Models and findings of synchronization in musical acoustics and music psychology

Abstract

Synchronization is a crucial mechanism in music tone production and perception. With wind instruments, the overtone series of notes synchronize to nearly perfect harmonic relations due to nonlinear effects and turbulence at the driving mechanism although the overblown pitches of flutes or horns may differ considerably from such a simple harmonic relation. Organ pipes close to each other synchronize in pitch by interaction of the sound pressures. With violins, the sawtooth motion appears because of a synchronization of the stick/slip interaction with the string length. All these models are complex systems also showing bifurcations in terms of multiphonics, biphonation or subharmonics. On the subjects perception and music production side models of synchronization, like the free-energy principle modeling perception by minimizing surprise and adaptation to physical parameters of sound production, neural nets of timbre, tone, or rhythm perception or synergetic models of rhythm production are generally suited much better to model music perception than simplified linear models.