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Mozart's Modular Minuet Machine

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... The piece included two tables of numbers (one for minuets and one for polonaises) that depending on the current bar number (and the result of throwing the dice) would direct the player to a card from a set included in the back, each one with notated fragments of music [17]. Similarly, a work attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (a fact disputed by some researchers [19]) was published as a pamphlet in 1792. It is usually referred as Musikalisches Würfelspiel K. ...
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"Ecstasy / Light / Inertia" represents an innovative exploration into the realm of gamified music experiences. Created within a 3D virtual environment, this project incorporates elements of postmodern philosophy, Nordic nature, modernist architecture, and high-fidelity spatial audio technology. It offers a unique mode of engagement with new music through narrative-based interaction and navigation, intending to replace traditional concert settings or sound art galleries with an immersive digital experience. The project features a series of original music compositions, intricately woven into beautifully crafted virtual spaces, presenting an innovative attempt to democratize the accessibility to transformative sound-focused art forms. The core of this dissertation revolves around the detailed analysis of the conception, evolution, and realization of "Ecstasy / Light / Inertia". It delves deep into the exploration of the artistic choices, methodologies, narrative threads, and philosophical facets that contribute to this distinctive gamified experience. Integral to this study are the music compositions that serve not merely as a backdrop, but as a crucial part of the overall project, underpinning the journey and narrative progression within the gamified environment. This dissertation also contemplates the potential of game engine environments in disseminating new music, particularly after a global pandemic that necessitated a reconsideration of physical presence for enjoying various sound-focused art forms. It further investigates the potential of gamification in music and the integration of philosophical elements into the narrative fabric of the project. Finally, it outlines future directions and concludes with reflections on the lessons learned and the potential impact of "Ecstasy / Light / Inertia" on the evolution of sound art in the digital era.
... The use of Classical-era repertoire (e.g., Mozart, Haydn, early Beethoven) in several structural intervention studies raises another granular-yet potentially decisive-issue regarding generalizability: some kinds of music better lend themselves to reordering than others. Eighteenth-century sonata movements often consist of modular, tonally closed sections; indeed, some forms can rather famously be assembled using chance procedures (for a discussion of ''musical dice games'' see Hedges, 1978;Zaslaw, 2005). Because we would like to know if listeners are sensitive to structural interventions in musical styles that do not readily lend themselves to the mixing and matching of interior sections, we chose a continuous (throughcomposed) Bach keyboard prelude. ...
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While previous research has raised doubts about the ability of listeners to perceive large-scale musical form, we hypothesize that untrained and unfamiliar listeners can, indeed, recognize structure when cognitive form judgments (coherence and predictability) are differentiated from enjoyment ratings (pleasantness, interest, and desire to hear again). In a between-groups experiment, listeners (n = 125) were randomly assigned to hear one of four versions of Bach’s Prelude in C minor from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier: 1) the original; 2) a mildly scrambled one in which two larger sections were switched; 3) a highly scrambled one; and 4) a randomized one. Significant differences were observed between versions in ratings of coherence and predictability, but not in ratings of pleasantness, interest, or desire to hear again. Individuals who had played the piece before could also explicitly identify structural intervention. It was assumed that relative incoherence would result in higher complexity and, thus, be reflected in longer retrospective duration estimates; however, estimates did not differ between stimuli. These results suggest that untrained listeners can evaluate global form, independently of their level of familiarity with a musical piece, while also suggesting that awareness of incoherence does not always correspond with decreased enjoyment.
Article
Written in the form and style of the popular “novel of circulation” (or “it-narrative”), this article examines and provides an experience of the performance practices of eighteenth-century amateur music. It tells the typically complex history of a minor hit, “Come Haste to the Wedding,” a tune that was sung in a 1760s Drury Lane pantomime, rewritten as a rondeau for London publishers, danced as a jig in Irish and Scottish halls, transcribed as a fiddle tune by a captain in the Continental Army, circulated as a flute or guitar melody as far abroad as Calcutta, and collected by a young loyalist in Charleston, South Carolina. I argue that common to all these versions—and among many similar and neglected amateur genres, including sectional variation sets and dance collections—was the practice of desultory reading. The term “desultory” itself comes from the period, and the practice suggested here extrapolates from evidence of readers' experience of approaching literature and periodicals out of order. Many musical texts asked readers to skip between pages and sections, rondeaux chief among them but also instructional treatises. Some of those same treatises, by C. P. E. Bach (1753–62) and Quantz (1752), hint at desultory reading in subtle admonitions. Through a lively engagement with period style, this article outlines a new definition of music reading informed by eighteenth-century language and practical context, a definition attuned to the ocular and physical habits of the era's most plentiful practitioners: domestic performers of domestic music.
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