Music Perception

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Music Perception
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Why music perception? 1. Found in all cultures -
listening to music is a universal activity. 2.
Interesting from a developmental point of view -
what aspects of the auditory processing necessary
for music perception is built in and which is
acquired? 3. Psychological qualities of sound
that are important in music perception are also
important to general auditory perception - i.e.
pitch, duration, loudness and timbre. 4. There
is a richness of structure, hierarchical
organization and multidimensionality to musical
patterns that provide virtually limitless
possibilities for the study of music perception.
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In musical scales one of the major dimensions of
sound is tone height - the increase in pitch that
accompanies an increase in frequency.
However, in musical scales there are
relationships between pitches that are very
important. One important relationship is the
octave - doubling of the frequency. Middle C -
261.6 Hz - one octave higher - 523.2 Hz.
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We seem to group on the basis of various
principles of organization - similar to Gestalt
visual grouping principles.
Similarity - Tones that are similar to one
another tend to be perceived as belonging
together.
Although there are many dimensions on which we
could perceive tones as being similar, the
dimension of tones that contributes most to
perceptual grouping is pitch.
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Grouping by similarity was often used by Baroque
composers. Such grouping produces auditory stream
segregation.
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Another grouping principle is that of good
continuation sequences of frequency changes in
the same direction (e.g. rising) tend to be
perceived as part of the same sequence, whereas
changes in direction between sequences of tones
tend to act as boundaries between segments.
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Contour - the pattern of successive pitch changes
within a melody defines its contour (what is
important is the direction of pitch changes,
rather than the extent of the change).
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Intervals - on the other hand, define the pitch
relations between notes in terms of the ratio of
adjacent pitches.
Melodies that have the same contour and the same
intervals are called transpositions.
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Transposition
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In Western tonal music the semitone is the
smallest interval between two notes - represents
the frequency ratio of 11.059 and divides the
octave into 12 equal intervals that make up the
octave scale
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Western Major Scale
Javanese Pelog Scale
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Does listening to music make you smarter?
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The Mozart Effect
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In a paper published in Nature in 1993, it was
reported that exposure to a Mozart piano sonata
produces a temporary increase in spatial
reasoning scores,amounting to the equivalent of
89 IQ points on the StanfordBinet IQ scale.
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Paper folding and cutting task
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