In everyday life, we frequently alternate between performing discrete and rhythmic movements. When performing a periodic movement, two distinct movement types can be distinguished: highly harmonic vs. discrete-like. The harmonicity of the movement is used to classify it as one or the other. We asked: (1) whether the frequency at which a periodic movement is performed affects the harmonicity of ...

When musical notes are combined to make a chord, the closeness of fit of the combined spectrum to a single harmonic series (the 'harmonicity' of the chord) predicts the perceived consonance (how pleasant and stable the chord sounds; McDermott, Lehr, & Oxenham, 2010). The distinction between consonance and dissonance is central to Western musical form. Harmonicity is represented in the temporal ...

In this paper, we address the equivalence of the analytic and probabilistic notions of harmonicity in the context of general symmetric Hunt processes on locally compact separable metric spaces. Extensions to general symmetric right processes on Lusin spaces including infinite dimensional spaces are mentioned at the end of this paper. AMS 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 60J45, 3...

Tonal affinity is the perceived goodness of fit of successive tones. It is important because a preference for certain intervals over others would likely influence preferences for, and prevalences of, “higher-order” musical structures such as scales and chord progressions. We hypothesize that two psychoacoustic (spectral) factors—harmonicity and spectral pitch similarity—have an impact on affini...

Periodicity is commonly found in many physical phenomena. This paper describes the notion of instantaneous frequency amplitude spectrum (IFAS) which originally developed in the context of time-frequency signal analysis. The IFAS provides better the harmonic structure representation of speech signal than the short time Fourier transform (STFT) amplitude spectrum. We define harmonicity measure as...

Tonal affinity is the perceived goodness of fit of successive tones. It is important because a preference for certain intervals over others would likely influence preferences for, and prevalences of, “higher-order” musical structures such as scales and chord progressions. We hypothesize that two psychoacoustic (spectral) factors—harmonicity and spectral pitch similarity—have an impact on affini...

we study the notion of harmonicity in the sense of symplectic geometry, and investigate the geometric properties of harmonic thom forms and distributional thom currents, dual to different types of submanifolds. we show that the harmonic thom form associated to a symplectic submanifold is nowhere vanishing. we also construct symplectic smoothing operators which preserve the harmonicity of distri...

Previous empirical studies have suggested that the perceived consonance/dissonance (C/D) of a musical chord depends on its psychoacoustic smoothness (lack roughness), spectral harmonicity (perceptual fusion), and/or familiarity. We tested dependence C/D and in hearing experiment included all 19 possible trichords pitch-class set theory. In each trial, listener heard (duration: 300 or 500 ms) ra...

In this paper we extend the construction of random walks with a prescribed Poisson boundary found in [CM04] to the case of measures in the class of a generalized Gibbs state. The price for dropping the α-quasiconformal assumptions is that we must restrict our attention to CAT(−κ) groups. Apart from the new estimates required, we prove a new approximation scheme to provide a positive basis for p...