Perceptions of More Complete Musical Compositions: An Exploratory Study

This study describes a methodology for documenting listeners' conceptions of musical structure. The method uses digital technologies that allows precise identification of musical structure, together with a word-processing feature that allows the researcher to capture listeners' interpretations of the piece. In the study, inexperienced listeners (N = 19) and experienced listeners (N = 13) were asked to identify structural events when listening to an intact musical example (last movement, Symphony No. 34 in C major, K. 338 by Mozart). The data collected using this method showed that inexperienced listeners were significantly poorer than the experienced listeners at recognising formal structural events. Most experienced listeners used perceptual attributes or musical labels to describe the structural units that they had identified; many of the inexperienced listeners did not. Eight inexperienced listeners reported psychoacoustic labels, two reported affective labels, four reported sporadic imagery and five reported sustained action involving imagined characters. Thus, this method demonstrated its ability to capture data at each of Umemoto's (1990) four dimensions for analysing compositions.