Music Perception

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.

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 Hz - one octave higher Hz.

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.

Grouping by similarity was often used by Baroque composers. Such grouping produces auditory stream segregation.

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.

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).

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.

Transposition

In Western tonal music the semitone is the smallest interval between two notes - represents the frequency ratio of 1:1.059 and divides the octave into 12 equal intervals that make up the octave scale

Western Major Scale Javanese Pelog Scale

Does listening to music make you smarter?

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 8–9 IQ points on the Stanford–Binet IQ scale.

Paper folding and cutting task