Eric Keller, Prof. hon. emeritus, Université de Lausanne
BachsUncannyIntuition.pptx (PowerPoint)
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Bach’s Uncanny Intuition (PDF)
John Sebastian Bach wrote two different types of music. On the one hand, he wrote many exceptional pieces of "general music". His compositions are numerous (tot. 1128), as was also the grand variety of music that he presented.
On the other hand, he wrote certain short pieces that seemed to be ordered somehow. Toward the end of his life he had supervisory and teaching in a prestigious live-in choir in Leipzig. It was likely that this last section of his life, he authored these music pieces.
We wished to study J.S. Bach's emotional composition as it was reflected in this teaching corpus. An IBM research group in San Jose in California argued that “the majority of emotions can be best explained in terms of the arousal and valence divisions using the two-dimensional model”, i.e. the Circumplex Model.
An analysis package called "Vokaturi" calculates the parameters of the Circumplex Model1. This package2 permits to identify four main levels (happiness, sadness, anger and fear) in any speech or music data base. I linked Bach's melodies to this analysis system, and a numerical estimation of the degree of happiness, sadness, anger and fear were produced.
The following are the tendencies that we identified in J.S. Bach's teaching corpus:
Happiness: His melody sequences show a multi-step degradation from happiness to sad.
Sadness: In the initial set, unusually slow and highly marked melodies are in evidence, in the second condition, his enunciation is rising or emphatic, in the third condition, strong-weak syncopations are heard, and in the final sequence, a complex pattern is presented.
Anger: Three of the four conditions are exceptionally rapid and threatening.
We conclude that the Vokaturi examination has documented a systematic use of certain distinctions by J.S. Bach. Furthermore, a number of J.S. Bach's previously unsuspected interests have been brought to the fore in this study.
1 Seemo: A Computational Approach to See Emotions. Conference Paper · April 2018