Review: Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound; An Introduction to Psychoacoustics edited by Perry R. Cook

Reviewed by R.M. Mottola

Originally published in American Lutherie #67, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013



Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound; An Introduction to Psychoacoustics
Edited by Perry R. Cook
The MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 978-0262531900

Wisdom, like beauty, is where you find it, and a beautiful bit of wisdom is tucked into AL#42. Here is found a thought, presented in a letter by Pamela Stanley-Rees. On the topic of the frequency response of instruments, Ms. Stanley-Rees opines that it is wise to always consider the response characteristics of the human ear and auditory system when evaluating the response characteristics of an instrument. She states: “Without the man in the loop, all of our instruments are just trees that have had a bad day.”

This thought as presented by Ms. Stanley-Rees is axiomatic, to me at least, and I try to let it inform my own design work. There is little sense in putting effort into working on aspects of the tone of an instrument that, although measurable and therefore present, cannot be perceived by human beings listening to that instrument. The problem this presents to the designers of musical instruments of course is that in addition to what we know and learn about instrument design, we must also learn something about how the human auditory system perceives musical sound.