Science can uncover neural mechanisms by looking at the work of artists. The ingenuity of a titan of classical music, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), in combining all the sensory modalities into a polyphony of aesthetical experience, and his creation of a chord based on fourths rather than the conventional thirds are proposed as putative points of departure for insight, in ...

This study evaluated the relationship between primitive and scheme-driven grouping (A. S. Bregman, 1990) by comparing the ability of different listeners to detect single note changes in 3-voice musical compositions. Primitive grouping was manipulated by the use of 2 distinctly different compositional styles (homophony and polyphony). The effects of scheme-driven processes were tested by compari...

The present study sets out to investigate the narrator’s textual position in Grass’s The Tin Drum. Although authorial self-dramatization through affinities with one or more characters in the work is undeniable, this study mainly concentrates on the inner interpenetrations of heteroglot utterances as uttered by an unreliable first-person narrator, Oskar Matzerath, in the light of the Bakhtinian ...

A score-following algorithm for polyphonic MIDI performances is presented that can handle performance mistakes, ornaments, desynchronized voices, arbitrary repeats and skips. The algorithm is derived from a stochastic performance model based on hidden Markov model (HMM), and we review the recent development of model construction. In this paper, the model is further extended to capture the multi...

I describe the experience of an acute loss of ability to read music and play the piano accurately and expressively following an embolic infarct of the right angular and supramarginal gyri in a setting of chronic migraine. Other parietal deficits included a small visual field defect, visual hallucinations, prosopagnosia, topographical disorientation, disturbance of perception of velocity of movi...