The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt.

  • Watt, Henry J. (Henry Jackson), 1879-1925.
Date:
[between 1910 and 1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    6/20 (page 262)
    26^ distance is probably one of the simplest, other varieties being line, mass, surface, outline, and forms of all kinds. Another prominent group adds to all these the feature of motion. It is not difficult to state a general relation between these complexes and the variable attributes that appear in their parts. When we turn to hearing to seek a parallel to these, we must remember that we have established in uniaural hearing only a single dimension of pitch orders and that con- sequently all pitch forms and motions can be only of one dimension. In the transverse dimensions of auditory orders that the two ears mobilise for us we may similarly look for spatial forms and motions of only one dimension. And this is approximately all that the direct localisational capacity of binaural hearing affords. The forms of pitch are found in the volumes of sounds (especially of tones) and in the intervals and chords of groups of tones. Their motions appear in the melodies of successive tones. The same fine sense of proportion that we find in ourselves for the proportions of visual distances and lines appears again in our familiar delicacy of discrimination of intervals—which are the proportions of auditory volumes (or pitch lines). It is of the greatest importance for the theoretical foundations of music that these things should be worked out in the finest detail. But it would be impossible to sketch them intelligently here.^ In the sense of vision a complication of the greatest im- portance appears which by a peculiar interlacing of two visual fields adds a third dimension to vision. This new dimension is not the result of any sort of cognitive correla- tion of the contributory fields ; it is a sensory fact, as much visible as is either of the primary dimensions of a single field. This fact is really undeniable by anyone who has carefully considered the simpler aspects of stereoscopic vision. The attempt has often been made to bring the sense of solidity under the head of the products of “ experience ” by reference to some other source, especially to touch and muscular movement; but without success. The fact of stereoscopy, as it can be demonstrated so simply with the stereoscope, is much too “ solid ” to be thus explained away or to be con- verted into a by-product of the mere succession of any simpler (two-dimensional) forms. The acceptance of this creative synthesis and its product must incline our judgment in the case of space, greatly in ^ Cf. my two books on the subject, The Psychology of Sounds Cam- bridge, 1917, and The Foundations of Music, Cambridge, 1919.