Richard Parncutt

My first encounter with the theory of harmony was during my last year at school (1975). This fascinating system of rules crystallized the intuitive knowledge of harmony I had acquired from years of piano playing, and facilitated memorization, transcription, arrangement and composition. For the next five years, I studied music (piano) and science (Physics) at the Univer sity of Melbourne. This "strange combination" started me wondering about the origins of those music theory "rules". To what extent were they determined or influenced by physics? mathematics? physiology? conditioning? In 1981, the supervisor of my honours project in musical acoustics, Neville Fletcher, showed me an article entitled "Pitch, consonance, and harmony", by a certain Ernst Terhardt of the Technical University of Munich. By that stage, I had devoured a considerable amount of (largely unsatisfactory) material on the nature and origins of harmony, which enabled me to recognize the significance of Terhardt's article. But it was not until I arrived in Munich the following year (on Terhardt's invitation) that I began to appreciate the conse quences of his "psychoacoustical" approach for the theory of harmony. That is what this book is about. The book presents Terhardt's work against the broad context of music perception research, past and present. Music perception is a multidisciplinary mixture of physics, psychology and music. Where different theoretical ap proaches appear contradictory, I try to show instead that they complement and enrich one another.

Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach

Gary McPherson

What type of practice makes a musician perfect? What sort of child is most likely to succeed on a musical instrument? What practice strategies yield the fastest improvement in skills such as sight-reading, memorization, and intonation? Scientific and psychological research can offer answers to these and other questions that musicians face every day. In The Science and Psychology of Music Performance, Richard Parncutt and Gary McPherson assemble relevant current research findings and make them accessible to musicians and music educators. This book describes new approaches to teaching music, learning music, and making music at all educational and skill levels. Each chapter represents the collaboration between a music researcher (usually a music psychologist) and a performer or music educator. This combination of expertise results in excellent practical advice. Readers will learn, for example, that they are in the majority (57%) if they experience rapid heartbeat before performances; the chapter devoted to performance anxiety will help them decide whether beta-blocker medication, hypnotherapy, or the Alexander Technique of relaxation might alleviate their stage fright. Another chapter outlines a step-by-step method for introducing children to musical notation, firmly based on research in cognitive development. Altogether, the 21 chapters cover the personal, environmental, and acoustical influences that shape the learning and performance of music.

Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning

The Science and Psychology of Music Performance

Music educators and practicing musicians have failed to benefit as much as they could from the past two decades of music psychology research. In this volume, Parncutt and McPherson propose to improve the situation by describing new approaches, informed by recent psychological research, to teaching music, learning music, and making music at all educational levels.

Richard Parncutt

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