Voice Leading
David Huron · The MIT Press eBooks · 2016
Voice leading is the musical art of combining sounds over time. This book offers an accessible account of the cognitive and perceptual foundations of voice leading. Drawing on decades of scientific research, explanations are provided for many practices and phenomena, including the perceptual dominance of the highest voice, chordal-tone doubling, direct octaves, embellishing tones, and the musical feeling of sounds “leading” somewhere. The traditional rules of voice leading are shown to align almost perfectly with modern scientific accounts of auditory perception. Expanding beyond chorale-style writing, the book shows how established perceptual principles can be used to compose, analyze, and critically understand any kind of acoustical texture from tune-and-accompaniment songs and symphonic orchestration to jazz combo arranging and abstract electroacoustic music. Finally, the book also reviews pertinent research establishing the role of learning and enculturation in auditory and musical perception.