The problem of registral direction. Two contrasting models of Narmurean Theory.

J. FERNANDO ANTA

Cognition & Musical Arts

Associação Brasileira de Cognição e Artes Musicais

Lugar: Curitiba-Br; Año: 2006 vol. 1 p. 40 - 52

1809-6549

Mindful of the heuristic power of the concept, E. Narmour (1990, 1992) developed an extensive theory devoted to determine the role of expectancy in melodic cognition, the Implication-Realization (I-R) model. One of the central hypotheses of the model is that, through a bottom-up process of registral direction, small implicative intervals imply continuity in the same registral direction. This hypothesis has been refuted by several researches, and a two-factor I-R model was designed where that hypothesis is discarded. In the present research, a revised two-factor model which recover the original hypothesis of small implicative intervals implying the same direction was designed, and the ability of the original and the revised model's versions to describe preexistent data were contrasted. Results suggest that the registral direction principle of the I-R model can not be fully discarded, and that other factors should be considered to asses its actual predictive power. More generally, our findings inform that a fully compressive assessment of the bottom-up melodic expectancy processes proposed by narmourean theory is not accomplished yet.