Re: music on the mind

Although I sympathize with some of the ideas in this article, the claim
that music is "wired into the brain at birth," especially with regards to
consonant frequency ratios, is very contentious and at odds, I believe,
with the opinions of a large majority of musicologists and psychologists.
It would take a lot of watertight empirical evidence to convince any
experts of that and Trehub's study hardly even lends support to the claim,
since her studies were conducted on 6 - 9 month old children. Studies in
speech perception have shown cultural influences effective on the
discrimination of infants younger than 6 months. If you look at some of
Trehub's recent articles in the psycology journals, I think as people wise
to the ways of tuning theory you'll agree that her ideas about frequency
ratios are overly simple minded and poorly represent those of use who use
rational ratios to represent musical intervals.

jason yust