Perceptual fusion of musical notes by native Amazonians suggests universal representations of musical intervals

Malinda J. McPherson (), Sophia E. Dolan, Alex Durango, Tomas Ossandon, Joaquín Valdés, Eduardo A. Undurraga, Nori Jacoby, Ricardo A. Godoy and Josh H. McDermott ()
Additional contact information
Malinda J. McPherson: MIT
Sophia E. Dolan: Wellesley College
Alex Durango: MIT
Tomas Ossandon: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Joaquín Valdés: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Eduardo A. Undurraga: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Nori Jacoby: Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Ricardo A. Godoy: Brandeis University
Josh H. McDermott: MIT

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Music perception is plausibly constrained by universal perceptual mechanisms adapted to natural sounds. Such constraints could arise from our dependence on harmonic frequency spectra for segregating concurrent sounds, but evidence has been circumstantial. We measured the extent to which concurrent musical notes are misperceived as a single sound, testing Westerners as well as native Amazonians with limited exposure to Western music. Both groups were more likely to mistake note combinations related by simple integer ratios as single sounds (‘fusion’). Thus, even with little exposure to Western harmony, acoustic constraints on sound segregation appear to induce perceptual structure on note combinations. However, fusion did not predict aesthetic judgments of intervals in Westerners, or in Amazonians, who were indifferent to consonance/dissonance. The results suggest universal perceptual mechanisms that could help explain cross-cultural regularities in musical systems, but indicate that these mechanisms interact with culture-specific influences to produce musical phenomena such as consonance.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16448-6 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-16448-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16448-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().