Re: Pitch learning

[Hiroko Terasawa <shiraiwa@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dick,

The experiments to support the fundamentals you stated were operated  
on the subjects with western music background, or using the stimuli  
with the assumption of western musical instruments (e.g. sounds with  
harmonic series, but not with strong inharmonicity, unusual spectral  
envelope or asymmetry energy decay distribution, which we often find  
in non-western music.) I expect to see more cross-cultural studies on  
sound perception (there should be, simply that I'm not aware of)  
which potentially support the diversity in pitch perception. We  
cannot neglect these non-western musical sounds being odd or marginal  
- non-western population is about 80% of the world.

 - hiroko



On Feb 28, 2007, at 7:58 AM, Richard F. Lyon wrote:

> At 10:41 PM -0800 2/27/07, Susan Allen wrote:
> > It is astonishing to me that all of you are talking about western  
> > scales and  octaves!  This is not the music of the world!  This is  
> > colonial music, discovered in the West.... The WORLD of music does  
> > not follow Pythagorean intervals!  There are many more notes!
>
> True.  But some pitch relationships, such as perfect octave and  
> perfect fifth, are so fundamental in our perceptual machinery that  
> you probably don't need any learning to appreciate them.  There is  
> a "closeness" between sounds of the same chroma, whether you know  
> or care about musical scales or not, that comes from them sharing  
> so many periods, or frequencies, however you care to look at it,  
> and from our machinery that reacts to these things.
>
> Dick

--

Hiroko Terasawa
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~hiroko/