A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    99/446 page 81
    is no disproof of the occurrence of the elemental experience of extensity. II. The Consciousness of Harmony A second perceptual experience of combination with dif¬ ferentiation — a consciousness, as Ebbinghaus calls it, of ‘unity in diversity’ — is that of auditory harmony.11 This consciousness of the differentiated unity of tones must be dis¬ tinguished carefully from tonal fusion. When one vibrating body, a string, rod, or plate of some musical instrument, is set into motion, the untrained listener is conscious of a tonal fusion, a sound in which he does not distinguish different elements of pitch, but hears only the one pitch. The tone which he hears may, to be sure, be different from that which he would hear if the string vibrated only as a whole; but he knows this difference (if, indeed, he is aware of it at all) as voluminousness or timbre, not as a combination of differ¬ ent pitch-elements.* The trained listener, on the other hand, is conscious of a unity of differentiated elements; and among these he recognizes not a single pitch, but several. These distinct elements of pitch are due to the fact that the vibrat¬ ing body vibrates both as a whole and also (more swiftly) in sections.f It thus appears that, for the trained listener, consciousness of harmony, that is, of a unity of different pitch-elements, is produced by the vibration in sections of a single vibrating body. In place of a fusion he experiences that combination of a lower, stronger tone, the fundamental, with one or more higher tones called overtones, partials, or harmonics. The * For experiment, cf. Sanford, 87 a. t For experiment, cf. Sanford, 88.
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