Music perception

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between music perception as it is studied in the laboratory and as it occurs in the real world. We first examine general principles by which listeners group musical tones into perceptual configurations, and how these principles are implemented in music composition and performance. We then show that, for certain types of configuration, the music as it is perceived can differ substantially from the music that is notated in the score, or as might be imagined from reading the score. Furthermore, there are striking differences between listeners in the perception of certain musical passages. Implications of these findings are discussed. First, we consider general principles of perceptual organization and show how they are applied to live musical situations. Second, we show that music as perceived can, for certain configurations, be quite different from that in the written score, or as might be imagined from reading a score. Instead, striking illusions can occur on listening to music, and there are strong differences between listeners in the way that some of these illusions are perceived. In some cases, such perceptual differences correlate with handedness, and so can be taken to reflect variations in innate brain organization. In the case of another illusion, perceptual differences correlate with the language or dialect to which the listener has been exposed, particularly in childhood, and point to an influence of exposure to extramusical phenomena on the perception of music.