AW.: The high note

<< My question: does anyone know of studies that attempt to document this
>effect, and perhaps even quantify it?
>>

Actually, this touches on one of the great open questions in music theory. In
early polyphonic music the uppermost melodic line is not necessarily the most
important one (_Hauptstimme_). (The same, may I add, is true for most gamelan
genres and for "barbershop" arrangements). This leads to questions of whether
the relative importance of the voices was reflected in the performance
dynamics (so that the most important line was projected above the others), or
if particular voicings, independent of dynamics, project particular
hierachies within a polyphony, or whether audiences were (and are) just
conditioned to listen to polyphonic settings in a particular hierarchy.

Daniel Wolf