Relationship+between+Timbre,+Rhythm,+Tempo+and+Tonality

Bryan Oczkowski
 * Relationship Among Timbre, Rhythm, Tempo, and Tonality **

I am interested in the relationship between timbre, tonality, and rhythm tempo that make up a musical theme. Would playing something in a minor key sound fitting if played with a fast, upbeat, rhythm and played on a kazoo? So far, I have not found any studies on the relationship of all four and it's perception as a whole. I did find some studies that looked into each one independently. I started by investigating the emotional effects of these elements as a starting point before forming a hypothesis about the role of each in the perception of a them. While most of my findings deal with music and it's relationship to emotion, I'm not searching for the answer to questions like "does playing a major key bring out happy emotions" but I think it a place to start since it classifies musical elements with adjectives that can then be combined and tested


 * Tempo and Mode:**

Kate Hevner seams to be doing a lot of studies in the relationship between emotion and the different elements of music. Her studies concluded that listeners of fast tempo perceived the sound as happy, and slower tempos were perceived as dreamy. low pitches were perceived as sad and high pitches as graceful. She also did studies on Major and minor keys, with results that you probably already guessed, Major keys seam to be associated with happy(or positive) emotions, while minor keys tended to be associated with sad and dreamy feelings. To me, her studies seam to be a good starting point for research on my introductory question. By using combinations of emotions from the different elements of music and testing themes made from elements that are associated with contradictory emotions. Link: [|the affective value of pitch and tempo in music]

Additoinal link: [|A study on the age children gather emotional information from tempo and mode:]


 * Timbre**

Makris and Mullet's paper "Judging the Pleasantness of Contour-Rhythm-Pitch-Timbre Musical Combination" discusses an experiment where subjects judged timbre to the overall pleasantness of a musical theme. Their research drew them to the conclusion, Quoting directly from the paper, "The more a theme is liked, the more the instrument factor has an effect on it's liking".

I came across a pdf document titled "Effects of a Change in Instrumentation on the Recognition of Musical Materials". This article references a study done by Crowder in 1989(That I could not find for free). The results of Crowders studies were that it takes longer for both musicians and non musicians to determine if two pitches are the same on when played on different instruments versus the same instrument. The results of the "Effects of a Change.." study suggest that musicians are more aware of timbre qualities of recorded music than non-musicians. If timbre can retard the ability to recongize pitches, then timbre does have an effect on how music is perceived. Can timbre make some pitches sound "wrong" or "right"?

Link: [|Judging the Pleasantness of Contour-Rhythm-Pitch-Timbre Musical Combinations] Link: [|Effects of a Change in Instrumentation on the Recognition of Musical Material]

This was one of the harder subjects to find solid research on. I did run into a few pages regarding the effects of rhythm on plants(Rock music killing plants is hard to believe, but would be awesome if true!) Makris and Mullet did have some findings about Rhythm. They cite studies that say that subjects characterize complex rhythms with different durations in the tones as being happy, playing different rhythmic patterns as being exciting and simple rhythms as being sad. This paper also has information on relationship between pitch and rhythm. Do we process rhythm and pitch separately or do we hear it as one thing?
 * Rhythm**

The findings in Makris and Mullets study show that melodic contour, rhythm, pitch and timbre all contribute to the perceived pleasantness of a musical theme. The study did not find any evidence of a relationship between the four elements but did show that each element did have a contribution to the precieved 'pleasantness' of a musical theme. I Suppose I'm looking at two, almost seperate beasts, the first being the relationship of any given two of the musical elements. The second is the overall pleasantness of a musical theme based on the context of all the elements fitting. The question I'm trying to find is If a theme was composed based on a sad rhythm, tempo, key, timbre, would the ultimate sad song be written? If one of those elements where changed with something categorized as 'happy' would it throw the whole theme off and sound un-natural ?
 * Conclusions/Beginnings**