Grouping in Music, Poetry, and Narrative, and the Triggering of Epiphany

Grouping in music, poetry, and narrative, and the triggering of epiphany

Nigel Fabb

Sydney Musicology Colloquium. 9 March 2016, 4.15pm.

Many aspects of cognition are organized hierarchically (Cohen 2000), with elements at one level organized into elements at a higher level, sometimes grouped and sometimes not (cf. Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983 on grouping vs. metrical structure). Hierarchical grouping operates in working memory (Baddeley 2012), the perceptual segmentation of events (Zacks and Tversky 2001), and the organization of narrative (Cohn et al 2014), as well as linguistic constituency. Pioneering work on hierarchical grouping in aesthetics has come from music theory/psychology; in this talk I generalize ideas from music to literature, and suggesting common psychological and aesthetic principles.

In hierarchical grouping, in general groups on the same level are adjacent, with no gaps between them, and no overlap; and higher level groups strictly contain lower level groups. However, in practice, there are various ways in which these rules for grouping can be violated, particularly when the grouping is assigned by the hearing/reading/viewing subject rather than being an objective fact. Different cues might imply a group’s boundaries in different places. Furthermore, groups and hierarchies of different kinds can interact, either conforming to one another's structure or not (cf. Lerdahl and Jackendoff on phase relations between grouping and metrical structure in music). I illustrate grouping by discussing the 'line' as the fundamental grouping in poetry, drawing on the metrical theory of Fabb and Halle (2008), and the proposal in Fabb (2015) that the line fits as a whole into working memory. The line as a grouping is different from syntactic grouping and from performative (prosodic) grouping.

I then turn to my current research project, which seeks a psychological explanation for how epiphanic experiences might be triggered by literary-linguistic form. 'Epiphany' here is used to describe a family of triggered experiences which are characteristically momentary, emotionally intense, and can have an odd epistemic aspect (an ineffable knowing). The ‘epiphanies’ family includes the sublime, awe, ecstasy, peak experience, etc. There has been more psychological work on 'epiphanies' triggered by music than those from any other source; it includes the extensive work on musical chills (e.g., Huron (2006), along with Gabrielsson's (2011) 'strong experiences in music'.

I propose that epiphanies may be triggered in the overlaps or gaps between events, when rules of event segmentation are violated, and more generally that grouping violations can help trigger epiphany. I argue that this is true for poetry and narrative, and that it might have broader applications (perhaps also to music). Grouping violations can be resolved by perceiving 'liminal events’ at the gaps or overlaps between events, and I note that narrative epiphanies are similarly often in liminal spaces (the beach, window, doorway, stairs, etc). I conclude that epiphanies are surprising, and seek an explanation in terms of predictive processing and expectation, where again the psychology of music has led the way (Meyer 1956, Huron 2006, Schaefer et al 2013).

References

Baddeley, Alan 2012. Working memory: theories, models, and controversies, Annu. Rev. Psychol. 63: 1–29

Cohen, Gillian 2000. Hierarchical models in cognition: Do they have psychological reality? European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 12, 1-36.

Cohn, Neil, Ray Jackendoff, Phillip J. Holcomb and Gina R. Kuperberg, 2014 The grammar of visual narrative: Neural evidence for constituent structure in sequential image comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 64, pp.63-70

Fabb, Nigel 2015. What is Poetry? Language and Memory in the Poems of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fabb, Nigel and Morris Halle 2008. Meter in poetry: a new theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gabrielsson, Alf. 2011. Strong experiences with music. Music is much more than just music. Translated by Rod Bradbury. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Huron, David 2006. Sweet anticipation: Music and the psychology of expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Meyer, Leonard B. (1956). Emotion and meaning in music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Schaefer, Rebecca S., Katie Overy, and Peter Nelson. 2013. Affect and non-uniform characteristics of predictive processing in musical behaviour. The Behavioral and brain sciences. 36(3), 226-7

Zacks, Jeffrey M. and Barbara Tversky 2001. Event Structure in Perception and Conception. Psychological Bulletin, 2001, Vol.127(1), pp.3-21