Tunings and cognition

I was surprised by this:

"Rasch's study (1985) of large sequences of simultaneous tones found that
mistuning of the intervals of the melody was more disturbing than mistuning
of simultaneous intervals. This suggests that listeners compare melodic
intervals to an abstract interval standard."

from this paper:

http://music.dartmouth.edu/~kov/lerdahl/tuningPaper.html

I've noticed in discussions here that simultaneities are assumed to be more
sensitive to microtuning than melodic intervals. Has anyone seen Rasch's
study?

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Rosati" <dante@p...> wrote:
> I was surprised by this:
>
> "Rasch's study (1985) of large sequences of simultaneous tones
found that
> mistuning of the intervals of the melody was more disturbing than
mistuning
> of simultaneous intervals. This suggests that listeners compare
melodic
> intervals to an abstract interval standard."
>
> from this paper:
>
> http://music.dartmouth.edu/~kov/lerdahl/tuningPaper.html
>
> I've noticed in discussions here that simultaneities are assumed to
be more
> sensitive to microtuning than melodic intervals. Has anyone seen
Rasch's
> study?

I reproduced this same quote on the list some time ago and also asked
if anyone had seen the study. I think Rasch's finding and main point
is that the "correct" intonation of melodic intervals is learned
through experience, and whatever intervals have occured repeatedly in
the listener's experience are the ones expected to be heard (to a
tolerance of, say 10 cents); while harmonic intervals are heard in
terms of the nearest simple ratios, and given our use of equal
temperament, deviations of 20 cents (and occasionally, up to 50
cents)
are routinely expected.

I believe that each era of diatonic music in the West has had a rough
idea of what the "correct" intonation of melodic intervals should be;
hence the "just" diatonic scale has tended to sound melodically
"wrong" due to the different sizes of major second.

I'm sure Joseph Pehrson could have heard the 50-cent "melodic" shifts
very easily in Daniel Wolf's utonal->otonal example if they hadn't
been buried in the inner voices. As a primarily _harmonic_ fragment
of
music, Joseph essentially heard a constant upper voice, a constant
bass voice, and a chord which resolved from a very poor approximation
of 4:5:6:7:9 to a very good approximation of 4:5:6:7:9. (The former,
of course, happened to be 1/9:1/7:1/6:1/5:1/4 -- in the sawtooth
example, you can hear the common overtone two octaves above the
highest voice very clearly if you listen for it.) I wonder, if the
top
voice had one of the 50-cent shifts, would Joseph have heard the
chords as containing different pitches, rather than the same ones? I
think so, and I think that is Rasch's point.