What makes a tune?
John Booth Davies · 2024
In previous chapters we have taken a look at the individual elements of which music is composed. The chief message concerning these individual elements is that they are interesting primarily on account of their perceptual characteristics which affect the way in which we experience them. These characteristics of tonal perception determine the type of sensory experience that a person is subject to when he listens to music. We have also seen that elements taken in isolation have nothing of the richness or depth, nothing of the emotional significance, or, if you prefer, none of the meaning of these same elements occurring in the context of a piece of music. The whole appears to be greater than the sum of the parts; furthermore, it is people who make it so. A string of more or less unremarkable and insignificant sounds only becomes a tune, or piece of music, as a result of the organizing capacities of the human brain. The central assertion is that seeing, hearing and remembering aie all acts of construction , which may make more or less use of the stimulus information depending on circumstances’, wrote Neisser (1967 ). It is these capacities which are central to any type of musical activity, especially that most widespread activity, listening to music. Furthermore, the human ear is, within very broad limits, of very little significance. Thus, people born with extremely sensitive hearing or an extraordinary capacity for discriminating sounds, are not automatically more musical than others with normal hearing. The reverse is also true. People with various species of auditory deficit can be extremely musical, providing that their hearing is not prohibitively bad. Herbert Wing, for example, administered his tests to a sample of boys who were considered sufficiently deaf to merit medical attention, and concluded that their disability had very little effect upon their performance on the tests (1948).