Conclusion

Because the first musical impression is always the right one, the initial notes of a theme play a major role in how we perceive a tonality. To modify our initial perception of a tonality, the composer must insist on extraneous notes, and thus make our tonal compass rotate to another direction. In how we perceive the tonality, our auditory memory plays several essential roles.

First, our auditory memory helps us recognize a theme. We recognize the theme by identifying a repeat in its exposition. Our auditory memory also helps us recognize intervals (whether melodic or harmonic) and the notes they consist of, whether the notes form chords or arpeggios.

Another effect of our auditory memory is the persistence of our auditory perception, even during rests. Playwright Sacha Guitry wrote “After you have heard a piece by Mozart, the silence that follows is still by him.”

As a conclusion, determining a key and a mode proves to be a complex process. The various rules we have gone through constitute a basis for analysis, but they suffer from numerous exceptions.

May this article inspire researchers who, by using and supplementing the various rules and their exceptions, and by entering them into some artificial intelligence program, would succeed in making the analysis more systematic, up to converting musical recordings into good-quality scores. ●

Jean-Pierre Vial January 2021