The psychology of musical appreciation / by C.S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1933]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The psychology of musical appreciation / by C.S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    summation of small tone distances, although later they were broken up to give rise to a series of smaller tone intervals. Our own tone intervals are so often experienced through the simultaneous sounding of the two tones constituting any interval, that it is generally supposed that their selection has been due to the ‘ degree of consonance ’ or ‘ fusion ’ experi¬ enced when two tones of different pitch are sounded together. But many primitive peoples who use harmonious intervals sing only in unison, and these intervals occur in the songs of peoples who employ no musical instruments and hence no instrumental accompaniment whatever. The first use of tone intervals seems therefore to depend on the pleasure derived from the relation of two consecutive tones, not from the consonant effects of fusion obtained by hearing the two tones simultaneously. It is obvious that the memory for absolute pitch has played an essential part in developing this relation. Indeed musical instruments, so far from developing the appreciation of harmonious (or consonant) intervals, have often helped to maintain scales based on tone distances. Thus the Siamese and Javanese instrumental scales divide the octave into seven and five equal steps, respectively ; and our own pianoforte scale consists of twelve equal semitones,—a method of tempering which was independently adopted or advocated also in Indian and Chinese music. The ancient Greeks, too, appeared to have formed their scale by adding note after note or by joining tetrachord to tetrachord on their instruments. Indeed they gave a different letter-name to each note, ranging from a to co ; only in Byzantine times was the note following 17 given the name of a,—the identity of octave tones being at length recognized by identity of lettering. Some years ago, the essential distinction between tone distances and the fusion effects of tone intervals was demon¬ strated by the description of a case of disordered hearing, in which the apparent pitch of a certain note was so lowered that its distance from another note, when they were sounded successively, was judged by the patient to be much reduced ; but when the same two notes were sounded together, the true interval was at once correctly reported.