Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
Program in Speech and Hearing Biosciences and Technology, Harvard University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Jun 3;11(1):2786. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16448-6.
Music perception is plausibly constrained by universal perceptual mechanisms adapted to natural sounds. Such constraints could arise from our dependence on harmonic frequency spectra for segregating concurrent sounds, but evidence has been circumstantial. We measured the extent to which concurrent musical notes are misperceived as a single sound, testing Westerners as well as native Amazonians with limited exposure to Western music. Both groups were more likely to mistake note combinations related by simple integer ratios as single sounds ('fusion'). Thus, even with little exposure to Western harmony, acoustic constraints on sound segregation appear to induce perceptual structure on note combinations. However, fusion did not predict aesthetic judgments of intervals in Westerners, or in Amazonians, who were indifferent to consonance/dissonance. The results suggest universal perceptual mechanisms that could help explain cross-cultural regularities in musical systems, but indicate that these mechanisms interact with culture-specific influences to produce musical phenomena such as consonance.
音乐感知可能受到适应于自然声音的通用感知机制的限制。这种限制可能源于我们对谐波频谱的依赖，以便将同时发出的声音分离开来，但目前的证据还只是间接的。我们测量了同时出现的音符被误认为是单一声音的程度，同时测试了接触西方音乐有限的西方人和亚马逊本地人。这两组人更容易将简单整数比相关的音符组合误认为是单一声音（“融合”）。因此，即使很少接触西方和声，声音分离的声学限制似乎也会在音符组合上产生感知结构。然而，融合并不能预测西方人的音程审美判断，也不能预测对协和/不协和音无动于衷的亚马逊人的音程审美判断。研究结果表明，存在通用的感知机制，可以帮助解释音乐系统中的跨文化规律，但也表明这些机制与特定文化的影响相互作用，从而产生了诸如协和之类的音乐现象。
