Psychology of Music

by Carl E. Seashore

Between the physical world of vibration, as measured by apparatus, and the world of consciously heard music there is a third area of investigation. Our auditory apparatus and/or mind separates different instruments and tones, hears some vibrations but not others, adds tones to fill out the sound spectrum, etc. This middle ground is the province of the psychology of music, a subject about which even many physical scientists know little.
This introduction, by the developer of the Seashore test of musical ability, is a thorough survey of this field, the standard book for psychologists specializing in the area, for the school, and for interested musicologists. It opens with the musical mind and with a series of chapters on music as a vibrato, pitch, loudness, duration, timbre, tone, consonance, volume, and rhythm, dealing with each from the special point of view of the role of psychology. It then moves to such factors as learning, imagining, and thinking in music; the nature of musical feeling; the relative sound patterns of specific instruments and the human voice; measures of musical talent; inheritance of musical ability; primitive music; the development of musical skills; and musical aesthetics.
This wealth of material is supplemented with dozens of oscillograms and other sound-pattern charts recorded from actual play and singing by Jeritza, Caruso, Paderewski, Szigeti, Rethberg, Menuhin, Martinelli, and other artists. An appendix cites two attitudes toward the evaluation of musical talent and over 200 bibliographic references.

Genres: Music, Psychology, Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

Reviews

[Caelyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book talks about how the physical world of vibrations is measured and how they affect the world. It also talks about how there are aspects in music that can be found all over the world, and not just in man-made sounds but natural sounds. Seashore talks about tones, and vibrations, and how we can hear some sounds and can’t others. There are many chapters in this book that talk about different things like, The musical mind, or the science of music, and so much more. I didn’t like this book. I found it very boring and hard to understand and read. Honestly this book was a bit of a disappointment. There were a lot of graphs and scales and things that weren’t really explained and made it very confusing. I give this book a 1-star rating. When I could understand it was interesting to read about the things they talked about but that was only a few pages from a few topics.

[Christopher Heckman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good classical reference, but not quite what was hoping would be there.

[May Ling · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this on one of my shelves at my parents house. I really liked the science of this book, but one star off because it primarily appealed to my nerdy ability to read highly technical text. If it wasn't that I was a math geek in real life, I think this book might be a bit unapproachable. It covers across instruments and in that regard it may be a bit much for the usual person. However, the idea of what sounds are about combined with the technology demonstrations are really quite fantastic.

In voice class, you often describe sound as larger or wide like a frequency band. Nowadays we use Garage band and the like to be able to see resonance. To think of singing or playing an instrument in those terms is an excellent way to really know the feel of things deeply.

I like the section on the piano that describes the four elements of what you can do to manipulate sound. In general, you can only really manipulate tempo and duration. The voice can do so much more. If you think about what the piano does with just these two things as the player, it's super cool. And then throw in the sustain pedal and you've got a third dimension, albeit limited relative to a super free instrument like voice. However, just think how much is possible with those constraints and then apply it to voice. Very very cool stuff.

I also love the chapter on creative sound vs. creative image or other forms of creativity. Really made me think about how that plays into other areas of work. We are - as humans - creative beings. We make tools and we shape our reality entirely unconstrained. I'd never meaningfully considered that creativity might also be divided into subgroups each with very in-depth training methodologies, e.g. you train visual creativity by drawing, painting, tracing, imagining actively, you train interactive creativity, by acting, role playing, etc, you train auditory creativity by listening to music hearing differences. Fascinating.

What does it mean as we take the arts out of school and force a STEM approach to learning? It is too obvious that this will be an HR issue for the future.

[Giuseppe · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is much to say about this book... for now, it is antiquated but it shares some foundational unchanging aspects about music that other books don't quite seem to reach....

[Tim Ponygroom]

This book implanted ideas in my 15 year old head that influenced my work in electronic music. Now that it is available online in the Google Books collection I plan to re-read it.