Notes+W2D2+(Rebellious+Attitude,+Stretched+Partials...)

This course has a certain rebellious attitude about it. The professor (who generally prefers not to speak of himself in the third person and will stop doing so after this) thinks most of the approaches to music perception in the published literature are off-base in one way or another, most of which are are overly reductive. It is surprisingly easy to think – and, indeed, many textbooks teach – that because sound must enter the human body through the ears, – of course – the anatomy and physiology of the ear and of the auditory pathway must play a crucial, a decisive role in determining what we hear ... in fact, in determining music itself ... right? Well, I would say: wrong – or, at the very least, it ain't necessarily so.

I did not have my "A" game with me on this particular day, although what kind of took me aback right from the outset was this: I thought that I had delivered a set of reasonably provocative remarks on Tuesday, and I had assigned a trio of articles that should have also provoked some questions. So when I asked if there were questions at the beginning of the class, the fact that the sole question came from a person who in fact //wasn't in attendance// at Tuesday's class was a bit disquieting.


 * 1) Correction. In fact there was another question/comment made by a student (me). I mentioned visiting professor David Huron's lecture in Winter quarter 09' on UCSD's campus. Specifically, I brought up Huron's take on the emotional reaction to scales and how he suggested it could depend on what a given listener considered 'normal.' The example Huron gave was traditional Jewish music, much of which is written in minor scales (commonly associated with sadness), but in this case was considered "happy." David said that when people who listen to this music moved overseas to New York (where major scales are the norm), they began to perceive their own traditional music as sad, by contrast. I mentioned in class that this brings up the nature verses nurture argument in regards to music. Professor Balzano said that he believed Huron was speaking about Bulgarian music (which he did at some point), but I am almost certain that Huron used Jewish music as an example of this normalcy concept. I could be wrong. -Bobby Bray######


 * 1) See the paper by Huron, [|A Comparison of Dynamics in Major- and Minor-key Works], where he specifically cites the example of Bulgarian music. Of course, he could have said "Jewish" in the talk Bobby is referring to, but you can't go wrong with "Bulgaria" here. -gjb######

Sometimes the business of writing up scientific papers leads the authors to overlook the most salient and important phenomena ... or at least, so it seems to me. This can happen even if the authors are giants in the field of psychoacoustics and computer music such as John Pierce and Max Mathews. To me, the most striking quality of the tones with stretched partials used in the Mathews-Pierce (1980) study is that //they don't fuse//, i.e. you listen to them and they don't have well-defined pitches. But, interestingly enough, one doesn't really find this perceptually prominent phenomenon mentioned in the text of the paper. And yet this would certainly have a major influence on the ability of such "tones" to participate in harmonic cadences ... it helps us understand how cadences constructed out of such "tones" lack "finality" ... since these "tones" are only just barely deserving of the name "tones" in the first place; the "glue" that normally holds multiple partials together into a single coherent tone-with-pitch is beginning to come unstuck here.