Psychology of Music

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

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.

The Age of Electroacoustics

The Age of Electroacoustics
Author: Roland Wittje
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262336537

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.

Helmholtz

Helmholtz
Author: Michel Meulders
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0262014483

The first biography in English of a nineteenth-century German scientist whose experimental approach influences today's neuroscience.

Music: A Mathematical Offering

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 Theory of Musical Communication

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

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.