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Abstract
Music perception is plausibly constrained by universal perceptual mechanisms adapted to natural sounds. Such constraints could arise from our dependence on harmonic frequency spectra for segregating concurrent sounds, but evidence has been circumstantial. We measured the extent to which concurrent musical notes are misperceived as a single sound, testing Westerners as well as native Amazonians with limited exposure to Western music. Both groups were more likely to mistake note combinations related by simple integer ratios as single sounds (‘fusion’). Thus, even with little exposure to Western harmony, acoustic constraints on sound segregation appear to induce perceptual structure on note combinations. However, fusion did not predict aesthetic judgments of intervals in Westerners, or in Amazonians, who were indifferent to consonance/dissonance. The results suggest universal perceptual mechanisms that could help explain cross-cultural regularities in musical systems, but indicate that these mechanisms interact with culture-specific influences to produce musical phenomena such as consonance.
Highlights
It seemed plausible that in participants without much experience with musical harmony, the fusion of a musical interval might decrease with increasing pitch difference between the notes
Preferences are subject to some other influence, such as experience with particular intervals in music. We found that both native Amazonians and US non-musicians were more likely to fuse canonically consonant note pairs compared to dissonant note pairs, even though only listeners in the US exhibited preferences for consonance (Fig. 2)
Rarely engage in group performances and have limited exposure to harmony, the observed fusion of consonant intervals seems likely to result from generic mechanisms for harmonicitybased sound segregation rather than from experience with musical intervals in polyphonic music
Summary
As reported by Riester[42], Tsimane’ song melodies are characterized by the use of a small number of musical pitches forming small intervals, often approximately two or three semitones, and a narrow vocal range. In addition to their knowledge of traditional music, nowadays many Tsimane’ villagers are somewhat familiar with religious Christian hymns, which they learn from missionaries. These hymns are monophonic and sung in Tsimane’. Most Tsimane’ report that they do not regularly play musical instruments
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