Aleksey Nikolsky

Braavo Enterprises · Research

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-6 for the paper "The commonalities between melodic line, geometric line, and environmental topography in traditional cultures of Northern Siberia: “landscape aesthetics” as a model of musical genesis." that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-6 for the paper "Non-octave Hypermode as a special form of tonal organization of Orthodox Christian plainsong." that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2" (20...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 14-21 for the paper "The Ancient Greek roots of Mediterranean Tonality and its Hemiolic Typology and their antithesis to Western tonality" that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Percep...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-13 for the paper "The Ancient Greek roots of Mediterranean Tonality and its Hemiolic Typology and their antithesis to Western tonality" that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Percept...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 22-26 for the paper "The Ancient Greek roots of Mediterranean Tonality and its Hemiolic Typology and their antithesis to Western tonality" that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Percep...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-21 for the paper "Correspondence Between Composition in Fine Arts and Music" that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links for most of the Audio e...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 38-45 for the paper "Correspondence Between Composition in Fine Arts and Music" that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links for most of the Audio...

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 22-37 for the paper "Correspondence Between Composition in Fine Arts and Music" that was originally published as an appendix to the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links for most of the Audio...

This is the zip archive of 2 audio examples for the appendix "A new method of modal multifactorial analysis of tonal organization in music" for the article "The pastoral origin of semiotically functional tonal organization of music." These examples are not listed in this article separately. The web-links for them were given in the figures' legends...

This is the zip archive of 7 audio examples for the appendix "A comparative structural analysis of musograms" for the article "The pastoral origin of semiotically functional tonal organization of music." These examples are not listed in this article separately. The web-links for them were given in the figures' legends and went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-25 for the book "Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach". The web-links in the pdf of this book went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 26-45 for the book "Music Cognition from Birth to Adolescence: A Structuralist Approach". The web-links in the pdf of this book went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of 3 Audio examples for the article "General typology of music texture in the evolutionary earliest forms of music. Commentary on "The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Language Evolution"". The web-links in the pdf of this book went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-19 for the chapter "Talking Jew's Harp" and its relation to vowel harmony". The web-links in the pdf of this chapter went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-56 for the article "The Overlooked Tradition of “Personal Music” and Its Place in the Evolution of Music." The web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-21 for the article "Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric." Most of the web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 43-56 for the article "Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric." Most of the web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 22-42 for the article "Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: Prehistoric." Most of the web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of 8 audio examples for the article "The pastoral origin of semiotically functional tonal organization of music." These examples are not listed in this article separately. The web-links for them were given in the figures' legends and went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 36-37 and a picture for the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 1-14 for the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 29-35 for the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This is the zip archive of the Audio examples Nos. 15-28 for the article "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2." The web-links in this article went dead Feb. 2023.

This article introduces a new method to analyze the tonal organization of music. This method uses “indefinite” intervallic typology instead of “definite.” The focus is on sounds with continuous frequency modulation and fluctuating pitch and time values rather than those with discrete time and frequency intervals that remain constant throughout a mu...

This document contains definitions and brief explanations of the musical terms that are most important for studying the evolution of music and comparative analysis of different music systems. The explanations are aimed at those researchers who do not have a strong background in music theory. All the terms are grouped into a few sections marked by h...

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evo...

This document contains definitions and brief explanations of the key musical terms that are most important for tonal organization in music and for the evolution of music. The explanations are aimed at those researchers who do not have a strong background in music theory. All the terms are grouped into a few sections marked by headings. The musicolo...

This book draws a new perspective on music as a special form of cognition that provides growing children with the means to mediate their emotional state and attitude to suit their physical and social environment. My conclusions are based on new evidence coming from: 1) musicological analysis of the original and spontaneous vocalizations by children...

Together with language, music is perhaps our most distinctive behavioral trait. As for language, different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in the species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evoluti...

Together with language, music is perhaps our most distinctive behavioral trait. Following the lead of paleolinguistic research, different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in the species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the theory of...

This paper introduces a new field of study - systematic geomusicology. I start by summarizing the correspondences between the properties of physical objects and the attributes of music structures. Then I present the evidence that cross-modality constitutes the characteristic trait of music that distinguishes it from other auditory stimuli. Cross-mo...

This study explores a novel approach to estimating a timeline of the evolution of music by establishing the commonalities between the principles of spatial organization of pictorial composition in works of visual art and the principles of tonal organization of music composition in music works. The cross-modal features of perception of music allow m...

This article completes the series dedicated to the methodology of research of the vocal system of Jaw Harp’s articulation within the surviving indigenous traditions of Siberia and the Far East. This last part introduces and examines the relation between the tonal organization of Jaw Harp music and the material of Jaw Harp’s making. The acoustic pro...

This is an overview of the available multi-disciplinary data on the history of “hemiolic” musical modes that use a melodic interval of the augmented second (e.g., Arabic and Turkish Hijaz). Such modes are extremely popular in Mediterranean, Balkan, and Central Asian countries, and originate from the Ancient Greek chromatic and enharmonic genera. He...

Here I identify a special scheme of tonal organization that so far has been overlooked despite its popularity in numerous forms of Orthodox Christian chant in Balkan, Near Eastern, and Caucasian countries as well as in Greece and Russia. Following Pashinian, I identify it as “non-octave hypermode.” It originates from Systema Metabolon in Ancient Gr...

This poster summarizes my research on the evolution of music as of 2020. It presents the general timeline of the succession of the main schemes of tonal organization from the late Lower Paleolithic to the 18th century.

Two decades ago, Wallin et al. (1999) opened a new page in the quest for the origins of music by integrating the methodologies and data coming from numerous disciplines. Our Research Topic "The Evolution of Music" updates this multidisciplinary approach by further advancing the fields defined by Wallin et al. and by introducing and specifying new f...

This article reviews the milestones in the formation of acoustic, musicological, and cultural attributes of tonal organization in indigenous traditions of jaw harp music across Northeastern Eurasia – as related to the timeline of its geographic distribution. Phonology of jaw harp playing is compared to singing and speaking in establishing traits sp...

This is a technical description of the procedure for analyzing the tonal organization of monophonic music (e.g., a song) in the majority of the world's known naturally occurring musics – analogous to the prosodic analysis of natural languages. Indefinite-in-pitch vocalizations of human infants and animal calls that express an emotional state can be...

Here I demonstrate the advantages of a new method of comparative multi-factorial analysis of 11 aspects of tonal organization of music, each of which constitutes an autonomous information channel. Patterns of expression, specific for each aspect are shown to interact and form structural configurations that characterize different types of music, fac...

This paper defines a new line of inquiry into when and how music obtained its capacity to express. Eleven principal expressive aspects of music each reserve specific structural patterns whose configuration signifies a certain affective state. This distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural l...

This paper presents a new line of inquiry into when and how music as a semiotic system was born. Eleven principal expressive aspects of music each contains specific structural patterns whose configuration signifies a certain affective state. This distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural la...

The pattern of acquisition of speech- and music-related skills during early stages of human infancy provides insight into the origins of language and music. Indiscriminate until shortly after birth, babies’ vocalizations gradually form acoustic features accompanied by behaviors that make it possible to distinguish attempts to speak from attempts to...

A very popular, yet barely researched, musical instrument is the Jew's Harp (JH). Its earliest archaeological occurrences date back to the early Bronze Age, but its simplest constructions, made of tree twigs and bark, along with its cross-cultural connection to shamanic beliefs and doxological status, suggest its prehistoric use. I outline a possib...

This report defines a new important field of inquiry for evolutionary musicology: the contribution of the physical properties of a specific material to the acoustic properties of a musical instrument made from that material. Since the timeline of human mastering of common manufacturing technologies is well established, it is possible to date the or...

The current scientific research into music has been skewed in favor of its frequency-based variety prevalent in the West. However, its alternative, the timbre-based music, native to the Northeast, seems to represent an earlier evolutionary development. Western researchers commonly interpret such timbre-based music as a “defective” rendition of freq...

Commentary to the article “How, where and when authentic traditions of Jaw Harp music of Siberia and the Far East have been forming. Part 1: Defining music, timbral music and Jaw Harp’s articulatory system”. Languages and folklore of indigenous peoples of Siberia. 2020. No.1, issue 39, DOI: 10.25205/2312-6337-2020-1-9-32. Edited by Eduard Alekseyev...

This article identifies the principal factors in the evolution of the tonal organization of traditional Jaw Harp music within the context of the chronology of its geographic distribution. The specificity of the vocal system of the Jaw Harp performance technique is analyzed in comparison with the vocal systems of verbal speech and singing. Based on...

This article is an attempt to further develop the theory of divergence of musical systems of east and west of Eurasia by defining characteristics of a special type of musical cognition prevalent in traditional musical cultures of the indigenous population of Siberia and Russian Far East. Its underlying trait is orientation on timbre (spectral conte...

This paper touches upon the very sensitive issue of “experimental music,” with its absence of conventions, as it is usually defined in relation to the 20th century music. The history of such music is traced. Afterwards, the focus shifts to its non-communicative design that seems to unite all the different techniques it implements, as well as ways t...

Much has been written on jazz, its explosive success at the beginning of its life journey, and its gradual gain of respectability as it aged – in exchange for a noticeable loss of popularity in the land of its birth. But very few researchers have touched upon the role that American copyright law has played in the development of jazz. This short boo...

This brief summary updates the definition of 3 main types of musical texture: heterophony, polyphony, and homophony - and explains why they are all unsuitable for the earliest phylogenetic forms of musicking, as described by the theory of musilanguage by Steven Brown. This theory, adopted by many scholars of the origins of music, models the evoluti...

This report is an attempt to formulate the principles of tonal organization of Jaw Harp music based on an overview of available research on the acoustic properties of Jaw Harp music of traditional musical cultures of the indigenous population of Siberia and Russian Far East. The underlying trait of such type of cognition is its orientation on timbr...

This paper presents a new method for analyzing the tonal organization of Jaw Harp music. Ten hypothetical statements were tested by the new procedure of identifying the "timbral classes" in sound recordings of Jaw Harp music. Five acoustic parameters were defined: 1) intensity of the lowest 11 harmonics (representing the "harmonic mode"), 2) the ex...

This is a draft for a long-awaited method of musicological analysis of music, designed for identification, classification, and interpretation of music structures found in recordings of solo musicking within any form of traditional music. This includes but is not limited to solo songs, instrumental solos, and leading parts (melody) in a monodic comp...

This summary briefly presents the classification system employed by the ethnomusicologists of former Soviet Union and modern independent states formed after its fallout. The value of this system is that it has been designed by collective efforts of thousands of musicologists who possessed both, etic and emic expertise in the analysis of music – and...

Organological evidence provides an important data for reconstruction of tonal organization in prehistoric music that most researchers deem forever unknown. Viktor Beliayev, an expert in tuning of Eurasian folk instruments, stressed that musical instruments with finger-holes and frets preserve historical stages in the development of melody by fixing...

This is a sequel to Evolution of Tonal Organization, Part-1. It completes the line of historic development of principal methods of tonal organization from Bronze Age to Western and Near- and Far-Eastern civilizations of the 17th century AD. I base my investigation on the premise that organization of sounds in music reflects the same degree of sop...

Against the common view of many ethnomusicologists, the legacy of chromatic Ancient Greek music survives in the modern practice of liturgical Near Eastern monody. Here I demonstrate how the supplication “B’hutho”, composed by St. Ephraim (306-373) and captured in the recording of the tradition of Tur Abdin that dates back to the 5th century, carrie...

This is the archive of 8 supplemental files for the article: "Evolution of Tonal Organization in Music Optimizes Neural Mechanisms in Symbolic Encoding of Perceptual Reality. Part-2: Ancient to Seventeenth Century"

Many ethnomusicologists believe that chromatic organization characterizes only Western classical music and distinguishes it from any non-Western tradition as well as from indigenous Western folk music. This technical paper proves otherwise: with the help of modern computer technology, it examines the tonal organization in 4 music excerpts and ident...

This paper lays out the foundation for a new semiotics of music - that is in line with the most up-to-date research on neurophysiology of emotion. It shows how the traditional view of music as a “language of emotions,” which prevailed up until the 20th century, can indeed hold true in relation to perception of music. This is the English translation...

This is a summary of available evidence collected from multiple sources to support the idea that multimodal diatonic organization of Mesopotamian music that emerged in urban culture at the end of the 3rd millennium BC stood in opposition to the previously existing heptatonic and pentatonic schemes, cultivated in folk village culture. The new temple...

Four audio clips with sonograms are used to demonstrate, respectively: 1) folk oligotonal "natural" chromatic mode; 2) folk multitonal "natural" chromatic mode; 3) folk mesotonal chromatic mode with microtonal alterations; 4) authored MPS mixochromatic mode with chromatic alterations (Debussy's Syrinx). The acoustic-morphological analysis is used t...

To support the claim of the survival of Ancient Greek chromatic/enharmonic tradition, acoustic-morphological analysis of an audio clip of the Syriac Chant is used to demonstrate the similarity of modal organization between the Ancient Greek chromatic music and modern day Near Eastern hemiolic music. This analysis highlights a case where the music t...

Here I identify a special scheme of tonal organization that so far has been overlooked despite its popularity in numerous forms of Orthodox Christian chant in Balkan, Near Eastern, and Caucasian countries as well as in Greece and Russia. Following Pashinian, I identify it as “non-octave hypermode.” It originates from Systema Metabolon in Ancient Gr...

This paper overviews the ancient doctrine of ethos and establishes that its conceptualization characterizes the world’s greatest Bronze Age civilizations. Musical modes of the diatonic music systems were assigned to specific ethea by means of public conventions within the Ancient Greek and Babylonian cultures. The latter prototyped the semiotic sys...

This is an overview of the available multi-disciplinary data on the history of “hemiolic” musical modes that use a melodic interval of the augmented second (i.e., Arabic and Turkish Hijaz). Such modes are extremely popular in Mediterranean, Balkan, and Central Asian countries, and originate from the Ancient Greek chromatic and enharmonic genera. He...

This paper introduces a new field of study - systematic geomusicology. I start by summarizing the correspondences between the properties of physical objects and the attributes of music structures. Then I present the evidence that cross-modality constitutes the characteristic trait of music that distinguishes it from other auditory stimuli. Cross-mo...

This report outlines the commonalities in the structural arrangement of pictorial composition in spatial visual art, and auditory composition in the temporal art of music – traced from Paleolithic rock art, and the corresponding typical forms of music of surviving hunter/gatherer societies up to the Baroque art of Western civilization. Quite thorou...

This is a tabulated outline of 12 principal schemes of tonal organization. It reflects how they differ from each other in regard to the structural traits of their pitch set, the pitch set categorization, definition of their pitch and interval classes, the categorization of their interval classes, gradations of stability and instability (tension and...

This is a general summary of the evolution of tonal organization hypothesized based on the totality of the available multidisciplinary data. In addition to the modern Western tonality, 13 schemes of tonal organization, from Pre-mode to Hemiolic mode, are briefly characterized in their chronological progression and dated based on available evidence....

This paper reveals the way in which musical pitch works as a peculiar form of cognition that reflects upon the organization of the surrounding world as perceived by majority of music users within a socio-cultural formation. The evidence from music theory, ethnography, archeology, organology, anthropology, psychoacoustics, and evolutionary biology i...

This summary briefly presents the classification system employed by the ethnomusicologists of the former Soviet Union and modern independent states formed after its fallout. Its principal advantage over the approach of Western ethnomusicology is the categorization of the intervallic typology and the identification of functions of musical intonation...