The elements of experience and their integration, or modalism / by Henry J. Watt.

  • Henry J. Watt
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The elements of experience and their integration, or modalism / by Henry 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.

    18/96 (page 144)
    time varying voluminosity and vice versa. As tone is elementary sensation and as pitch and voluminosity are its primitive attributes, it is impossible to look for an explanation of this interdependence of attributes elsewhere than in a physiological theory of the sense-organ. Such an explanation, if it is not actually there already, may be said to be in sight at the present time. But it cannot concern us here. We can do no more than acknowledge the introspective fact of inter- dependence of pitch and voluminosity. For this very reason it is evident that extensity in tone cannot, as in the other senses, be a variable dependent upon the occurrence of many tone-sensations of neighbouring or different order. For as each pitch or order has a different voluminosity inseparably attached, though easily distinguishable from it, the aspect of pitch will always suffice to segregate its fellow voluminosity from others, even when there might be a tendency for them to fuse in some manner, and vice versa. Many tones together, therefore, will not fuse, as sensations of the other senses do, in any way except intensity1; and even that will occur, of course, only when the tones are the same in quality in its threefold aspect, i.e. in pitch. In other words, tones of different pitch sounded together will always be distinguishable, even if they are not always distinguished from one another. It need hardly be added that sounds fuse together as mere sounds apart from all aspects or attributes. Many high tones of nearly the same pitch, even when they are consonant, would not therefore give a voluminosity equal to that of a tone of great depth. The voluminosity of all together may very well differ from that of any of them alone, in a way peculiar to such combination, but it will never approach towards that of a deep tone. For this and other reasons it will often occur that many tones together are not distinguished from one another, but they can always be dis- tinguished as soon as the attention is directed upon their order or pitch, their voluminosity, or the integration of these. For if homo- logous aspects of two tones are distinguishable from one another in isolation, they cannot be completely fused with one another when they occur simultaneously. We have thus brought the introspective nature of auditory sensation into line with that of all the others except the visual and olfactory. And we have explained the first apparent discrepancy between tone 1 Or timbre, which we may neglect for the moment, as it is obviously not a character- istic of the elementary sound. Timbre, as an integrated character of tone-complexes, forms an interesting problem for psychological treatment.