Questions tagged [psychoacoustics]
the scientific study of sound perception.
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Why does a chord sound lower although the individual notes went up?
I was dabbling around on my keyboard and noticed a strange effect that I'd like to learn more about.
I'm sure this is a well-known effect that probably has a name, but it's a little hard to google ...
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Do the notes in a scale project a specific feeling, or personality? [closed]
Has anyone tried to describe the "feel" that the various notes in a scale have? For instance, in any scale, the tonic, root, or 1st degree, could be described as something like calm, ...
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What is a listener's typical audible angular resolution?
According to wiki, the human eye has an angular resolution of ~1 arcminute, which means
you can distinguish things that are 30 centimetres apart at a distance of 1 kilometre.
But your ears have a much ...
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My muscle memory is tied to my auditory sense: is there a name for the phenomemon?
When I play a simple melody on my guitar while I strum (to create the sound) I can quite easily determine where to put my frethand finger for the next note.
But if I do not create the sound, ...
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What makes descending chords so Sci-Fi? Psychologically [closed]
I have noticed that descending chord progressions seem to feel sci-fi-ish. I'm playing on an acoustic piano, so I mean that it just feels that way because of the composition, not some synth filter.
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Does tuning music to A = 432 Hz versus A = 440 Hz have a measurable effect on listeners?
A brief internet search for "432 vs 440" will bring up a large number of chat discussions and videos discussing whether the tuning makes a real difference. These often seem to boil down to ...
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To what extent can humans perceive musical notes when they "blend" together? Do composers intentionally blend notes together?
I have a fidget-spinner. When it is still, it looks like this:
When it is moving, it looks like this
Physically, the prongs are always there. The issue is how my brain processes it. There is a ...
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Harmonic Series Interference
I have been analysing intervals to look at the frequency difference between harmonics.
Before my analysis I was under the impression that harmonics for 'consonant' sounding intervals contained more ...
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Why do frequencies that follow a base two logarithmic relationship sound the "same"? [duplicate]
We know that frequencies that follow a base two logarithmic relationship sound as the same tone. This seems to be one of the fundamental principles that underlies music theory. For example, ...
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Is there a reason why "Scale Inversions" don't get discussed?
It only dawned on me recently, but it's quite a fundamental and important feature of scales that they are not mirrored under their own inversion.
The intervalic formula for major is:
W W H W W W H
If ...
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Psychology experiment using sounds of alternating notes
Many years ago, I remember hearing of a psychology experiment where participants were asked to listen to two sounds and choose which one was higher or lower.
The two sounds were a mix of pure tones. ...
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Audio latency in live bands
In computer music one usually says that the audio latency of the system should ideally be less than 10ms…
On the other hand, as the speed of sound is around 340 m/s in the air it means that whenever ...
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How to synthesize non-pitched sounds? How pitched is a sound in general?
Non pitched sounds are sounds which are not only composed of a fundamental frequency and a distribution of its harmonics. For instance, a sound composed of a sum of a sin wave at 440Hz and a sin at ...
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Volume adjustment based on frequency of played note
I'm currently in the process of implementing a basic software synthesizer.
I read that some frequencies are perceived as louder, even when they have the same amplitude. This relation is described by ...
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Flutes in octaves sounds like an organ? Why does this happen?
I have noticed something when I hear 2 flutes in octaves or a flute and piccolo playing the same notated notes, sounding an octave apart. It starts to not sound like a flute. In particular it sounds ...
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The discriminating power of experienced listeners
Consider a choir of n singers who sing the same tune in almost perfect unison.
When asked how many singers they do hear, test persons may say:
don't know
more than 3, 5, 10, ...
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ...
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What does affect the recognition of melodies, rhythms, and chords?
I am looking for studies or meta-studies in which it has been systematically explored how two presented pieces of music (two rhythms, two melodies, two chords) may deviate such that test persons do ...
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Hearing a sequence of tones but not a melody
Normal cognitive sciences (neurosciences and psychology) try to explain what goes on when a person
hearing a sequence of beats perceives a rhythm
hearing a sequence of tones perceives a melody
...
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Third resonant frequency when two notes are played
I have noticed that when two notes - relatively spaced apart, more than a tone and less than an octave - are played, there is a third frequency that can be heard, and this frequency lies between the ...
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Is there any objective evidence that different keys "feel different" or have different moods?
In an advertisement in YouTube for composer Danny Elfman's master class viewable here the composer says:
When somebody starts talking about “this should be in such and such a key because such a key ...
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What is the difference between tone deafness and amusia?
Trying to explain that the multiple reasons of the inability to sing the right tone (to match pitch) I encountered two other terms: amusia and ton defness.
I wonder how far these two terms are ...
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Why aren't slight imperfections in consonant intervals extremely dissonant?
In theory classes, we're taught that an interval's acoustic consonance is a function of how "simple" it is as a ratio, where "simple" means being a ratio of small integers. So a perfect fifth (3:2) is ...
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Amplitude of a crest and trough in a sound wave?
Lets say we have a sound wave, it has a frequency, wavelength, crest, trough, etc.
My question is, is the crest of a sound wave equaled to high amplitude/ high volume and if so, does that mean the ...
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A truly perfect unison
Two notes are two notes. At least, it seems that way. When people play two notes at two frequencies, they sound like two notes, even when they're playing in unison. There are a variety of factors ...
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How did the audience guess the pentatonic scale in Bobby McFerrin's presentation?
The video below is entitled "The Power of the Pentatonic Scale". And from the video you'd think that people are inherently tuned to the pentatonic scale. But I was wondering if they're really ...
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The effects of memory on the perception of harmonic function
The opening four bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony are performed in pure octaves, with no other notes to color our perception of what we hear:
The notes are G G G E♭, F F F D
Taken alone ...
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Psychology Of Key Preferences
I'm a layperson with regards to all things music. I have some experience with the guitar and took a semester long music theory class in high school, but aside from that and some stuff I've heard from ...
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What is the main note you hear when hearing a chord?
I've done experiments on my friends and myself, and when listening to chords, the note we end up hearing at the forefront (in other words the note we hum when reproducing the song) is actually the ...
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Lower interval limits
I've heard about this concept of lower interval limits: An arbitrary limit to how low any given pattern of harmonic intervals can be played before it starts to sound muddy. It generally predicts that ...
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Is the sense of resolution of a harmonic cadence psychologically "intrinsic", or is it created through conditioning?
If we took someone who had never heard western music before and played a piece of music with, say, a deceptive cadence and a perfect cadence in it, would they understand it? I.e., would they feel that ...
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What is the smallest difference in note lengths that an average listener can still perceive?
Approximately speaking, what is the smallest temporal difference, expressed in milliseconds, in note lengths (for consecutively sounded notes) that an average, untrained listener can still (semi)...
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Can a pitch be perceived outside the range where it can be heard?
In an example on the wikipedia section on Binaural Beats it says that two sine waves heard as separate signals, one in each ear, which differ by 10 Hz will produce the perception of a 10 Hz difference ...
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Subconscious Plagiarization in Music Production
I have effectively no training in music theory, and have only ever produced a handful of "songs" (unpublished files on my hard drive, resulting from aimless experimentation with production software).
...
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Does the THX Deep Note Actually Increase in SPL/IL?
This may be more of a question for the Physics StackExchange, but I thought I'd post it here since it is in some sense a musical question. The Wikipedia article on the Deep Note includes the ...
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How does the ear pick which note to hear when hearing guitar vibrato
When adding vibrato to a fretted note on an electric guitar, if I do so by bending the note up a semitone, I perceive as the pitch of the original note being modulated. When applying vibrato to a bend ...
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Time the sound of a pressed piano key take to reach the human ear
I'm working on a DPS software and I was looking at the entire time that my sound sample take from the moment it begin the processing until it reach the ear. I'm reaching something like 71ms, but I've ...
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What makes some instruments louder than others?
Main question: are longer pianos actually louder?
Context: When a musician plays on an acoustic instrument, I expect that the loudness produced corresponds to raw energy (as measured in Joules or ...
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Number of notes in a tune such that it is metrically sensible
I am computationally generating short tunes (aiming for around 10-15 notes, 0.5 seconds per note) for a psychology experiment. I am wondering exactly how many notes I should have per tune, so that the ...
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Why do lower instruments speak "slower"?
Why do lower instruments, such as double bass and cello in an orchestra or chamber setting, are discerned by the ear slower than higher instruments (violin, flute, etc)? Does it have to do with the ...
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Identifying a contrasting pair of musical memory trait
Trait-1:
My mother, a non-professional music teacher of Indian-classic (North indian) Vocal-music and Nazrul's songs. She is good in her stream (in my opinion), she had a strong interest for indian ...
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Should low frequency players anticipate in orchestra?
"The bigger the instrument, the heavier the strings, the bigger the bow, the bigger the mouthpiece, the more you should anticipate." This concept is expressed occasionally by double bass players, ...
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A seriously difficult question about mistakes and intepretation of music
I just came up with a question that I've never seen asked or talked about. It maybe obvious to everyone else in the world but I realized I simply can't answer it except with the non-answer.
This is ...
user2691
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Question on critical-band and critical-band rate usage
If I take a note with frequency 101 Hz (roughly G2), then the critical bandwidth (CB) will be made up of 51 Hz on the low end and 151 Hz on the high end. This means that if I play a D3 with frequency ...
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Why do low chords sound muddier than high chords?
In most styles of music low notes seemed to be spaced more sparsely in pitch than high ones ie. a piano piece might have octaves in the left hand and dense melody in the right hand.
This spacing is ...
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What contributes to the roughness of a sound?
I know this is a little subjective in regards to what roughness is. So, imagine the sound of a sine wave, you could say this is the purest, or cleanest sound there is.
Now contrast that to a ...
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What's the shortest that a note can be and still have a recognisable pitch?
While talking about this question:
What does it mean to play a note for half a second?
I got to thinking - how short can a note actually be for us to perceive its fundamental pitch?
Obviously real ...
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Is it learned or innate our reaction of happiness or sadness in music? [duplicate]
Are we born with the response telling us that the chord tones or melody has a sad or happy quality? Or is it learned by our culture?
The minor scale and chords have a serious or sadness to them ...
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Does good intonation alone really make you "louder"? If yes, why?
I have multiple times heard this claim, from very different sources.
There certainly seems to be some correlation between intonation and "loudness", in the sense that ensembles with great harmony ...
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What gives a piece of music its personality and feeling? [closed]
What makes a piece of music sound angry, dark, sad, happy, or otherwise?
"La Chute" by Yann Tiersen sounds so angry to me and "A Dark Knight" from "The Dark Knight" movie sounds so dark and ...
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