source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 10:16:59 -0800 Subject: Hardwired or What? From: randy@tcm.mit.edu In TUNING Digest 982 John Starrett wrote: > We may have, hardwired into the structure of our brains, an innate >musical understanding of the harmonic series, but we may be hardwired >for understanding small number ratios as well. For that matter, we may >be hardwired for mathematical understanding of all that we can understand >mathematically, and that may spill over into musical understanding, even >of tempered and non-octave scales. > In short, I don't think we are in any position to say what is >natural to our musical understanding and what is not. Further >psychoacoustic research may shed some light on what musical >structures are more primal, but I haven't seen anything convincing >yet. I'll bet Brian Mclaren has an opinion on this. A good book I read a couple of years ago that I think might provide a good foundation for further psychoacoustic research is "Consciousness Explained" by philosopher Daniel Dennett. Although Dennett doesn't specifically deal with psychoacoustics in this book, he does set up a substantial framework for discussing perception and consciousness. Dennett doesn't take a typical behaviorist approach, but grants credence to subjective experience as important to how things feel to people (what he calls heterophenomenology), but not necessarily as a description of reality. He outlines a theory of "multiple drafts" of consciousness where the perception of discrete events is no longer sequentially ordered. Perceptions of an event can even change radically over small periods of time as the brain fills in what it considers missing information or rationalizes the perception to make it fit within preconceived notions of what should be perceived. Dennett backs up his theories with findings from recent research in neuroscience, although his examples focus mostly on visual perception. Fascinating reading. So, my feelings on the psychoacoustics . . . I believe that it's going to be very difficult to isolate the so-called "primal" musical perceptions or structures, since so much of what we hear is heavily influenced by our indoctrination and education. I don't doubt that some primal structures exist, or even that they might possibly be hardwired in some way, just that they pale in significance when compared with the effects of experience. (It seems to me that recent research gives more examples of why the brain isn't hardwired than why it is.) Example: Even at this fairly late point in my life (after age 40), after working on advanced 72tET ear training exercises, I can hear the difference between two intervals that differ by one 72tET step much more clearly than I could a year ago. I now hear adjacent microtonal steps as being much wider than I did previously. There's no doubt to me that this has affected my overall perception of music in some way, especially when I now hear 100 cent steps of 12tET as much larger than I used to. Some musically untrained people I have worked with have enough trouble even with steps of that size, while I know other people who can hear an isolated pitch, give you the note name and then tell you approximately how many cents off from 12tET it is. I think that in this sense, perception of music is much closer to perception of language. Some people have larger vocabularies than others due to their education. People in specialized fields also have specialized vocabularies which help them make sense and allows them to communicate their ideas to others in the same field. I think that something similar happens with music. Randy ************************************************************************ * Randy Winchester * randy@mit.edu * PO Box 1074, Cambridge, MA 02142 * * (617) 253-7431 * http://web.mit.edu/randy/www * ************************************************************************ Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 11 Feb 1997 20:51 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02749; Tue, 11 Feb 1997 20:51:54 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02747 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id LAA14305; Tue, 11 Feb 1997 11:49:32 -0800 Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 11:49:32 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu