EVERY journal offers its own type of contribution to scholarship, defined by its mission, its scope, and the scholarly community that contributes to that journal. Vol. 20(2) of Empirical Musicology Review offers several contributions that highlight the ways in which this journal contributes to the empirical musicology community. The scholars included in this volume present and examine two new corpora, along with an article detailing two straightforward perceptual experiments exploring the effect of important characteristics of musical stimuli on emotion ratings.
The first of these corpus studies by Martin supplements the growing availability of popular music corpora with a 750-song collection of country music from 1949–2023. Martin’s investigation, focusing on the use of swing in country music, finds that swung divisions of the beat are less common than duple divisions with a significant decline over time, and that tempo is correlated with which metric level of subdivision the swing occurs at. Bell draws attention to the difficulty of operationalizing meter, tempo, and rhythm, focusing on how simplifications to enable research can obscure meaningful differences, such as the relationship of straight compound meter and uneven swung rhythms. In his commentary, Gardner examines the broader questions of corpus construction, building a representative sample, and the ways in which sampling biases and contextual cultural factors may influence the findings of a corpus study.
The second corpus study by Lee also augments popular music scholarship by presenting a new corpus of 105 Cantonese popular songs from 2000–2020. After outlining the characteristics of the new corpus, Lee goes on to examine the relationship between the lyrics and the melodic contours. Specifically, Lee finds that the melodic contours suggested by the Cantonese speech tones are not significantly correlated with the actual pitch contours of the melodies. In his commentary, Condit-Schultz recognizes the contribution of Lee’s article, praising his methodology. He also points out that the handling of melismatic passages is not sufficiently operationalized and offers his own analysis of the relatively uncommon melodic feature in the dataset.
Finally, Poudrier, Bell, Lee, and Sapp provide a pair of experiments designed to isolate the effect that two commonly-employed stimulus manipulations can have on participant ratings of emotion. In particular, the experiments test the effect on emotion ratings created by the variables of sound production (synthetic vs. naturalistic), instrumentation (piano vs. strings), and pitch order (musically syntactic vs. randomly-ordered). They find that all three variables impact listener ratings of emotion. In his commentary, Müllensiefen highlights the importance of examining these issues, noting that many studies uncritically employ such stimulus generation choices without understanding their impact. He ends by discussing potential moderations of the conclusions given the methodological limitations of the authors’ approach.
Taken together, these new contributions to empirical musicology fulfill EMR’s goal of providing an international forum where community members can engage in systematic and observation-based music studies with a disciplinarily open mind and a level of transparency that enables us to advance scholarship through debate and intellectual interchange.
