Subject: Book Announcement: "What is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery" From: Philip Dorrell <aud(at)1729.COM> Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 19:10:50 +1300To the auditory.org list: "What is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery" is a book I have written to explain my "super-stimulus" theory of music. The theory states that music is a super-stimulus for the perception of "musicality", where "musicality" is a perceived aspect of speech. The primary audience for the book is anyone involved in or interested in music science, but it will also be of interest to those of you studying speech perception. In particular, the theory places quite strong constraints on the nature of cortical maps which process speech, because each aspect of music must be a super-stimulus for a corresponding cortical map (or part of a cortical map, depending on exactly what is considered to be one "cortical map"), where each such cortical map corresponds to an aspect of speech perception. For example, harmony is an aspect of music, which involves the perception of consonant relationships between simultaneous pitch values, yet there are no simultaneous pitch values in speech. However, some forms of harmony have both sequential and simultaneous forms, in particular chords. A chord can be played all notes together or one note at a time, and the same chord is perceived in both cases. This suggests that there exists some cortical map which responds to the consonant relationships between pitch values, whether those pitch values occur simultaneously or sequentially. The true purpose of this cortical map, on the assumption that it represents an aspect of speech perception, must be to perceive consonant relationships between pitch values occurring at different times within a single speech melody. That was a brief treatment of just one aspect of music -- the book deals with others including musical scales, regular beats, home chords and repetition. It also deals with musical symmetries and calibration, and it includes some general discussion of the issues surrounding scientific attempts to understand what music is. The book's website ( at http://whatismusic.info/ ) contains a basic description of the concepts in the theory and a link to an online PDF preview. There are some discussions of newer theoretical developments, including analyses of the papers "The Statistical Structure of Human Speech Sounds Predicts Musical Universals" (Schwartz, Howe and Purves) and "Pitch is determined by naturally occurring periodic sounds" (Schwartz and Purves). Yours, Philip Dorrell. Web: http://www.1729.com/ Email: http://www.1729.com/email.html (current email address on page)