INVESTIGADORES
TREVISAN Marcos Alberto
artículos
Título:
A composition algorithm based on crossmodal taste-music correspondences
Autor/es:
B. MESZ; M. SIGMAN; M. A. TREVISAN
Revista:
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
Editorial:
FRONTIERS RES FOUND
Referencias:
Año: 2012 vol. 6 p. 1 - 6
ISSN:
1662-5161
Resumen:
While there is broad consensus about the structural similarities between
language and music, comparably less attention has been devoted to
semantic correspondences between these two ubiquitous manifestations of
human culture. We have investigated the relations between music and a
narrow and bounded domain of semantics: the words and concepts referring
to taste sensations. In a recent work, we found that taste words were
consistently mapped to musical parameters. Bitter is associated with
low-pitched and continuous music (legato), salty is characterized by silences between notes (staccato), sour is high pitched, dissonant and fast and sweet is consonant, slow and soft (Mesz et al., 2011).
Here we extended these ideas, in a synergistic dialog between music and
science, investigating whether music can be algorithmically generated
from taste-words. We developed and implemented an algorithm that
exploits a large corpus of classic and popular songs. New musical pieces
were produced by choosing fragments from the corpus and modifying them
to minimize their distance to the region in musical space that
characterizes each taste. In order to test the capability of the
produced music to elicit significant associations with the different
tastes, musical pieces were produced and judged by a group of
non-musicians. Results showed that participants could decode well above
chance the taste-word of the composition. We also discuss how our
findings can be expressed in a performance bridging music and cognitive
science.