Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality
eBook - ePub

Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality

About this book

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.

Frequently asked questions

Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
  • Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
  • Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go.
Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality by Richard Parncutt in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Music History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Terms and Abbreviations
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. I. Interdisciplinary Introduction
  9. II. Extramusical Foundations
  10. III. Musical Foundations
  11. IV. Perception of Sonority
  12. V. Perception of Progression
  13. VI. The Big Picture
  14. References
  15. Index