Jeff’s six principles of psychoacoustics research

I have noticed the following commonalities while researching music perception in prestigious scholarly journals.

• Music Perception Research tends to follow several principles:
 
1. Pure Sine waves, or purely simplistic waveguide timbres are used.
2. The sample set consists of 1-10 subjects, one of whom is the researcher, most of the rest of whom are graduate students studying experimental composition.
3. The experiment is never repeated, but is often reprinted.
4. The conclusions have at best a tenuous connection to the experiment performed, and are often entirely unrelated.
5. The researcher is not a composer, has never composed, yet draws conclusions about what can and should be composed.
6. Musicians who have been through an extensive regimen of Western Ear Training are used as a reference group. It is sometimes assumed that the preferences and observations of this group are more astute and accurate than that of randomly selected people off the street.

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Example:

Many papers have been written by psychoacoustics researchers purporting to support Western music’s theoretical foundations — supporting octave-repeating pitch equivalence classes, explaining the favoring of the fifth over the tritone, etc. These papers are backed by perception and preference experiments on subjects, performed in accordance with the rules set out in the above section.

All of these papers’ conclusions are wrong.

There is no basis whatsoever for claiming that recognition of low-order just intervals is wired into the human wetware. If this were so then two things would be true:

1. Just intervals between sine wave timbres would be heard as more consonant than non-just intervals.
2. A single note consisting of a timbre which is a synthesis of non-integral harmonics would be heard as dissonant.

To the contrary:

1. The only dissonance people hear between sine waves is when the sine waves are close together, according to the Plomp-Levalt curves. There are no pockets of consonance occuring around integral multiples of sine waves. In fact, there are no distinguishing characteristics observed there at all. Dissonance between complex timbres is caused by dissonant interaction between harmonics which fall within the capture range indicated by the dissonance maximums indicated on the Plomp-Levalt curves.
2. Completely inharmonic Marimbas are heard as ‘mellow’. Xylophones are heard as ‘bright’ but not dissonant. One of the most beloved timbres — the piano — is highly inharmonic.

In point of fact, the dissonance is caused by rhythm — the grating x Hz rhythm heard at the maximums of the Plomp-Levalt Curves. This rhythm occurs in a number of sounds occuring in nature which are correlated with impending doom such as a stampeding hordes of wild animals, earthquakes, and tornados.