Compare these two themes
Are first themes vital, grand, and heated?
Are second themes lyrical, quiet, and gentle?
Since the 18th century…
Music theorists have noted the tendency for Western art-music works to contain themes exhibiting contrasting expressive content. In music exhibiting two main themes, the first theme is commonly characterized as stronger or fiery, whereas the second theme tends to be gentler or cantabile.
David Huron and I investigated this idea in two ways:
Corpus study—are there structural differences in first and second musical themes?
Two behavioral perception studies—can musicians tell which themes are first themes and which are second themes?
Corpus Study
In the corpus study of 1,063 musical works, structural expressive features such as mode, rhythmic smoothness, interval size, articulation and dynamic markings, and durational pace were examined using computational methods.
The experimental findings regarding the durational pace, dynamic levels, and articulations are consistent with traditional textbook descriptions that first themes are energetic and second themes are lyrical in nature, given the study operationalizations.
Perception Studies
Two perception studies assessed whether musicians can perceive these differences in musical themes. The studies used excerpts from musical scores and audio recordings. In some cases, just the thematic melody was used and in other cases, the theme + harmonic accompaniment were used.
The results are consistent with the hypothesis that listeners are (weakly) able to differentiate first and second themes using surface level features of the musical stimuli, even when the themes are presented outside of the original musical context.