ABSTRACT-This life report describes how I became a psychoacoustician of It starts with some events from World War II and then tells of my desperate, belated endeavors to attain the competence in piano performance necessary for entrance as a student to the music academy. It tells how, as first an engineer and later as a musicologist, I finally became an academic teacher at a higher music school and began research on issues concerning pitch perception and memory for pitch in music. Particularly mportant findings in that domain arose from my experiments with context-dependent and context-free melodic intervals, and with the transition between musically meaningful time distances of short-term and long-term auditory memory. Other findings in that domain include introducing, in 1976-1978, the concept of pitch strength and demonstrating it with various original methods (e.g., through chroma recognition by absolute-pitch listeners). I was born in Warsaw on June 16, 1931. The families of both my father, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, and mother, Janina Lazynska-Rakowska, up to the end of the First World War lived in Podole, the Eastern part of pre-war Poland (presently part of Ukraine). Until 1939 our family, including my sister Krystyna, four years younger, and my grandmother, lived in Poznan, the main city of Western pre-war Poland. Our father was head of the work and social welfare division at the local state administration (voivodship), and our mother was a doctor. When the Second World War broke out we were still on summer vacation in Eastern Poland and could not return to our home in Poznan. Most of the Polish population was expelled from the western Polish territories which were incorporated into the Nazi State (das Reich) and our flat (together with all our belongings) was taken over by the new German inhabitants. Our family spent the wartime under German occupation in Cracow, named by the occupants a capital of the region called Generalgouvernment. Our father worked at the Main Council for Welfare (RGO.), die only Polish organization allowed and not infiltrated by Germans. On January 17th 1945, the day that ended the Germans' presence in Cracow, a sudden tragedy happened to our family. Soviet troops were approaching Cracow, and Germans hastily withdrew from the city. The air-attack alarms against Soviet planes occurred every day, though usually not followed by any bombardments. That day, soon after the alarm started my mother was called to her patient several blocks away from our house. The patient had had a heart attack, and my mother did not stay with us as usual in the bomb shelter, but went to see him. Halfan hour later we heard bomb explosions in the vicinity. Unfortunately one of the bombs crashed down on the house where my mother was with her patient. They were both killed instantly. It happened that those two bombs were the only signs of war in Cracow on that very day - the day when the German occupation turned into the Soviet one. After the war in October 1945, our group, including the canary in a cage, moved from Cracow to Warsaw, where my father was to take a post of deputy director in the department of social welfare, in the Ministry of Labor. Warsaw of early winter 1945, having been crushed during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, was something difficult to describe and, if truly described, difficult to believe. Large parts of the city, like the Old Town or the Jewish ghetto, were just fields of hills covered with snow. In other parts there were streets of burned houses with shattered windows and no living soul inside. We were lucky enough to find a flat on the fourth floor of one such house that was not burned, by some negligence of the German troops (whose duty was to set fire to every house after the inhabitants were removed). The family that had found it earlier agreed to share that unburned flat with us for some reasonable monthly rent. We stayed there for a year. In winter, the staircase, open to snow, rain, and frost, changed into a mountain of ice, and climbing it without winter-mountaineering equipment was a real challenge. …
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Aug 1, 2010
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