Since the adoption of equal temperament, leading theories and models of pitch space assume transpositional and enharmonic equivalence, thereby perpetuating an assumption that each key should sound the same. However, composers and musicians have often suggested that the presence of sharps (with their spiky angles) or flats (with their rounded curves) can contribute to an intuition that keys such F# Major and Gb Major have different affective properties, despite being enharmonically equivalent. This type of symbolic mapping between shapes and sounds has been extensively studied in linguistics. The bouba-kiki effect, for example, reveals a non-arbitrary association between rounded and spiky shapes and the sounds of the nonsense words bouba and kiki, respectively. Given the similarities between the bouba-kiki effect and the sharp-flat dichotomy, this research seeks to disentangle the relationship between textual affect and relative position in pitch space. More specifically, it analyses how the semantic and affective connotations of lyrics are systematically (re)distributed across pitch space. Ultimately, I argue for dynamic and contextual models of pitch spaces.

First, the results of my statistical analysis (2016) of the Montpellier Codex demonstrate how semantic associations can be systematically distributed across a repertoire’s pitch space.[1] Within this collection of thirteenth-century polyphony, the most common tonal center (F) co-occurs most frequently with tenor texts veritatem (truth) and omnes (all)—words whose semantic connotations imply greater stability than those that co-occur with less frequent tonal centers. Notably, themes of relative ascent and descent in the tenor texts map onto tonal trajectories by ascending and descending fifth, respectively. Second, a work in progress explores the potential insights that can be generated from applying this methodology to repertoires in digital archives (such as the Million Song Dataset and the Yale-Classical Archives Corpus).

[1] Garand-Sheridan, B. 2016, ‘Stigmergy in the Montpellier Codex: Soundscapes and Semantics’, paper presented at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 12-15 2016.