Three Lectures to Scientists
Julian Randall · Perspectives of New Music · 1967
LET US explore for a moment some paradoxical consequences of the view that a piece of music-whatever else it may or may not be besides -can be viewed as an anthology of sound-events each of which can be psycho-acoustically investigated on its own; and that the scientific investigation of the perception of such sound-events has nothing in particular to do with the artistic capacities of the investigator. Even at the risk of having to disinter it first, I would like to cast doubt upon this view-not because I suspect that psycho-acousticians are too prone to graze in the pastures of art, but because I suspect that their own work suffers a severe malnutrition resulting from their not being too fussy about what they eat when they do graze there. A psycho-acoustical investigation of a sound-event (or sequence or combination of sound-events) is normally carried out utilizing not only the usual variety of washed and unwashed auditors, but also a variety of sound-event contexts in which the test-event is imbedded. For example, a typical event in a perception test will be designed to elicit from an auditor a statement that two sounds are roughly the same in some clearly (or not-so-clearly) defined respect or that, in this respect, one is more this or that than the other. Now since the scientist is well aware that responses to any one event may depend in part upon the exact context provided by the sequence of events which constitutes the test as a whole, he is properly concerned to build any central event into a variety of contexts; and hence he is properly concerned to develop some contexts for this event which, in his judgment, might tend to suggest one response and others which might tend to suggest another, perhaps even an opposite, response. It would seem then that a scientist framing a perception test is required not merely to know a great deal about the interactions of the various perceivable aspects (durational, intervallic, etc.) of sound-sequences upon one another in influencing whatever may be perceived about some individual element or elements within those