source file: mills2.txt Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Yet another overlooked (but remarkable) article on microtonality -- The Journal of Psychology is not a place you'd usually think of looking for articles about xenharmonic music--especially perceptive early articles which foreshadow many later developments. But, as it turns out, one such article was published in Vol. 10, 1940, J. Psych., pp. 149-156, author Heinz Werner. The title is "Musical 'Micro-Scales' and 'Micro- Melodies.'" In this remarkable article, Werner discusses what was later to become known as categorical perception (though in 1940 it did not have that name). Werner points out that "A subject, when presented with a arelatively small interval of--let us say--0.12 of a semitone, at first may hear a very slight indefinite difference between the two tones, or even no difference at all. But when the same interval is repeated a great many times with the subject deliberately focussing his attention on the task of discerning a clear-cut interval, there will almost invariably be reported an apparent enlargement of the objectively constant interval. UIsual;ly there is a maximum in this subjective augmentation: *the maximum is reached when this small interval has acquired the subjective character of a semi-tone.* The time necessary for the attainment of this maximum increase varies greatly with the individual, but so far not one individual has been encountered who did not hear the semi-tone-like quality after more or less repetition." [Werner, H., "Musical 'Micro-Scales' and 'Micro-Melodies,'" J. Pych., Vol. 10, 1940, pp. 149-150] In this paper Werner goes on to describe a set of experiments in meldoic recognition performed with intervals of "less than one-sixth of a normal semi-tone (16.5 cents)." Werner foudn a number of fascinating effects: one which he called "the law of increasing stabilization" mandated athat "if the subject should be presented with an ascending-descending interval, he will at first perceive the ascending phase as subjectively larger than the one which descends." Werner also found audible apradoxes--for example, because the melodic patterns used tended to acquire a gestalt quality of their own as well as the effect caused by the pitch of the individual notes "this leads to a paradoxical statement frequently made by the [subjects] that even though Tones 1 and 2 remain constant in character, nevertheless the interval separating these tones may audibly vary in size. All this seems to prove that it is not the position of the tones which is of primary important and which creates the quality of the interval. It would seem that it is the quality of the interval which determines the position of the tones in the micro-system." Yet another fascinating effect was observed when Werner played the ubjects a straight chromatic cmirotonal scale versus a melody: "When the scale such was given chromatically, i.e., step by step, none of these subjects, providing that there were completely ' in the system,' found any distinction between te micro-scale and the normal piano scale. Indivudal differences came to the fore when the micro-melodies were compared to patterns of the normal scale. Two of the subjects felt sure that no difference existed. One observed expressed the feeling that it was as if she were sitting in a puppet theater. 'If one keeps on looking at the puppets, after a while they acquire the full siz eof human beings!' The other two subjects felt a certain difference." This is a fascinating and to my knowledge one of the only *subjective* records of naive observers' reactionsn to microtonal melodies. (By "naive" I mean test subjects who weren't committed microtonalists). Moreover, Werner found that microtonal melodies were perceived with considerable consistency by the subjects, once they'd become used to hearing them. Observers could make reliable judgments about whether two halves of micro-melody "fit" together, or whether a melody formed an antepenultimate closure leading to a cadence, or whether the melody was perceived as "empty" or not because it used primarily members of the harmonic series. Carol Krumhansl has done a great deal of work with the "probe tone" method of studying melodic perception. Comparing her work to Heinz Werner's, however, it seems to me that Krumhansl's assumptions are crucially flawed. For one thing, she assumed that when an observer hears a 12-TET melody with one note missing and then a series of notes off by various twelfths of a semitone, the observer willr eact according to an innate sense of "tonality," rather than according ot how s/he has been programmed by a lifetime of listening to 12-TET. Second, Krumhansl assumes implicitly that no systematic distinction can be made by test subjects between one "mistuned" (tuned off the target 12-TET note by some number of twelfths of a semitone) note and another. But Heinz Werner's article proves this is clearly not so--and our own experience indicates very clearly that observers can easily be trained to hear intervals as small (in my case, anyway_ as 1/100 of an octave. In fact Jonathan Glasier reliably tuned Pep Estavane's Harmonry Harp by ear to 1/100 of an octave intervals per string: he had no trouble hearing a distinct difference twixt adjacent tones, and he was reliably able to detect which strings approximated members of the harmonic series and which did not. Third, Krumhansl seems to assume that observers cannot tell whether the probe tone is bouncing around between different circles of fifths (each 1/12 of a semitone or 1/72 of an octave belongs to *different* circle of fifths--and there are *six* different and entirely incompatible circles of fifths in the 72-tone equal-tempered scale). But my own experience indicates that this assumption is probably untrue--and Werner's evidence supports this contention strongly. If Werner's subjects were able to hear difrferences in the implied harmonies of one 36-TET scale versus another, would not Krumhansl's test subjects have made similar judgments about one 72-TET scale step versus another? In short, Heinz Werner's article seems to me a model of its kind. It is amazing that this article has almost never been cited in the microtonal literature. It blazes many new trails and foreshadows quite a few later developments. In particular, Werner's briliant idea of giving test subjects *months* the get used to hearing micro-melodies completely revolutionized test procedures for microtonal melodies. It is in fact shocking that psychoacoutic and music psychology experiments continue to be done today using micro-meldoies, but *without* giving the subjects adequate time to overcome the inevitable effects of categorical perception which are known to apply to any naive listener who hears an entirely different tuning for the first time. Heinz Werner's paper did not seem to garner any attention...it appears to have dropped into the sea of psychological literature and vanished. Yet it would fascinating to follow up on Werner's experiments today, using modern equipment, and do a second series of experiments pushing further along the lines Werner laid out. In paritcular it would extremely interesting to compare subject reactions to micro-harmonies a well as micro-melodies, after a suitable period of acclimitization by the listeners. This is a truly remarkable paper, and one which every microtonalist would do well to study. Incidentally, there is one other paper by Heinz Werner I've been able to track down-- "Uber Mikromeloik und Mikroharmonik," in Zeitschrift f"ur Psychologie, 1926, pp. 74-128. This probably explains the depth and breadth of Werner's later paper. Clearly he cut his teeth on microtonality in the European quartertone movement of the 20s, then came to America as a refugee before or during WW II. It's a shame he never published anything else, so far as I can tell. Werner was clearly a first-rate mind, and an amazingly astute thinker on the perception of microtonal intervals. --mclaren