Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality

Description

A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do.

Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau’s fundamental bass, Riemann’s harmonic function, Schenker’s hierarchic analysis, Forte’s pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman’s auditory scene, Terhardt’s virtual pitch, Krumhansl’s tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research.

Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt’s evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks:

• Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others?
• What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history?

Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.Terms and Abbreviations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix

I Interdisciplinary Introduction
1 Definitions 3
2 Approaches 27
3 Rudiments 51

II Extramusical Foundations
4 Metaphysics 65
5 Auditory Scene Analysis 91
6 Auditory Sensitivity 101

III Musical Foundations
7 Matthew Shirlaw 115
8 Hugo Riemann 125
9 Diverse Epistemologies 137
10 Scales and Intervals 151
11 Chant and the Leading Tone 175
12 Accidentals and Enharmonics 189

IV Perception of Sonority
13 Pitch 201
14 Consonance and Dissonance 227

15 The Root of a Chord 251
16 Spectral Pitch in Chords 273
17 Jazz Harmony 283

V Perception of Progression
18 Pitch Commonality 295
19 Tonality 305
20 Progression and Modulation 317
21 Structural Cognition 341

VI The Big Picture
22 Theoretical Evaluation 353
23 Universals and Diversity 363

References 377
Index 425Richard Parncutt is Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz, Austria.US

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