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Hardwired or What?

🔗randy@tcm.mit.edu

2/11/1997 10:16:59 AM
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
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* Randy Winchester * randy@mit.edu * PO Box 1074, Cambridge, MA 02142 *
* (617) 253-7431 * http://web.mit.edu/randy/www *
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