Psychoacoustic Foundations Of Major Minor Tonality

"A leading music psychologist and theorist explains how Major-Minor Tonality came to assume its dominant place within music composition"--

A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau’s fundamental bass, Riemann’s harmonic function, Schenker’s hierarchic analysis, Forte’s pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman’s auditory scene, Terhardt’s virtual pitch, Krumhansl’s tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research. Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt’s evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks: Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others? What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history? Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains " ... audio examples ..."--Page 4 of cover.

This unique reference book offers a holistic description of the multifaceted field of systematic musicology, which is the study of music, its production and perception, and its cultural, historical and philosophical background. The seven sections reflect the main topics in this interdisciplinary subject. The first two parts discuss musical acoustics and signal processing, comprehensively describing the mathematical and physical fundamentals of musical sound generation and propagation. The complex interplay of physiology and psychology involved in sound and music perception is covered in the following sections, with a particular focus on psychoacoustics and the recently evolved research on embodied music cognition. In addition, a huge variety of technical applications for professional training, music composition and consumer electronics are presented. A section on music ethnology completes this comprehensive handbook. Music theory and philosophy of music are imbedded throughout. Carefully edited and written by internationally respected experts, it is an invaluable reference resource for professionals and graduate students alike.

My first encounter with the theory of harmony was during my last year at school (1975). This fascinating system of rules crystallized the intuitive knowledge of harmony I had acquired from years of piano playing, and facilitated memorization, transcription, arrangement and composition. For the next five years, I studied music (piano) and science (Physics) at the Univer sity of Melbourne. This "strange combination" started me wondering about the origins of those music theory "rules". To what extent were they determined or influenced by physics? mathematics? physiology? conditioning? In 1981, the supervisor of my honours project in musical acoustics, Neville Fletcher, showed me an article entitled "Pitch, consonance, and harmony", by a certain Ernst Terhardt of the Technical University of Munich. By that stage, I had devoured a considerable amount of (largely unsatisfactory) material on the nature and origins of harmony, which enabled me to recognize the significance of Terhardt's article. But it was not until I arrived in Munich the following year (on Terhardt's invitation) that I began to appreciate the conse quences of his "psychoacoustical" approach for the theory of harmony. That is what this book is about. The book presents Terhardt's work against the broad context of music perception research, past and present. Music perception is a multidisciplinary mixture of physics, psychology and music. Where different theoretical ap proaches appear contradictory, I try to show instead that they complement and enrich one another.

The acoustics of a recording space can have a real impact on the sounds you create and capture. The book gives an essential grounding and understanding to how real music sounds behave and are perceived in real spaces. With a clear and simple style Howard and Angus walk you through the theory- the science of sound engineering and music production, and the practical ? how to apply it to music spaces so create professional sound, using real world examples and providing audio clips and recorded sounds to work with. Updated throughout the new edition uncovers the acoustic application for today's recording industry. The website is packed with audio clips, questions and answers, a calculation facility as well as links and resources.

A state-of-the-art overview of the latest theory and research in music psychology, written by leaders in the field. This authoritative, landmark volume offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the latest theory and research in music perception and cognition. Eminent scholars from a range of disciplines, employing a variety of methodologies, describe important findings from core areas of the field, including music cognition, the neuroscience of music, musical performance, and music therapy. The book can be used as a textbook for courses in music cognition, auditory perception, science of music, psychology of music, philosophy of music, and music therapy, and as a reference for researchers, teachers, and musicians. The book's sections cover music perception; music cognition; music, neurobiology, and evolution; musical training, ability, and performance; and musical experience in everyday life. Chapters treat such topics as pitch, rhythm, and timbre; musical expectancy, musicality, musical disorders, and absolute pitch; brain processes involved in music perception, cross-species studies of music cognition, and music across cultures; improvisation, the assessment of musical ability, and singing; and music and emotions, musical preferences, and music therapy. Contributors Fleur Bouwer, Peter Cariani, Laura K. Cirelli, Annabel J. Cohen, Lola L. Cuddy, Shannon de L'Etoile, Jessica A. Grahn, David M. Greenberg, Bruno Gingras, Henkjan Honing, Lorna S. Jakobson, Ji Chul Kim, Stefan Koelsch, Edward W. Large, Miriam Lense, Daniel Levitin, Charles J. Limb, Psyche Loui, Stephen McAdams, Lucy M. McGarry, Malinda J. McPherson, Andrew J. Oxenham, Caroline Palmer, Aniruddh Patel, Eve-Marie Quintin, Peter Jason Rentfrow, Edward Roth, Frank A. Russo, Rebecca Scheurich, Kai Siedenburg, Avital Sternin, Yanan Sun, William F. Thompson, Renee Timmers, Mark Jude Tramo, Sandra E. Trehub, Michael W. Weiss, Marcel Zentner

The acoustics of a space can have a real impact on the sounds you create and capture. Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, Fifth Edition provides supportive tools and exercises to help you understand how music sounds and behaves in different spaces, whether during a performance or a recording, when planning a control room or listening space, and how it is perceived by performers, listeners, and recording engineers. With their clear and simple style, Howard and Angus cover both theory and practice by addressing the science of sound engineering and music production, the acoustics of musical instruments, the ways in which we hear musical sounds, the underlying principles of sound processing, and the application of these concepts to music spaces to create professional sound. This new edition is fully revised to reflect new psychoacoustic information related to timbre and temporal perception, including an updated discussion of vocal fold vibration principles, samples of recent acoustic treatments, and a description of variable acoustics in spaces, as well as coverage of the environment’s effect on production listening, sonification, and other topics. Devoted to the teaching of musical understanding, an accompanying website (www.routledge.com/cw/howard) features various audio clips, tutorial sheets, questions and answers, and trainings that will take your perception of sound to the next level. This book will help you: Gain a basic grounding in acoustics and psychoacoustics with respect to music audio technology systems Incorporate knowledge of psychoacoustics in future music technology system designs as appropriate Understand how we hear pitch, loudness, and timbre Learn to influence the acoustics of an enclosed space through designed physical modifications