The Pursuit of Intensity

This chapter offers a phenomenological approach to the vamp’s form, arguing that gospel vamps emerge as repetition and intensification become musical conduits of belief. Beginning with an analytical essay on the live recording of Smallwood’s “Anthem of Praise,” the chapter elucidates the interpenetration of compositional strategy and religious expectation in the gospel tradition. Its second section interrogates the phenomenological implications of gospel’s participatory character and analyzes a performance of Brenda Joyce Moore’s “Perfect Praise” by Lecresia Campbell and the Houston Chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America in order to clarify the relationship between musical syntax and musical experience—“the gospel stance.” The third part of this chapter weaves together analytical vignettes and theories of repetition, groove, and teleology, theorizing the vamp’s “affective trajectory.” In so doing, this section pays special attention to tonal modulation, “inversion,” and textural accumulation, three techniques that pervade the gospel choral repertory. The chapter’s fourth move reflects on the practice of music analysis, using Kurt Carr’s “For Every Mountain” and Thomas Whitfield’s “Soon as I Get Home” to assert that the chapter’s concern with the way sound is organized provides a deeper understanding of the way musical sound structures believers’ traffic between the seen world and another. This interchange motivates the gospel song’s relentless pursuit of intensity, a quest that comes into particularly clear relief in the chapter’s concluding analysis of Smallwood’s “I Will Sing Praises.”

K Intonologickej Charakteristike Slabiky V Slovenčine

The paper analyses the intonation of syllables in broadcasted communication utterances (analyzing audio samples from radio programs Rádiožurnál and Literárna revue Rádia Slovensko) from theoretical point of view, while building upon the outcomes of the experimental phonetic research. Duration of the individual segments, intensity of sonantic cores including intensity of syllables and basic frequency F0 were analysed. Role of the analysed parameters in relation to the sonic formation of the text can be seen in exact graphs, which are cross-referenced by the measured values. The analysis has shown that an intonation differentiation of text-forming features in the broadcasted communication utterances is significantly influenced by tonal modulation (melody). Variation potential of time modulation is limited by faster pace of broadcasted texts. The strength modulation is demonstrably limited by signal standardization in radio broadcasting.

The effect of harmonization on cortical magnetic responses evoked by music of rapidly changing tonalities

The act of shifting from one key to another is termed tonal modulation, which has been used to articulate emotion expressions and formal structures in Western music. The present study recorded cortical activity to examine how the auditory-evoked magnetic fields are affected by harmonizing music of rapidly changing tonalities. Participants were asked to covertly sing the pitch names of well-learned modulating melodies along with the harmonized or unharmonized melodies. In our musical stimuli, three flats were added to the key signature for every four beats. Such a rapid modulation is achieved by a chromatic inflection of the submediant tone between the third and fourth beats. Tonal modulations with such chromatic progressions are termed chromatic modulations. A major finding was that the amplitude of N1m (neuromagnetic response at approximately 110 ms after the onset of a stimulus) was significantly reduced by harmonization only when a modulation occurred. We also observed that harmonization enhanced the P2m (neuromagnetic response at approximately 200 ms after the onset of a stimulus) amplitude. The results provide evidence of the impacts of harmonization on attention efforts and pitch categorization.