Abstract
In this study we aim to understand listeners’ real-time processing of musical leitmotives. We probe participants’ memory for different leitmotives contained in a 10-min passage from the opera Siegfried by Richard Wagner, and use item response theory to estimate parameters for item difficulty and for participants’ individual recognition ability, as well as to construct novel measurement instruments from questionnaire-based tests. We investigate the relationship between model parameters and objective factors, finding that prior Wagner expertise and musical training were significant predictors of leitmotive recognition ability, while item difficulty is explained by chroma distance and perceived emotional content of the leitmotives.
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This work was supported by the Transforming Musicology project, AHRC AH/L006820/1.
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Müllensiefen, D., Baker, D., Rhodes, C., Crawford, T., Dreyfus, L. (2016). Recognition of Leitmotives in Richard Wagner’s Music: An Item Response Theory Approach. In: Wilhelm, A., Kestler, H. (eds) Analysis of Large and Complex Data. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25226-1_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25226-1_40
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