On the tones that make music

Abstract

Advances in musical acoustics, music psychology, architectural acoustics, and electroacoustics during the past few decades have all contributed to our present understanding of the complex processes involved in making, listening to, and enjoying music. Psychoacoustics has made contributions by exploring basic relationships between tones, tone combinations, and tone sequences on the one hand, and sensations of loudness, pitch, timbre, consonance, dissonance, and rhythm on the other. Statistical analyses of musical intervals used in certain compositions, for instance, show a clear relationship with auditory critical bandwidth. Musical instruments typically used for playing lead voices or complex harmonies are found to have lower partials with an exact or nearly exact harmonic relationship so that they can convey clear and unambiguous pitch sensations. Even spatial effects have been used by composers since the Renaissance to the present day. Such effects don’t always lead to the intended results, however, because of the often unpredictable acoustic behavior of listening spaces. Reinier Plomp has made significant contributions to our present understanding of these problems. The title of this presentation is, in fact, the subtitle of an auditory demonstration CD recently issued by him in The Netherlands.