THE METAPHOR OF SWEETNESS IN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN MUSIC LISTENING

Abstract

HISTORICAL LISTENING HAS LONG BEEN A TOPIC OF interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700-present). In the first study of its kind, this research compared a model of medieval perceptions of ''sweetness'' based on writings of medieval music theorists with modern day listeners' aesthetic responses. Responses were collected through two experiments. In an implicit associations experiment, participants were primed with a more or less consonant musical excerpt, then presented with a sweet or bitter target word, or a non-word, on which to make lexical decisions. In the explicit ass..