Music Colloquium: Featuring Prof. Johanna Devaney

Date/Time:
Date(s) - 03/02/2018
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location:
Rm. 3491 (Large Seminar Rm.), Graduate Center

Talk Title: Towards a model of melodic tuning in solo vocal performance: A case study of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria.’

About this Event:

This talk will describe a study of melodic vocal intonation practices. The study used a set of performances of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ by both undergraduate vocal majors and professional singers in order to assess the utility of modelling cent-wise deviation in semitone and whole tone tuning with a variety of global and local musical factors. Some of these factors were derived from Narmour’s Implication-Realization model and Lerdahl’s Tonal Pitch Space model, as well as the benefit of looking at larger-scales patterns in regards to the amount of consistency across multiple performances. Overall, there were significant effects found for some of the factors but, when taken in combination, these factors only some of the variance in the semitone and whole tone tunings. The study of the larger-scale patterns suggests that both local structural features, such as phrase beginnings and endings, and overarching trends, such as the return to the home key and the ending section of the piece, exhibit relatively greater tuning stability than other points in the piece.

About the Speaker:

Johanna Devaney is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Cognition at The Ohio State University and the specialty chief editor for the Digital Musicology section of Frontiers in Digital Humanities. This year she is on leave from OSU and teaching in the Music Technology program at NYU Steinhardt. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley. Devaney completed her PhD in music technology at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She also holds an MPhil degree in music theory from Columbia University, as well as an MA in composition from York University in Toronto.Her research seeks to understand how humans engage with music, primarily through performance, with a particular focus on intonation in the singing voice, and how computers can be used to model and augment our understanding of this engagement. This research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSRHC), the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FRQSC), the Google Faculty Research program, and, most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Digital Humanities program.

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