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Salience in works of phonography

What attracts the listener’s attention when listening to a favorite track? Is it the same feature that attracts attention when heard first time and upon repeated listening? How do producers give prominence to differentmusical properties? These are all questions regarding salience in works of phonography, i.e. musical works created as recorded sounds.

As a part my PhD work-in-progress on salience in works of phonography, participant observation was conducted with in three mixing sessions with two separate artists, where the producers were interviewed on how they see the foreground-background relationship in the music they produce. Their responses, as well as the resulting works of phonography were analyzed using the theories of salience in social semiotics and psychology. The preliminary results show among other things that the salient features of music are genre-specific. How the producers envision what the listeners will notice and actively listen to in their music tell the music researcher much about the foreground-background relationships in particular genres, the production methods, and more generally about salience in recorded music.

There are many events happening simultaneously in all music. The question of which of these events (are intended) to draw our attention the most is a question of musical foreground and background. The mechanisms that affects what in music is perceived to be in the foreground vs. background is complex and relates both to musical structure, musical cognition, and more importantly how these two meet.

While this is not a new question, or specific to works of phonography, it is pertinent in the context of works of phonography, where musical properties outside of those we have methods for analysis dominate. This thesis work is about the challenge of analyzing works of phonography and offers studying salience in them as a useful way to tackle this challenge.