Difference between revisions of "220a-fall-2007/psychoacoustics"

Latest revision as of 21:30, 4 January 2008

Pyschoacoustics (the science of hearing/audition) can be explored and exploited in computer music.

Musical examples played in class on 10/23/07 include solo saxophone music by Eric Barber, Ugandan amadinda (wooden xylophone) music from the Demonstrations of Auditory Scene Analysis CD, and the Headphone Canon by Nick Didkovsky.

Researcher David Huron classifies 8 primary auditory phenomena: loudness, pitch, timbre, toneness, apparent location, auditory streaming, numerosity, sensory dissonce. More info can be found in his Music Cognition Handbook: A Glossary of Concepts: [1].

Pd lab#3/hw#3 [[2]] involves auditory streaming. A visual analogy is given in the lab.

Several psychology lab examples of auditory streaming have been created by Albert Bregman and Pierre Ahad at the Auditory Perception Laboratory, McGill University (Montreal) and are available on the Demonstrations of Auditory Scene Analysis CD which provides examples of phenomena discussed in Bregman's 1990 book, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound, a core text that reports on hypotheses and experiments.

Other useful texts include:

Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound - Perry R. Cook, Ed. (MIT Press: 1999/2001)

An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing - Brian C.J Moore (Elsevier Science: 2003, 5th Ed.)

Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition - Stephen McAdams and Emmanuel Bigand, Eds. (Oxford University Press: 1993/2001)

The spring quarter course, Music 151: Psychophysics and Cognitive Psychology for Musicians, taught by Professor Jonathan Berger, is highly recommended.