Archetypes, Melodic

Archetypes as Cognitive Building Blocks

In years of observing how young musicians grappled with learning the pitch-and-time complexes that make up real melodies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Jeanne Bamberger noticed the importance of what she called “simples.” Good examples of simples, her term for archetypes, can be found in the small melodic building blocks of children's songs. Take, for instance, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The song begins by stating the keynote (the first “twinkle”) [Page 72]and then figuratively leaping up to a higher tone (the second “twinkle”). The melodic “gap” opened up by that leap—its opening “simple”—is filled in by the subsequent descent down the scale back to the starting point (“how I wonder what you are”). The combination of gap and subsequent fill can itself become a more complex archetype. Leonard B. Meyer, a prominent postwar music theorist and music psychologist, attributed the prevalence of the “gap-fill” archetype to the kind of universal principles of human pattern perception first described by the gestalt psychologists in the 1920s. Movement up or down musical scales, for example, could be explained by the gestalt principle of “good continuation,” a kind of cognitive inertia where movement in one direction tends to continue.

One of Meyer's most famous students, Eugene Narmour, created the first analytical method designed specifically for melody. Like Meyer, he based his concept of melodic archetypes on solid cognitive principles. But whereas Meyer thought in terms of general gestalt laws, Narmour conceived of the brain as a collective of semiautonomous “modules,” obvious examples of which are the physiologically distinct modules of sensory organs such as ears or eyes. Narmour posited modules within the brain's auditory system able to detect and compare the following: (1) the direction of melodic movement, (2) the size of melodic intervals, (3) melodic returns to previous tones, (4) duplication of a tone or movement, and (5) pattern completion, as when a gap is filled and a listener senses “closure.” Interactions among these modules create a set of 16 melodic archetypes (most comprised of three notes), which in turn can combine in sequences and hierarchies of infinite complexity.

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