Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach by Richard Parncutt

Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach by Richard Parncutt

My first encounter with the theory of harmony was during my last year at school (1975). This fascinating system of rules crystallized the intuitive knowledge of harmony I had acquired from years of piano playing, and facilitated memorization, transcription, arrangement and composition. For the next five years, I studied music (piano) and science (Physics) at the Univer- sity of Melbourne. This strange combination started me wondering about the origins of those music theory rules. To what extent were they determined or influenced by physics? mathematics? physiology? conditioning? In 1981, the supervisor of my honours project in musical acoustics, Neville Fletcher, showed me an article entitled Pitch, consonance, and harmony, by a certain Ernst Terhardt of the Technical University of Munich. By that stage, I had devoured a considerable amount of (largely unsatisfactory) material on the nature and origins of harmony, which enabled me to recognize the significance of Terhardt's article. But it was not until I arrived in Munich the following year (on Terhardt's invitation) that I began to appreciate the conse- quences of his psychoacoustical approach for the theory of harmony. That is what this book is about. The book presents Terhardt's work against the broad context of music perception research, past and present. Music perception is a multidisciplinary mixture of physics, psychology and music. Where different theoretical ap- proaches appear contradictory, I try to show instead that they complement and enrich one another.

Martina Koegeler-Abdi is a graduate student in American Studies specializing in multiethnic literature, and feminist and postcolonial theory. She holds a teaching degree in English, American and Spanish Studies from the University of Graz; an MA degree in Comparative Literature; and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies from the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at SUNY Stony Brook, New York. She was Co-Director of the Conference on Applied Interculturality Research at the University of Graz in 2010 and has published in the MELUS Journal. Richard Parncutt is a music psychologist and Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz, Austria. His publications address musical structure, music performance, the origins of tonality and of music, and musicological interdisciplinarity. He holds qualifications in Music and Physics from the University of Melbourne and an interdisciplinary PhD in Psychology, Music and Physics from the University of New England, Australia. In 2000, Parncutt organised an academic response to the wave of xenophobia and racism in Graz and Austria that preceded and followed the 1999 federal elections. The project culminated in cAIR and this book.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9783642748332
ISBN 10	3642748333
Title	Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach
Author	Richard Parncutt
Series	Springer Series In Information Sciences
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Springer
Year published	2011-12-13
Number of pages	212
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.