Abstract
How shall we define the musical stimulus? Traditionally, music theorists interested in pitch phenomena have sought the definition in terms of ratios of whole numbers. Such ratios can provide a description of most, if not all, of the musical intervals in use today, and can be translated readily into ratios of physically realizable tone frequencies. Psychoacousticians, following the dictates of reductionism, have sought a finer grain of analysis than this, pointing out that the essential constituent of an interval is a tone, and that the study of music perception must ultimately refer to the perception of single tones and their frequency components. Accordingly, a great deal of scientific effort has gone into studying the perception of isolated tones.
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Balzano, G.J. (1982). The Pitch Set as a Level of Description for Studying Musical Pitch Perception. In: Clynes, M. (eds) Music, Mind, and Brain. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8917-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8917-0_17
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