Keuler Jenõ

Musical Imagery and Experiences of Musical Tensions
Jenõ Keuler

The functioning of the musical imagination can be connected with many kinds of musical activity. Depending on this, musical images are some times more, other times less saturated with musical tensions. There exist many kinds of tensions that must be revealed systematically. Auditory perception is an initial source at the rise of auditory images thus the task of revealing musical tensions must begin with a scrutiny of perception. Diverse types are distinguishable, e.g. sensory tensions and the ones arising from acts of perception. Experiences connected to sensory tensions are influenced by the immediate effects of sounds, and by the qualitative similarity of sound features. Acts of perception are influenced by the temporal orderliness of the sound connections. Depending on the case whether the focus of attention is directed to the qualitative or to the effective side of the connections, two different strategies of perception are distinguishable, an observing and an undergoing one.
During perception, memory images arise permanently. They preserve information submitted to diverse kinds of abstraction. They are, however, complex images, dominated by the most important information depending on the strategy of the perception. Besides memory images target images of expectancy arise during perception as well. Abstractions can come about also in this respect. Acts of abstraction can be carried out also during evocation of images. If the aim of evocation is a recollection of a musical experience, images called forth can function as an ideal for a musical performance.

Musical Practice and Theory in Relation to the Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research in Musicology
Jenõ Keuler

Music-theoretical rules are not objective laws. Some music-theoretical problems (e.g. effect of tone system or enharmonic phenomena) may be based on deterministic connections. Diverse sound features require diverse generative time for springing into existence. Unrevealed deterministic connections should be investigated by means of exact sciences to give new viewpoints for the makers of cognitive models.

Research into Musical System Planes and System Levels
Jenõ Keuler

Systematic musicology makes its scientific investigations in co-operation with many different sciences, since music functions as a complex system. Each domain of research investigates some plane and level of this complex system. Regarding the harmonization of research work and integration of scientific results, laws revealed by the universal theory of systems may be useful for systematic musicology.
In examining of the transmission, music as a system functioning in the connection of sounds and man by way of effects and information the most important task is to reveal what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for the sounding processes, and for the human mental state to qualify sound processes as music.
From this point of view the following areas of research work may be considered as significant:
1. Research of the pictorial appearance of sound phenomena. Revealing the system of the sounding features of sound quality. (Empiric and psychoacoustic examinations of pitch, timbre, volume, duration, spaciousness and their interrelations.)
2. Research of the immediate (sensorial) effect of sound phenomena. Revealing the dependence of effects and/or effect changes upon the sounding features of sound quality and their changes. (Empirical and psycho-physiological examinations.)
3. Research of human perception listening to sound processes under conditions of diverse strategies of perception. (Objective observation, subjective feeling of effects and tensions.)
4. Research into the influence of the orderliness of sounding features and effecting properties of sounds on perceptual strategies and experiences. Examination of the role of sound systems and rhythm systems.
5. Research of the diverse levels of decoding processes during perception of sound events or musical happening, in respect of pragmatics, syntax and semantics.
6. Research work examining active music making, as a process of operations made on sound features, sound effects, time durations, kinds of order, decoding actions and experiences.
The paper presents concrete examples for the research areas treated above. Questions are solved regarding how interrelations of system-theoretical concepts such as system-element-structure-function relate to music-theoretical notions. Lessons are drawn from empiric research enlightening the connections of sounding features and effecting properties of sounds. Problems of perception and perceptual strategies are discussed from the view-point of musical theory and semiotics. Proposals are made for interdisciplinary investigations on the basis of questions formerly searched empirically.