Hello my name's Scott Lipscomb. I'm an associate professor of music education and the associate director of
University of Minnesota School of Music. I'm here today to talk with you about
Music psychology and why understanding music psychology is so very important to music educators.
The study of psychology is crucial to our understanding of music because music
is a form of communication. There was a wonderful model of music education
proposed by Kendall and Karderat in 1990, and if we look at that model
you'll see that they proposed that three individuals or groups
of individuals are involved in this in western art music, and that tends to be an composer
a performer or group of performers, and a listeners or group of listeners.
In these cases information is communicated between the composer and the
performer often through musical notation. The information from the performer to the listener
involves the process of molecular vibration; vibrating a string,
causing the air molecules to vibrate in tandem, and then setting off the sensory
organ in the ear, the auditory organ in the ear, which then triggers electrical impulses in the brain.
We go into a lot of detail into my class talking about that, right now I'd just kind of like to leave
at that, but the idea of communication is crucial because communication
is crucial, we have to understand how the mind takes information, and
create meaning out of that information. Roger Kendall and Edgar Careve
proposed a various interesting model of music communication, involving a composer, performer,
and a listener. Each of these individuals or groups of individuals in some cases
have certain shared understanding and other understanding that's individually
specific. So, as we consider the cognitive processing of music sound
psychology plays a very important role, and one type of psychology that emerged in the late
18th, 19th and early 20th century was Gestalt Psychology. In
1890, Christian Ferlandefils laid a philosophical foundation
for this position, and in the early 20th century, students of Carol Stof,
Koffca Vanhiemer and Kurler took this to a new level. Their early
research involved visual perception, not auditory perception, but we've since learned
that these principals that they've proposed hold true both for
visual and audio perception. If we truly over simplify
the idea of Gestalt psychology, it's the idea that the whole
or the total experience is greater than the sum of its parts, and in fact that's what the principals
of Gestalt Psychology help us to delineate. The concept of
a gestalt can be simplified as the whole, in other words the whole being
being greater than the sum of its parts. One of the aspects that these psychologists did was try to figure out
what are the principals behind our perception, and so they began laying out specific
things that happen in the communication process. What our brains try to do
is to minimize complexity and unfamiliarity. Making something as simple as
it can possibly be. This brings up a very interesting point,
and that is that our perception is not simply an input and output process.
As earlier were Pavlov's Classical Conditioning for example,
would lead us to believe that input, output, what I refer to affectionately is the Ding, Slurp
Theory. The idea of something happens and you respond to it. In fact
Our perception is one of synthesis; we create out individual experience based
on that sensory information, so as we move forward
the Gestalt principals are build around the basic tennet referred to as
pregnance, and that's basically this idea of taking complexity
taking something that is unfamiliar and imposing order on that. Some of the ways that this
happens is through the principal of proximity, those things that are close together seem to belong together.
So thing in terms of music pitch. Those frequencies that are close to one another are considered
to be part of the same group. Things that are similar, the principal
of similarity, objects that retain some kind of similarity, so, for example,
instrumental tampers, sounds that come from a specific instrumental tamper tend to belong
together as we perceive them. Closure is another principal, the idea that
we want things to come to a meaningful conclusion, and in fact if you look at a circle that has a
little section of it missing, often we don't even notice that that's missing.
Moving forward, the idea of symmetry is very important, we want ot see things as symmetrical
so even in chaotic random dots, we impose an order that
imposes some sense of symmetry on that, and finally there are about three more
but I'll stop with this one as we move forward, the idea of common fate, moving in the same direction,
things/objects with the same trajectory seem to belong together and I'll give you some examples
of that right now. To provide some specific examples of Gestalts happening
I'd like to show you same visual examples, so if you look at this slide, you'll notice that
there are a collection of letters. There are several randomly selected distractor letters
and mixed in amongst them is a word. I'd like you to try to pick it out, I'll give you five seconds.
What's the hidden word? Now I'm going to make it much easier
for you, when I click this button you'll see an animation occur
and two things happened. As the letters move, common faith
was in operation, now that they're apart, melody
is separate from the letters for detractors. So that space, that proximity of
the letters in melody and the proximity of the letters in detractor allow you to separate
those into two separate groups, and then when I return them, even though you know the word, you have the schema
in your mind for the word melody, it's very difficult to pull it out from the slide.
We can also use the process of similarity, and you'll notice here that I've changed
the text so that it's red and you can easily read still the word
melody in those contexts. So, visually yes you can say
I see that happening, but what does that mean to music perception? There was some fascinating
work done by Al Bregman during the 70's, 80's and 90's on an area called auditory
scene analysis. Trying to understand what allows us to hear different conversations in a room
specifically in a cocktail party he was interested. Why can't we follow multiple
conversations at one time? How does it allow that to happen? So he
came to these principals of gestalt psychology as a means of discrimination.
So, I'm going to play a musical example for you, this one also deals with
proximity. I'm going to play you a series of tones, they are again like the letters
distractor tones, but there is also a very familiar melody hidden in this particular
example. So, I'll play the first example and I'm asking you to pick out a hidden melody.
Got it?
It's difficult. What I'm going to do now is
take the melody and bump it up two semi-tones, so we're beginning to separate it out.
Same exact distractor tones.
*music playing*
Alright. Lets do it two more semi-tones. Very few people at this point in my
classes can actually pick those out, so we're going to now raise it two more.
*music playing*
Two more semi-tones, see if you can pick out the hidden melody.
*music playing*
On that example I begin to see some lights go off in my classes. Some students are hearing it, but not
everyone, so I'm going to do two more. At this point from where we've started we've raised the melody
by eight semi-tones
*music playing*
And in that one I hope that
you can hear higher than the distractor tones the melody of Mary Had a Little Lamb. I'm going to play that
one more time so that you can hear it.
*music playing*
Did you hear it? So by separating the melody out, by
keeping those pitches that were in the melody farther apart than those of the distractor
tones, we're able to group the melody separate from the distractor
tones. So tones
proximity, I get it. What does that mean to musical sound? Let me show you
an example from Tchaikovsky's Sixth symphony that uses a very unique
approach to this particular aspect of musical sound. i'll play you first
the opening of the forth movement, it's a beautiful piece, and I'm just going to play
the example for you. Ok. so what does that mean about music? Sure
I hear in the tones that separating things makes me hear one melody separate from another.
I hear in the tones that separating things makes me hear one melody separate from another. Ok proximity
matters. What does this mean when we listen to actually music in the concert hall.
Well there's a wonderful example in Tchaikovsky's Sixth symphony, the opening of the fourth movement.
Where he does something very interesting with the melody. I'd like you to listen first
to the full orchestra playing that opening couple of lines.
*music playing*
and I'm going to ask you to listen one more time, and this time hum along with the melody. Pick out the melody
and hum along with it.
*music playing*
*humming*
The melody that you just sang doesn't exist anywhere in the notation.
And in fact, I'm going to play you the first violin part separate from the second.
violin part, and then I'll combine them together
The first violins re playing the following
:*music plays* Are you surprised?
The second violins are playing this
:*music playing* Now
alright after hearing the first violin part and the second violin part, I'm going to play you one file
that I created by simply taking those two musical sound files and putting them together.
Violin 1 is in one channel of the sterofield, violin 2 is in the other channel.
I'll play that combination for you now. See if you can hear either the first violin part
(the angular jumping up and down)or the second violin part, separately. See if you can pull that out.
*music playing*
Most people,
99.9% of my class have a great deal of difficulty hearing those parts. In fact our perception
so pushes us towards hearing that meaningful melodic line instead of
the jumping around, because your brain says, wait a minute. I can't possibly
be what Tchaikovsky meant to do. This melody makes a lot more sense, so you take the first note
of the first violin part, the second note of the second violin part, the third note of the first, and
created a descending melody instead of hearing the two parts jumping back and forth.
The musical notation as it exists is as represented on the screen.
This is how the notation actually looks, but this is how we hear that
perception. If you look at the screen now you'll see the notation
as it appears in the score. However, the notation as we hear it
is much different. Our brain organizes those musical notes
in a way that makes sense based on our past experience. In closing
I'd like to come back to the idea of communicating through music. What is the meaning
of psychology, of gestalt psychology, of these principals
to the musical classroom? I would pause it to you that without understanding
how music is listened to, how music is heard, how music is learned,
it's very difficult to be able to understand musical communication and also to
effectively communicate that information to a population of students.
So I hope that you'll take time to use this presentation as a basis for
wondering what else you could learn about psychology that would positively impact your teaching, 170 00:14:25,280 --> 00:14:19,439 and your opportunities to learn music. Thank you.