David Temperley
Biographic Data
| ID | 235103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Temperley |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Temperley |
| SIGNATURE | TEMPERLEY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Eastman Chemical Company (United States) |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0569-7877 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Interval Patterns Facilitate Short-Term Memory Encoding of Auditory Pitch Sequences
This study investigated short-term memory recognition for melodies and the effect of patterns (repeated subsequences) within a melody. Participants (n = 54) completed a same/different task in which they listened to two consecutive melodies on each trial that could be identical or could differ by one pitch. Melodies could contain patterns based on pitch intervals or melodic contour or could have no pattern structure (i.e., no repeated subsequences…
Melodic Pattern Repetition and Efficient Encoding: A Corpus Study
Melodies are full of repeated patterns of pitch, interval, and rhythm. It has been suggested that these repeated patterns aid the listener in creating an efficient encoding; this raises the possibility that compositional practice might have evolved to facilitate this process. I propose three specific hypotheses about compositional practice: 1) Repeated intervallic patterns tend to be metrically parallel, with each instance of the pattern falling …
The inverse frequency effect: An exploratory study
Rare syntactic constructions show an especially strong tendency to be repeated, but some rare constructions exhibit this tendency much more strongly than others. The reasons for this variation are not well understood. This exploratory study examines five rare noun-phrase (NP) expansions in English: ( the rich ), ( a Bob Gates) , ( architect Julia Morgan ), ( the jobs data ), and ( home electronic equipment ). Repetition tendencies are very strong…
Music and Language
This review presents a highly selective survey of connections between music and language. I begin by considering some fundamental differences between music and language and some nonspecific similarities that may arise out of more general characteristics of human cognition and communication. I then discuss an important, specific interaction between music and language: the connection between linguistic stress and musical meter. Next, I consider sev…
The evolution of syncopation in twentieth-century American popular music
Several studies have found increases in syncopation within genres of twentieth-century popular music, but its evolution across the entire century has not been explored. In this study we use a new corpus of vocal melodies to examine trends in the use of syncopation. We find an increasing trend over the entire century. We also consider three ways of categorising syncopations into ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms, and find that the strong forms increase mo…
The origins of syncopation in American popular music
The origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory char…
Uniform Information Density in Music
The theory of Uniform Information Density states that communication is optimal when information is presented at a moderate and uniform rate. Three predictions follow for music: (1) low-probability events should be longer in duration than high-probability events; (2) low-probability events should be juxtaposed with high-probability events; (3) an event that is low in probability in one dimension should be high in probability in other dimensions. I…
Minimizing Syntactic Dependency Lengths: Typological/Cognitive Universal
Syntactic dependencies are head/modifier relations between words in a sentence that organize sentences into a syntactic tree structure. The general principle that languages have a preference to group syntactically related words close together can be made precise as a preference for shorter dependencies. We examine evidence for this principle in the development of languages’ grammars as well as in the choices made by individual speakers where synt…
Mediant Mixture and "Blue Notes" in Rock: An Exploratory Study
Rock features extensive use of mediant mixture, that is, the use of both scale-degrees3̂and ♭3̂within a song; it also has been said to employ "blue notes" that fall between these two degrees. In this study we explore these issues, seeking to gain a better understanding of the use of mediant mixture and blue notes in rock. In addition to conventional aural analysis, we use an automatic pitch-tracking algorithm that identifies pitch contours with h…
Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music
Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music
We present a corpus of harmonic analyses and melodic transcriptions of rock songs. After explaining the creation and notation of the corpus, we present results of some explorations of the corpus data. We begin by considering the overall distribution of scale-degrees in rock. We then address the issue of key-finding: how the key of a rock song can be identified from harmonic and melodic information. Considering both the distribution of melodic sca…
A corpus analysis of rock harmony
In this study, we report a corpus analysis of rock harmony. As a corpus, we usedRolling Stonemagazine's list of the '500 Greatest Songs of All Time'; we took the 20 top-ranked songs from each decade (the 1950s through the 1990s), creating a set of 100 songs. Both authors analysed all 100 songs by hand, using conventional Roman numeral symbols. Agreement between the two sets of analyses was over 90 per cent. The analyses were encoded using a recur…
Scalar Shift in Popular Music
Existing approaches to scales in popular music do not do justice to the variety of scale collections that are used or to their expressive effects. In this article I propose a novel approach to this problem, focusing particularly on shifts of scale within songs. The idea is simple: The scale-degree content of a song (or a section of a song) tends to occupy a certain region on the "line of fifths," the circle of fifths stretched out infinitely in b…
The Cadential IV in Rock
In this paper I examine large-scale cadences in rock-those that end a section or an entire song-and the role of IV in such cadences. My main focus is onsectional cadences-those that occur at the end of a chorus. Plagal (IV-I) sectional cadences are common in rock, as I will show (using statistical evidence). I examine an especially common subtype of the plagal cadence, theplagal stop cadence. I also consider several other uses of IV that are in s…
Distributional Stress Regularity: A Corpus Study
The melodic-harmonic 'divorce' in rock
Several authors have observed that rock music sometimes features a kind of independence or 'divorce' between melody and harmony. In this article, I examine this phenomenon more systematically than has been done in the past. A good indicator of melodic-harmonic divorce is cases where non-chord-tones in the melody do not resolve by step. I argue that this does occur frequently in rock - often with respect to the local harmony, and sometimes with re…
The Dependency Structure of Coordinate Phrases: A Corpus Approach
Bayesian Models of Musical Structure and Cognition
This paper explores the application of Bayesian probabilistic modeling to issues of music cognition and music theory. The main concern is with the problem of key-finding: the process of inferring the key from a pattern of notes. The Bayesian perspective leads to a simple, elegant, and highly effective model of this process; the same approach can also be extended to other aspects of music perception, such as metrical structure and melodic structur…
Communicative Pressure and the Evolution of Musical Styles
Music functions, at least in part, to convey certain structures to the listener via a surface of notes. For communication to occur successfully, the structures must be recoverable from the surface. I argue that this consideration has been an important factor in the shaping of musical styles, and sheds light on a number of phenomena: the greater degree of syncopation and lower degree of rubato in traditional African music and rock versus common-pr…
Ambiguity Avoidance in English Relative Clauses
Are syntactic choices influenced by the need to avoid ambiguity? Studies of the use of that with English embedded clauses have reached negative conclusions on this point. It is argued here that these conclusions may be premature. Statistical analysis of another phenomenon of English-use of the optional relative pronoun or complementizer with object relative clauses-in written text suggests that both AMBIGUITY AVOIDANCE and ANAPHORICITY contribute…
The Line of Fifths
Meter and Grouping in African Music: A View from Music Theory
Les musiques africaines ont fait l'objet de nombreuses etudes en ethnomusicologie sur les rythmes, notamment sur une comparaison entre les structures rythmiques de l'Afrique noire et des pays occidentaux. Cet article aborde le rythme des musiques de l'Afrique dans son ensemble depuis une perspective theorique en posant les questions suivantes : comment les rythmes africains sont-ils analyses par les theories musicales contemporaines ? Quelles sim…
Syncopation in rock: A Perceptual Perspective
While study of the social and cultural aspects of popular music has been flourishing for some time, it is only in the last few years that serious efforts have been made to analyse the music itself: what Allan Moore has called 'the primary text' (1993, p. 1). These efforts include general studies of styles and genres (Moore, 1993; Bowman, 1995); studies of specific aspects of popular styles such as harmony and improvisation (Winkler 1978; Moore 19…
The melodic-harmonic 'divorce' in rock
Several authors have observed that rock music sometimes features a kind of independence or 'divorce' between melody and harmony. In this article, I examine this phenomenon more systematically than has been done in the past. A good indicator of melodic-harmonic divorce is cases where non-chord-tones in the melody do not resolve by step. I argue that this does occur frequently in rock - often with respect to the local harmony, and sometimes with re…
A corpus analysis of rock harmony
In this study, we report a corpus analysis of rock harmony. As a corpus, we usedRolling Stonemagazine's list of the '500 Greatest Songs of All Time'; we took the 20 top-ranked songs from each decade (the 1950s through the 1990s), creating a set of 100 songs. Both authors analysed all 100 songs by hand, using conventional Roman numeral symbols. Agreement between the two sets of analyses was over 90 per cent. The analyses were encoded using a recur…
Syncopation in rock: A Perceptual Perspective
While study of the social and cultural aspects of popular music has been flourishing for some time, it is only in the last few years that serious efforts have been made to analyse the music itself: what Allan Moore has called 'the primary text' (1993, p. 1). These efforts include general studies of styles and genres (Moore, 1993; Bowman, 1995); studies of specific aspects of popular styles such as harmony and improvisation (Winkler 1978; Moore 19…
The Cadential IV in Rock
In this paper I examine large-scale cadences in rock-those that end a section or an entire song-and the role of IV in such cadences. My main focus is onsectional cadences-those that occur at the end of a chorus. Plagal (IV-I) sectional cadences are common in rock, as I will show (using statistical evidence). I examine an especially common subtype of the plagal cadence, theplagal stop cadence. I also consider several other uses of IV that are in s…
Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music
We present a corpus of harmonic analyses and melodic transcriptions of rock songs. After explaining the creation and notation of the corpus, we present results of some explorations of the corpus data. We begin by considering the overall distribution of scale-degrees in rock. We then address the issue of key-finding: how the key of a rock song can be identified from harmonic and melodic information. Considering both the distribution of melodic sca…
Meter and Grouping in African Music: A View from Music Theory
Les musiques africaines ont fait l'objet de nombreuses etudes en ethnomusicologie sur les rythmes, notamment sur une comparaison entre les structures rythmiques de l'Afrique noire et des pays occidentaux. Cet article aborde le rythme des musiques de l'Afrique dans son ensemble depuis une perspective theorique en posant les questions suivantes : comment les rythmes africains sont-ils analyses par les theories musicales contemporaines ? Quelles sim…
Communicative Pressure and the Evolution of Musical Styles
Music functions, at least in part, to convey certain structures to the listener via a surface of notes. For communication to occur successfully, the structures must be recoverable from the surface. I argue that this consideration has been an important factor in the shaping of musical styles, and sheds light on a number of phenomena: the greater degree of syncopation and lower degree of rubato in traditional African music and rock versus common-pr…
Ambiguity Avoidance in English Relative Clauses
Are syntactic choices influenced by the need to avoid ambiguity? Studies of the use of that with English embedded clauses have reached negative conclusions on this point. It is argued here that these conclusions may be premature. Statistical analysis of another phenomenon of English-use of the optional relative pronoun or complementizer with object relative clauses-in written text suggests that both AMBIGUITY AVOIDANCE and ANAPHORICITY contribute…
Scalar Shift in Popular Music
Existing approaches to scales in popular music do not do justice to the variety of scale collections that are used or to their expressive effects. In this article I propose a novel approach to this problem, focusing particularly on shifts of scale within songs. The idea is simple: The scale-degree content of a song (or a section of a song) tends to occupy a certain region on the "line of fifths," the circle of fifths stretched out infinitely in b…
Distributional Stress Regularity: A Corpus Study
The Line of Fifths
The origins of syncopation in American popular music
The origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory char…
Minimizing Syntactic Dependency Lengths: Typological/Cognitive Universal
Syntactic dependencies are head/modifier relations between words in a sentence that organize sentences into a syntactic tree structure. The general principle that languages have a preference to group syntactically related words close together can be made precise as a preference for shorter dependencies. We examine evidence for this principle in the development of languages’ grammars as well as in the choices made by individual speakers where synt…
Syncopation in rock: A Perceptual Perspective
While study of the social and cultural aspects of popular music has been flourishing for some time, it is only in the last few years that serious efforts have been made to analyse the music itself: what Allan Moore has called 'the primary text' (1993, p. 1). These efforts include general studies of styles and genres (Moore, 1993; Bowman, 1995); studies of specific aspects of popular styles such as harmony and improvisation (Winkler 1978; Moore 19…
The Line of Fifths
Meter and Grouping in African Music: A View from Music Theory
Les musiques africaines ont fait l'objet de nombreuses etudes en ethnomusicologie sur les rythmes, notamment sur une comparaison entre les structures rythmiques de l'Afrique noire et des pays occidentaux. Cet article aborde le rythme des musiques de l'Afrique dans son ensemble depuis une perspective theorique en posant les questions suivantes : comment les rythmes africains sont-ils analyses par les theories musicales contemporaines ? Quelles sim…
Ambiguity Avoidance in English Relative Clauses
Are syntactic choices influenced by the need to avoid ambiguity? Studies of the use of that with English embedded clauses have reached negative conclusions on this point. It is argued here that these conclusions may be premature. Statistical analysis of another phenomenon of English-use of the optional relative pronoun or complementizer with object relative clauses-in written text suggests that both AMBIGUITY AVOIDANCE and ANAPHORICITY contribute…
Bayesian Models of Musical Structure and Cognition
This paper explores the application of Bayesian probabilistic modeling to issues of music cognition and music theory. The main concern is with the problem of key-finding: the process of inferring the key from a pattern of notes. The Bayesian perspective leads to a simple, elegant, and highly effective model of this process; the same approach can also be extended to other aspects of music perception, such as metrical structure and melodic structur…
Communicative Pressure and the Evolution of Musical Styles
Music functions, at least in part, to convey certain structures to the listener via a surface of notes. For communication to occur successfully, the structures must be recoverable from the surface. I argue that this consideration has been an important factor in the shaping of musical styles, and sheds light on a number of phenomena: the greater degree of syncopation and lower degree of rubato in traditional African music and rock versus common-pr…
The Dependency Structure of Coordinate Phrases: A Corpus Approach
The melodic-harmonic 'divorce' in rock
Several authors have observed that rock music sometimes features a kind of independence or 'divorce' between melody and harmony. In this article, I examine this phenomenon more systematically than has been done in the past. A good indicator of melodic-harmonic divorce is cases where non-chord-tones in the melody do not resolve by step. I argue that this does occur frequently in rock - often with respect to the local harmony, and sometimes with re…
Distributional Stress Regularity: A Corpus Study
A corpus analysis of rock harmony
In this study, we report a corpus analysis of rock harmony. As a corpus, we usedRolling Stonemagazine's list of the '500 Greatest Songs of All Time'; we took the 20 top-ranked songs from each decade (the 1950s through the 1990s), creating a set of 100 songs. Both authors analysed all 100 songs by hand, using conventional Roman numeral symbols. Agreement between the two sets of analyses was over 90 per cent. The analyses were encoded using a recur…
Scalar Shift in Popular Music
Existing approaches to scales in popular music do not do justice to the variety of scale collections that are used or to their expressive effects. In this article I propose a novel approach to this problem, focusing particularly on shifts of scale within songs. The idea is simple: The scale-degree content of a song (or a section of a song) tends to occupy a certain region on the "line of fifths," the circle of fifths stretched out infinitely in b…
The Cadential IV in Rock
In this paper I examine large-scale cadences in rock-those that end a section or an entire song-and the role of IV in such cadences. My main focus is onsectional cadences-those that occur at the end of a chorus. Plagal (IV-I) sectional cadences are common in rock, as I will show (using statistical evidence). I examine an especially common subtype of the plagal cadence, theplagal stop cadence. I also consider several other uses of IV that are in s…
Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music
We present a corpus of harmonic analyses and melodic transcriptions of rock songs. After explaining the creation and notation of the corpus, we present results of some explorations of the corpus data. We begin by considering the overall distribution of scale-degrees in rock. We then address the issue of key-finding: how the key of a rock song can be identified from harmonic and melodic information. Considering both the distribution of melodic sca…
Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music
Minimizing Syntactic Dependency Lengths: Typological/Cognitive Universal
Syntactic dependencies are head/modifier relations between words in a sentence that organize sentences into a syntactic tree structure. The general principle that languages have a preference to group syntactically related words close together can be made precise as a preference for shorter dependencies. We examine evidence for this principle in the development of languages’ grammars as well as in the choices made by individual speakers where synt…
Mediant Mixture and "Blue Notes" in Rock: An Exploratory Study
Rock features extensive use of mediant mixture, that is, the use of both scale-degrees3̂and ♭3̂within a song; it also has been said to employ "blue notes" that fall between these two degrees. In this study we explore these issues, seeking to gain a better understanding of the use of mediant mixture and blue notes in rock. In addition to conventional aural analysis, we use an automatic pitch-tracking algorithm that identifies pitch contours with h…
Uniform Information Density in Music
The theory of Uniform Information Density states that communication is optimal when information is presented at a moderate and uniform rate. Three predictions follow for music: (1) low-probability events should be longer in duration than high-probability events; (2) low-probability events should be juxtaposed with high-probability events; (3) an event that is low in probability in one dimension should be high in probability in other dimensions. I…
The origins of syncopation in American popular music
The origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory char…
Music and Language
This review presents a highly selective survey of connections between music and language. I begin by considering some fundamental differences between music and language and some nonspecific similarities that may arise out of more general characteristics of human cognition and communication. I then discuss an important, specific interaction between music and language: the connection between linguistic stress and musical meter. Next, I consider sev…
The evolution of syncopation in twentieth-century American popular music
Several studies have found increases in syncopation within genres of twentieth-century popular music, but its evolution across the entire century has not been explored. In this study we use a new corpus of vocal melodies to examine trends in the use of syncopation. We find an increasing trend over the entire century. We also consider three ways of categorising syncopations into ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms, and find that the strong forms increase mo…
The inverse frequency effect: An exploratory study
Rare syntactic constructions show an especially strong tendency to be repeated, but some rare constructions exhibit this tendency much more strongly than others. The reasons for this variation are not well understood. This exploratory study examines five rare noun-phrase (NP) expansions in English: ( the rich ), ( a Bob Gates) , ( architect Julia Morgan ), ( the jobs data ), and ( home electronic equipment ). Repetition tendencies are very strong…
Melodic Pattern Repetition and Efficient Encoding: A Corpus Study
Melodies are full of repeated patterns of pitch, interval, and rhythm. It has been suggested that these repeated patterns aid the listener in creating an efficient encoding; this raises the possibility that compositional practice might have evolved to facilitate this process. I propose three specific hypotheses about compositional practice: 1) Repeated intervallic patterns tend to be metrically parallel, with each instance of the pattern falling …
Interval Patterns Facilitate Short-Term Memory Encoding of Auditory Pitch Sequences
This study investigated short-term memory recognition for melodies and the effect of patterns (repeated subsequences) within a melody. Participants (n = 54) completed a same/different task in which they listened to two consecutive melodies on each trial that could be identical or could differ by one pitch. Melodies could contain patterns based on pitch intervals or melodic contour or could have no pattern structure (i.e., no repeated subsequences…
Computer Science (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Music and Audio Processing (12 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Mathematics (10 works) · Music Technology and Sound Studies (9 works) · Musical (8 works) · Literature (7 works)