Musical Aptitude as the Ability to Structure Acoustic Material
Kai Karma · International Journal of Music Education · 1984
In the beginning of this century scientific psycho-logy was still new and fighting for a respected status among the established sciences. Even more than today it lacked a generally accepted paradigm which could have formed the frame of reference for theories and empirical study. One central line of thought saw the tradition of the natural sciences as an ideal which should be approached as much as possible. Among other things, this means that elementary phenomena should be isolated and studied in well-controlled experimental situations. For instance, already before the turn of the century numerous studies on the memory were carried out with word lists and the like. The basic principles of proactive and retroactive inhibition, retention curves, overlearning etc. were found in these experiments. Within musical psychology, the best known con-crete consequence of this research tradition is Sea-shore’s Measures of Musical Talents (first published in 1919). Although it includes the subtests of rhythm and tonal memory, the core of the battery is formed by sensory discrimination tasks where pitch, intensity, timbre, and length differences must be heard. Seashore’s idea was to keep the test as free as possible from the effects of culture and training by not using music but variables which were thought to be the basic elements of musical perception. This ’atomistic ’ tradition was later much criti-cized by gestalt psychology. The main point in the criticism was that isolated elements of mental func-tioning are not similar to ones which have their natural interaction with other elements and the whole; ’a whole is more than the sum of its parts’. Within the psychology of music this meant that the ’holistic ’ or ’omnibus ’ ideas of musical ability gained a predominant role.