Perception of melodic and harmonic intonation of two‐part musical fragments

Abstract

Short musical fragments consisting of a melody part and a bass part were mistuned in various ways and to various degrees. They were presented to a group of subjects for a judgment of the quality of intonation and for an identification of the mistuned part. Mistuning was applied to the melodic frequency intervals of the melody part and/or the bass part (melodic mistuning) as well as to the frequency intervals of simultaneous tones in melody and bass (harmonic mistuning). Results indicate that the melodic mistuning of the melody part has the largest influence on the perception of the intonation, followed by the harmonic mistuning, while the melodic mistuning of the bass is less important. When mistuning is present in both melody and bass part, mostly the melody is considered to be the mistuned part. When the sound‐pressure levels of the two parts are unequal, there is a tendency to consider the louder part as the mistuned part. In the perception of harmonic mistuning, the deviating interval size is probably of more importance than the presence of beats. Small amounts of mistuning go unnoticed or may even cause an increase of the intonation quality.