Nonlinearities and Synchronization in Musical Acoustics and Music Psychology [Hardcover]

This book offers an overview of models, measurements, calculations and examples connecting musical acoustics and music psychology. Indeed, many mathematical formulations that explain musical acoustics can also be used to help predict human auditory perception.This book surveys research on nonlinearities in musical systems, discusses tools for analyzing sounds in the Fourier and the phase space domains, and introduces the Finite-Element and Finite-Difference methods for physical modeling of musical instruments.Introduction.- Signal Processing.- Frequency Representations.- Embedding Representations.- Physical Modelling.- Musical Acoustics.- Musical Instruments.- Impulse Pattern Formulation.- Examples of Impulse Pattern Formulation.- Music Psychology.- Psychoacoustic.- Timbre.- Rhythm.- Pitch, Melody, Tonality.- CD Tracks.

Nonlinearities are a crucial and founding principle in nearly all musical systems, may they be musical instruments, timbre or rhythm perception and production, or neural networks of music perception. This volume gives an overview about present and past research in these fields. In Musical Acoustics, on the one hand the nonlinearities in musical instruments often produce the musically interesting features. On the other, musical instruments are nonlinear by nature, and tone production is the result of synchronization and self-organization within the instruments. Furthermore, as nearly all musical instruments are driven by impulses an Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF) is suggested, an iterative framework holding for all musical instruments. It appears that this framework is able to reproduce the complex and perceptionally most salient initial transients of musical instruments. In Music Psychology, nonlinearities are present in all areas of musical features, like pitch, timbre, or rhythm perception. In terms of rhythm production and motion, self-organizing models are the only ones able to explain sudden phase-transitions while tapping. Self-organl£_