Detecting the Differences in Jazz: A Comparison of Methods for Assessing Perceptual Veridicality in Applied Aesthetics

Applied aesthetics raises questions concerning the relationship of aesthetic appreciation to the underlying artistic features that can be manipulated in creating works of art. To the extent that subjective aesthetic judgments and objective artistic characteristics correspond, the process of communication is characterized by “perceptual veridicality.” This degree of correspondence should be studied using real as opposed to artificially-constructed artworks and may be measured by either compositional or decompositional methods. By hypothesis, compositional approaches indicate the extent to which subjects can detect objective stimulus characteristics while decompositional techniques show the degree to which they do make such accurate distinctions. This hypothesis is tested on a set of real jazz recordings, with perceptual veridicality measured by mean squared canonical correlations between objective stimulus characteristics and perceptual maps derived by both compositional and decompositional methods. As expected, the compositional approach provides the better statistical fit. This result suggests that, as an assessment of veridicality, the compositional technique should be regarded as a measurement of cognitive capability rather than as an index of normal perceptual performance in aesthetic appreciation.