source file: m1464.txt
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 16:27:52 -0400

Subject: New-ish book

From: Daniel Wolf <DJWOLF_MATERIAL@compuserve.com>

I found the following in the Frankfurt City and University Library:

Albrecht Schneider, _Tonho"he Skala Klang: Akustische, tonmetrische und
psychoakustische Studien auf vergleichender Grundlage_ (Band 89 der
Orpheus-Schriftenreihe zu Grundfragen der Musik, Orpheus Verlag, Bonn 199=
7)

Although I am generally cautious about books in this series, the house
press of Prof. Martin Vogel, there is some interesting material here.

The first part has some general remarks about comparative-systematic
musicology with an extended essay on functional models of musical
perception. The second and central part of this 597 page _Habilitation_
concerns the acoustics and measurements of idiophones, and treats the
problematic relationship between complex timbres and equidistant tunings =
in
African and Southeastasian idiophones. The third part treats the data of
the second part in terms of the relationship between psychoacoustic and
comparative-systematic musicology.

The essay on (primarily pitch) perception is quite up-to-date, and list
readers into psychoacoustics who can hack the German should enjoy it. The=

second part - which is more in my line of work - contains a few errors in=

ethnographic data, and makes a more fundamental error in measuring museum=

gamelan instruments without - surprisingly - considering their functional=

ensemble roles and ignoring the fact that gamlean repertoire is also sung=

or played on instruments with integer-related harmonic spectra. The
measurements, however, are very interesting, and illustrate spectra widel=
y
deviating from the best models. There is also some suggestive data here
about subharmonic components in the spectra of struck idiophones.

While I am too unfamiliar with the music of the African instruments
Schneider presents, the conclusion I raise from the Southeastasian data i=
s
that although the divergence from from simple harmonic spectra is probabl=
y
one reason that intervals between perceived fundamentals are able to vary=

greatly from the simplest ratios, the variation in the divergence (both
from instrument to instrument and among the bars or gongs of a single
instrument) is so great that it would be extremely unlikely that the
tunings are directly related to the timbral structures. There is very
likely, however, a lower-level perceptual mechanism at work in which
timbres are grouped together in rather broad classes of spectra and
envelopes. The streaming of a complex ensemble of idiophones into
musical-functional roles (e.g. distinguishing a gender from a saron from =
a
bonang from a kenong) would then be constructed through this mechanism.

           =