On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music
Author | : Hermann von Helmholtz |
Publisher | : Courier Corporation |
Total Pages | : 612 |
Release | : 1954-01-01 |
Genre | : Music |
ISBN | : 9780486607535 |
Psychology of Music
Author | : Diana Deutsch |
Publisher | : Elsevier |
Total Pages | : 563 |
Release | : 2013-10-22 |
Genre | : Music |
ISBN | : 1483292738 |
Approx.542 pages
Music as Biology
Author | : Dale Purves |
Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | : 115 |
Release | : 2017-02-01 |
Genre | : Science |
ISBN | : 0674972961 |
The universality of musical tones has long fascinated philosophers, scientists, musicians, and ordinary listeners. Why do human beings worldwide find some tone combinations consonant and others dissonant? Why do we make music using only a small number of scales out of the billions that are possible? Why do differently organized scales elicit different emotions? Why are there so few notes in scales? In Music as Biology, Dale Purves argues that biology offers answers to these and other questions on which conventional music theory is silent. When people and animals vocalize, they generate tonal sounds—periodic pressure changes at the ear which, when combined, can be heard as melodies and harmonies. Human beings have evolved a sense of tonality, Purves explains, because of the behavioral advantages that arise from recognizing and attending to human voices. The result is subjective responses to tone combinations that are best understood in terms of their contribution to biological success over evolutionary and individual history. Purves summarizes evidence that the intervals defining Western and other scales are those with the greatest collective similarity to the human voice; that major and minor scales are heard as happy or sad because they mimic the subdued and excited speech of these emotional states; and that the character of a culture’s speech influences the tonal palette of its traditional music. Rethinking music theory in biological terms offers a new approach to centuries-long debates about the organization and impact of music.
Music: A Mathematical Offering
Author | : Dave Benson |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 426 |
Release | : 2007 |
Genre | : Mathematics |
ISBN | : 0521853877 |
This book explores the interaction between music and mathematics including harmony, symmetry, digital music and perception of sound.
The Age of Electroacoustics
Author | : Roland Wittje |
Publisher | : National Geographic Books |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2016-11-11 |
Genre | : Science |
ISBN | : 026203526X |
The transformation of acoustics into electro-acoustics, a field at the intersection of science and technology, guided by electrical engineering, industry, and the military. At the end of the nineteenth century, acoustics was a science of musical sounds; the musically trained ear was the ultimate reference. Just a few decades into the twentieth century, acoustics had undergone a transformation from a scientific field based on the understanding of classical music to one guided by electrical engineering, with industrial and military applications. In this book, Roland Wittje traces this transition, from the late nineteenth-century work of Hermann Helmholtz to the militarized research of World War I and media technology in the 1930s. Wittje shows that physics in the early twentieth century was not only about relativity and atomic structure but encompassed a range of experimental, applied, and industrial research fields. The emergence of technical acoustics and electroacoustics illustrates a scientific field at the intersection of science and technology. Wittje starts with Helmholtz's and Rayleigh's work and its intersection with telegraphy and early wireless, and continues with the industrialization of acoustics during World War I, when sound measurement was automated and electrical engineering and radio took over the concept of noise. Researchers no longer appealed to the musically trained ear to understand sound but to the thinking and practices of electrical engineering. Finally, Wittje covers the demilitarization of acoustics during the Weimar Republic and its remilitarization at the beginning of the Third Reich. He shows how technical acoustics fit well with the Nazi dismissal of pure science, representing everything that “German Physics” under National Socialism should be: experimental, applied, and relevant to the military.
The Theory of Musical Communication
Author | : Alexander N. Yakoupov |
Publisher | : Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
Total Pages | : 250 |
Release | : 2016-08-17 |
Genre | : Music |
ISBN | : 1443899062 |
This book provides an overview of the communicative processes that encompass the creation, interpretation, perception, and evaluation of the various phenomena constituting musical art. The numerous internal and external communicative links in the spheres of the composer, the performer, the listener and the musicologist-critic – links which constitute a complex system of the transmission of musical information – are considered from a socio-cultural perspective, which determines the high social role of the academic genres of music. The book will be of use to professional musicians and to all those interested in the acute problems of musicology, musical aesthetics, the sociology of music, and musical pedagogics.
The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory
Author | : Thomas Christensen |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 1033 |
Release | : 2006-04-20 |
Genre | : Music |
ISBN | : 1316025489 |
The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory is the first comprehensive history of Western music theory to be published in the English language. A collaborative project by leading music theorists and historians, the volume traces the rich panorama of music-theoretical thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Recognizing the variety and complexity of music theory as an historical subject, the volume has been organized within a flexible framework. Some chapters are defined chronologically within a restricted historical domain, whilst others are defined conceptually and span longer historical periods. Together the thirty-one chapters present a synthetic overview of the fascinating and complex subject that is historical music theory. Richly enhanced with illustrations, graphics, examples and cross-citations as well as being thoroughly indexed and supplemented by comprehensive bibliographies of the most important primary and secondary literature, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
Music, Mind, and Brain
Author | : Manfred Clynes |
Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
Total Pages | : 431 |
Release | : 2013-06-29 |
Genre | : Medical |
ISBN | : 1468489178 |
There is much music in our lives -yet we know little about its function. Music is one of man's most remarkable inventions - though possibly it may not be his invention at all: like his capacity for language his capacity for music may be a naturally evolved biologic .function. All cultures and societies have music. Music differs from the sounds of speech and from other sounds, but only now do we find ourselves at the threshold of being able to find out how our brain processes musical sounds differently from other sounds. We are going through an exciting time when these questions and the question of how music moves us are being seriously investigated for the first time from the perspective of the co-ordinated functioning of the organism: the perspective of brain function, motor function as well as perception and experience. There is so much we do not yet know. But the roads to that knowledge are being opened, and the coming years are likely to see much progress towards providing answers and raising new questions. These questions are different from those music theorists have asked themselves: they deal not with the structure of a musical score (although that knowledge is important and necessary) but with music in the flesh: music not outside of man to be looked at from written symbols, but music-man as a living entity or system.