarize themselves with the conventions of various musical styles in order to learn how different composers will imply variant structure and expect the listener to readjust their perception to account for this.
This is naturally not an exhaustive list of every skill the can be developed with regards to comprehension of musical structure, but it should give an overview of the major kinds of skills that should be attainable given a student possesses a given level of attunement to the faculties they possess. The attainment of individual modal faculties will still result in sudden quantum leaps of ability in ways that are beyond the possibilities of a person otherwise, despite more gradual learning being possible within them.
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1 Refer to the to-be-published article on key finding algorithms.
2 A particular example of a person who has self reported experiencing meaningful engagement with 'ultratonal' music at a very young age who I want to draw attention to is Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. This is because he is one of the first people to propose the possibility of recursively experiencing hierarchical key structures in music and to suggest that this may have particular cognitive importance.
3 Here, objective properties (of a work of art) are defined in terms of how people who's minds possess certain attributes are expected to apprehend it, and hence in terms of the subjective. And once the nature of this subjectivity is recognized in a particular way, that it can be characterized in terms of the experience of an individual subject, which can be clarified via all the same attributes as the objective view, the nature of the distinction between the objective and the subjective here may become apparent essentially as the matter of convenience it is. In general, subjectivity is considered distinct from objective classification due to our lack of understanding of the complexity and nuance of the human mind, and everything 'objective' ultimately presents itself to consciousness via means that can be considered subjective, but in principle, with complete knowledge of mental activity, there ought to be nothing subjective that couldn't be treated objectively, by considering what a mind with a specific structure and composition should feel when particular activity take place in it, given that there really are static metaphysical 'laws' governing the actual expression of consciousness that might be discoverable.
4 The EVA-SGN subject, though capable or perceiving an ultimate chord as a resolution satisfying the tonal centers of multiple voices synchronously, will not itself simultaneously perceived as a harmony or 'harmonically unified chord'. i.e. To those lacking Super Grammar, but whom are capable of perceiving music intertonally through EVP, will be able to interpret a given chord (where appropriate) as being several distinct notes that each conclude the cadence of a separate vocal line or as being a single experience of harmony, but not both at the same time (as long as we are talking about a given set of notes that respectively both constitute the chord and serve as ultimate cadences to distinct voices in polyphony, additional supporting harmonies may naturally be added as long that they aren't interpreted as separate voices in themselves). This is effectively a claim, not that apprehension of both harmony and tonality is actually impossible, but that SGP is required in order to effectively perceive both simultaneously. As such, SGP seems to allow the perception of more 'exotic' harmonic structures.
Note that when I speak of harmony, or being harmonically unified here, I mean nothing especially technical. I only mean the feelings that naturally arise on hearing a series of note together in a chord, which are generally absent when the same notes are heard bare and individually unaccompanied. I'm simply saying that these feelings will be absent if and when such a chord is experienced as polyphony in the context of an intertonal experience.
5 I use dissonance in these places in a specific way. I'm not referring to harmonic dissonance, where a note that directly clashes with another is played at the same time, but to a sense of unease resulting from an unsatisfying melodic sequence. To an EVPN, all melodic sequences which might otherwise result in developing musical tension within a tonal idiom will simply immediately be perceived as dissonant in this way.
6 Many people, in trying to understand music theory, will naturally come across the idea of tonality, yet have difficulty understanding it. In many cases, I believe that this is because they basically have no actual experience of tonality at all, even though their instructors (whether they be books or teachers) believe otherwise. On a certain level it is vaguely acknowledged by many that not everyone experiences tonality and even harmony the same way, as many cross cultural psychological experiments will attest to, but in practice many teachers assume a certain experience of harmony and tonality is possessed by the student, and that any 'deficiencies' can either be gradually 'corrected' through learning, or that otherwise the student may simply be inherently incapable of grasping the material due to how their perception is built up. This, I believe, simply doesn't capture the whole picture, as it doesn't account for the leaps of perceptual change that I and others have experienced, nor do these views account for why, if our perceptions of harmony, tonality and structure can differ, they don't seem to differ in entirely arbitrary ways (i.e. while people can learn to appreciate unusual musical forms, you can't just 'make up' arbitrary forms of music and train people to perceive your invented patterns as being being beautiful in general).
This seems to result in a conception of faux-tonality in many cases, people who are not yet capable of actually experiencing music tonally may end up mistaking their own experience of particular impressions of melodies based around a given (major or minor) scale as being what tonality properly is, without realizing that they may simply be listening to music is such a way that it is actually in some sense being experienced modally (i.e. as Ionian instead of being within a major tonality) or as dissonance 5 (where a leading tone that isn't immediately resolved may simply be felt to be unpleasant).
7 There is some debate over whether most pop music is 'traditionally tonal'. Some might argue that it is not structured around the goal of developing and progressing towards a tonic, and hence not tonal in the sense that Heinrich Schenker would have meant. Others might say that, despite this difference of structure, that they perceive the music to have a tonic anyway, and so may be considered tonal, even if the music isn't driven towards an 'inevitable' tonal resolution. I believe I may be able to clear some of this issue up. To reiterate what I have already said, people who do not possess Encompassing Voice will not perceive tonal tension. They may hear a melody as being appropriate to a scale, and hence desire consonance, but will not perceive dissonant or leading harmonies as a prompt to desire resolution. This doesn't mean they will hate all tones that may be perceived as somewhat dissonant in themselves, but will not feel that tones that are intended to imply a voice leading structure actually serve this purpose and will generally find them dissatisfying to listen to. As such, from my experience, they will not perceive pop music as being traditionally tonal (which is difference from simply being harmonious).
So then what of those with EVP (but not necessarily SGP)? Now the perception of tonality is contingent on a number of things, but still I will not say that even those with Encompassing Voice will perceive verse-chorus structured pop music as being tonal. EVPAs must keep track of specific themes and do so with the intent of perceiving them as leading towards a cadence. This is not impossible to deliberately do, but doing so does not only require deliberate concentration and reinterpretation of the music, but it will lead to an interpretation that is unnaturally unsatisfying (as tension will not be dynamically developed and resolved) and artificial. As such it is much more natural to not bother trying to interpret tonality into the music or reading into to structure it doesn't have, and so EVA-SGNs in particular will typically not perceive pop music to be tonal in a particularly meaningful way, relaxing demand for tonal perception of these songs.
So now I've lead into the final question, what happens if we add Supper Grammar into the mix? This is probably the most interesting part, and I believe it may shed considerable light on this issue. Since EVA-SGAs are capable of experiencing music supertonally, this adds some ambiguity to things. While pop music that won't be interpreted intertonally still won't demand the listener experience tonal tension, it's possible the SGPA listener may perceive an implied tonic via the harmonic structure of the music. This won't strictly demand resolution, but since SGP allows the listener to suspend the demand to lead straight back to the tonic, and perceive unresolved parts as part of a larger structure in which tonality is implicit, the SGPA experience of pop can be felt to be supertonal, and hence closer to their experience of traditional tonality than that of the SGPN, even if there is no actual resolving structure.
