...Musical Terminology and the Music of Africa"). Lerdahl and Jackendoff provide a more formal definition: "By phenomenal accent we mean any event at the musical...stresses such as sforzandi, sudden changes in dynamics of timbre, long notes, leaps to relatively high or low notes, harmonic changes, and so on" (A Generative...

...context to introduce another idea from GTTM, the "phenomenal accent." A phenomenal accent is defined as "any event at the musical surface that gives emphasis or stress to a moment in the musical flow" (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, 17). This could include an event-onset, the onset of a long event, or other...