Schwartz David A, Howe Catherine Q, Purves Dale
Department of Neurobiology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University Medical Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA.
J Neurosci. 2003 Aug 6;23(18):7160-8. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.23-18-07160.2003.
The similarity of musical scales and consonance judgments across human populations has no generally accepted explanation. Here we present evidence that these aspects of auditory perception arise from the statistical structure of naturally occurring periodic sound stimuli. An analysis of speech sounds, the principal source of periodic sound stimuli in the human acoustical environment, shows that the probability distribution of amplitude-frequency combinations in human utterances predicts both the structure of the chromatic scale and consonance ordering. These observations suggest that what we hear is determined by the statistical relationship between acoustical stimuli and their naturally occurring sources, rather than by the physical parameters of the stimulus per se.
人类群体中音阶与和声判断的相似性尚无普遍接受的解释。在此，我们提供证据表明，听觉感知的这些方面源于自然产生的周期性声音刺激的统计结构。对语音（人类声学环境中周期性声音刺激的主要来源）的分析表明，人类话语中振幅 - 频率组合的概率分布既预测了半音音阶的结构，也预测了和声排序。这些观察结果表明，我们所听到的内容是由声学刺激与其自然声源之间的统计关系决定的，而非刺激本身的物理参数。
