Re: Pitch learning

[Linda Seltzer <lseltzer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have strong reservations about the idea of cross cultural studies on
sound perception.  The difference between a master and even an advanced
student in Asian cultures is tremendous.  And the difference between an
advanced student and the layman is another huge gulf.  Asian music
cultures have so much internal variability that it is a major undertaking
just to study the music of one performer or one gharana.  I am not one of
those musicologists who say that you can never compare anything across
cultures, but it is necessary to be very careful and not to impose
oversimplifying paradigms.  Concerning cross cultural studies of laymen or
amateurs, what would be the purpose?
> 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/
>