Conceptual Blending in Music Cadences: A Formal Model and Subjective Evaluation

Conceptual blending is a cognitive theory whereby elements from diverse, but structurally-related, mental spaces are ‘blended’ giving rise to new conceptual spaces. This study focuses on structural blending utilising an algorithmic formalisation for conceptual blending applied to harmonic concepts. More specifically, it investigates the ability of the system to produce meaningful blends between harmonic cadences, which arguably constitute the most fundamental harmonic concept. The system creates a variety of blends combining elements of the penultimate chords of two input cadences and it further estimates the expected relationships between the produced blends. Then, a preliminary subjective evaluation of the proposed blending system is presented. A pairwise dissimilarity listening test was conducted using original and blended cadences as stimuli. Subsequent multidimensional scaling analysis produced spatial configurations for both behavioural data and dissimilarity estimations by the algorithm. Comparison of the two configurations showed that the system is capable of making fair predictions of the perceived dissimilarities between the blended cadences. This implies that this conceptual blending approach is able to create perceptually meaningful blends based on self-evaluation of its outcome.