Musical Practice and Performance Stack Exchange
Musical Practice and Performance Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [psychoacoustics]

the scientific study of sound perception.

For questions about how humans psychologically and physiologically respond to sound (in general) and music (in particular for this site).

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Should low frequency players anticipate in orchestra?

"The bigger the instrument, the heavier the strings, the bigger the bow, the bigger the mouthpiece, the more you should anticipate." This concept is expressed occasionally by double bass players, conductors etc. Is there any good reasoning behind…
Kari Kääriäinen
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Does tuning music to A = 432 Hz versus A = 440 Hz have a measurable effect on listeners?

A brief internet search for "432 vs 440" will bring up a large number of chat discussions and videos discussing whether the tuning makes a real difference. These often seem to boil down to the question of whether people can perceive the difference…
Aaron
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How did the audience guess the pentatonic scale in Bobby McFerrin's presentation?

The video below is entitled "The Power of the Pentatonic Scale". And from the video you'd think that people are inherently tuned to the pentatonic scale. But I was wondering if they're really inherently tuned or did Bobby tune them? Could they have…
user34288
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What's the shortest that a note can be and still have a recognisable pitch?

While talking about this question: What does it mean to play a note for half a second? I got to thinking - how short can a note actually be for us to perceive its fundamental pitch? Obviously real world notes often fade in at the start or have…
Нет войне
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What gives a piece of music its personality and feeling?

What makes a piece of music sound angry, dark, sad, happy, or otherwise? "La Chute" by Yann Tiersen sounds so angry to me and "A Dark Knight" from "The Dark Knight" movie sounds so dark and mysterious. "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber is a…
Chiron
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Is the sense of resolution of a harmonic cadence psychologically "intrinsic", or is it created through conditioning?

If we took someone who had never heard western music before and played a piece of music with, say, a deceptive cadence and a perfect cadence in it, would they understand it? I.e., would they feel that the piece is not quite over when they hear the…
axelotl
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Is there any objective evidence that different keys "feel different" or have different moods?

In an advertisement in YouTube for composer Danny Elfman's master class viewable here the composer says: When somebody starts talking about “this should be in such and such a key because such a key feels that way”, that’s bulls--t. You can turn any…
uhoh
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What is the main note you hear when hearing a chord?

I've done experiments on my friends and myself, and when listening to chords, the note we end up hearing at the forefront (in other words the note we hum when reproducing the song) is actually the highest note in the chord. For example, in the C…
Eyal K.
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What makes some instruments louder than others?

Main question: are longer pianos actually louder? Context: When a musician plays on an acoustic instrument, I expect that the loudness produced corresponds to raw energy (as measured in Joules or Watts if taken per second) that the musician puts in.…
dtldarek
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Is there a reason why "Scale Inversions" don't get discussed?

It only dawned on me recently, but it's quite a fundamental and important feature of scales that they are not mirrored under their own inversion. The intervalic formula for major is: W W H W W W H If we invert this, we end up with phrygian: H W W W…
Alan
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Is it learned or innate our reaction of happiness or sadness in music?

Are we born with the response telling us that the chord tones or melody has a sad or happy quality? Or is it learned by our culture? The minor scale and chords have a serious or sadness to them while the major scale and chords are brighter or…
r lo
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Why aren't slight imperfections in consonant intervals extremely dissonant?

In theory classes, we're taught that an interval's acoustic consonance is a function of how "simple" it is as a ratio, where "simple" means being a ratio of small integers. So a perfect fifth (3:2) is consonant while a minor second (16:15) is…
user1447786
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Subconscious Plagiarization in Music Production

I have effectively no training in music theory, and have only ever produced a handful of "songs" (unpublished files on my hard drive, resulting from aimless experimentation with production software). While I attempt to be as original as possible, I…
user50920
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Why do low chords sound muddier than high chords?

In most styles of music low notes seemed to be spaced more sparsely in pitch than high ones ie. a piano piece might have octaves in the left hand and dense melody in the right hand. This spacing is in keeping with the spacings of the harmonic…
Orinocco
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What is a listener's typical audible angular resolution?

According to wiki, the human eye has an angular resolution of ~1 arcminute, which means you can distinguish things that are 30 centimetres apart at a distance of 1 kilometre. But your ears have a much lower angular resolution than that. Any idea…
Brian THOMAS
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