It is an empirically assumed fact that some of the music written in the last decades – particularly the commonly called modern classical – poses, on the aesthetic level, major difficulties for the common listener, and that some of these compositions remain largely misunderstood by most of the public, valued only by a restricted group of specialized listeners. However, it remains to understand which peculiar aspects exert either repulsion or attraction on the public, and consequently, how certain types of music structures are sensorially grasped by people. The present study is based on the auditory reactions of a group of human subjects to a set of musical excerpts extracted from orchestral compositions by composers such as Penderecki, Ligeti, Xenákis, Georg Haas, or Peter Ruzicka. The multimodal approach used in this study is based on sensory aspects from the auditory, visual, tactile, and emotional domains, articulated through semantic descriptors. Thus, it is intended to provide a renewed perspective on how listeners, in general, apprehend certain musical structures from modern orchestral music. The study will mostly focus on textural aspects such as “sound masses”, sound continuums, but also timbres and register layers, extracted from orchestral works written in about the last fifty years. This paper will expose the analysis of data extracted from an online survey applied to about fifty subjects – of several age groups, levels of education, and musical knowledge – drawing conclusions about how people listen to and perceive the meanings in the orchestral music created by the aforementioned

Authors:
Luís Raimundo, Center for the Sociology & Aesthetics of Music (CESEM) & Foundation for the Sciences and Technologies (FCT), Portugal
Ricardo Mestre, University of Algarve & Aberta University, Center of Investigation in Arts and Communication (CIAC), Portugal

About the Presenter(s)
Luís Raimundo is an integrated researcher at CESEM, NOVA University - Portugal). Main interests: late orchestral music (20th and 21st centuries); Musical Texture, Musical Theory & Analysis. Other interests: 19th-Century Opera; Musical Composition.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu%C3%ADs-raimundo-58231823a/

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Luis-Miguel-Da-Raimundo

Additional website of interest
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1712-6358

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