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Re: pitch and psychophysics



At 09:52 AM 1/24/00 -0500, Michael Edmiston wrote:

... musicians and psychologists and physics (sometimes the
same person) have done studies to determine what the average person claims
is an octave. These tests do not involve tuning two piano strings until
beats disappear. Rather they involve playing a lower note followed by a
higher note (or vice versa) and varying the frequency of the second note
until the listener declares the two sounds are one octave apart. In these
tests, most listeners will choose a stretched octave. I'm not sure why
other than some sort of psychological preference as Leigh says.

What kind of notes? Piano notes? If so, there are plausible hypotheses
that involve more piano-physics than psychology.

I heard one
musician declare it was because so many times as people learn to sing in
choirs in high school, they keep having it drummed into their heads that
they must not go flat. Especially the boys are taught to "think high" or we
also hear "hit it from the top."

A simpler hypothesis is that they all learned their sense of pitch by
rehearsing with a piano. Again, no psychology required.

Indeed, there's ample evidence that _a_cappela_ choirs sing different
intervals than accompanied choirs. Indeed there's evidence that they
spontaneously do things that are subtler versions of we see in melodic
minor; that is, the frequency of individual notes depends on musical context.

Spectacular additional evidence for the nonpsychological hypothesis comes
from the experiments using synthesized notes with partials radically
different (not just slightly stretched) from the Pythagorean intervals. To
a good approximation, these lead to the rule that consonant intervals have
partials that line up. This works when one note is played in one ear while
the other note in the other ear; I don't recall seeing experiments as to
what happens when the notes are separated in time.