Perceptual fusion of musical notes by native Amazonians suggests universal representations of musical intervals
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s41467-020-16448-6.pdf
Description
Published version
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1.72 MB
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Author(s)
McPherson, Malinda J.
Dolan, Sophia E
Durango, Alex
Ossandon, Tomas
Valdés, Joaquín
Undurraga, Eduardo A
Jacoby, Nori
Godoy, Ricardo A
McDermott, Joshua Hartman
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020, The Author(s). 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-020-16448-6
