The property of sounding like music

Usage examples of musicality.

The procedure for calculating musicality would be a simulation of the operation of those parts of the brain that play a role in perceiving music.

I analysed many songs, attempting to assign 2D and 3D representations to the intervals that occurred in each song, but I was not able to find any rule for assignment that made the occurrence of a spiral-to-loop mapping depend on the musicality of the tune.

But eventually we have to develop a specific hypothesis about what musicality is: what it means, and how the brain perceives it.

To use a term that I am going to use a lot throughout this book, would the Martian scientist be able to calculate the musicality of music?

The predictive algorithm accepts as input any music, or non-music, and tells what the musicality of that input is, and predicts its effect on the human listener.

In as much as music does not appear to be part of a biological digital security system, there is no particular reason to suppose that an algorithm for the evaluation of musicality could not be converted into an algorithm for generating music with a high level of musicality.

The theory should specify an algorithm for calculating the musicality of music, possibly parameterised for variations in musical taste.

I implicitly assumed that there existed some measure of musicality that was equal for all listeners.

In developing my own theory of music I have decided to take what might be called the strong approach, and I assume that in the first instance a theory of music should be capable of explaining all observed features of music, whether or not those features are found across all cultures, as long as it can be established that the features contribute substantially to the musicality of music for a substantial number of listeners.

In proper instruments the shape will vary according to elapsed time, frequency and amplitude in a manner which is pleasing to the ear and which contributes to the musicality of the music.

This will follow from the general nature of the final theory developed in Chapter 14, where musicality is defined as a secondary feature of many different aspects of speech perception.

In later chapters, as I present my theory of music, we will have reason to speculate on the existence and purpose of a number of distinct tono-topic cortical maps, and on the relationship between perceived musicality and the patterns of neural activity in those maps.

Music is a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality, and musicality is a perceived attribute of speech.

So if speech perception includes these various extra perceptions, maybe the perception of musicality is yet another aspect of speech perception.

The perceived musicality of speech represents useful information about the speech being listened to.