Associate Professor Neil McLachlan from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical properties of sound, the ear itself and an innate ability to hear harmony.<\/p>\n \u201cOur study shows that musical harmony can be learnt<\/strong> and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds,\u201d Associate Professor McLachlan said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo if you thought that the music of some exotic culture (or Jazz) sounded like the wailing of cats, it\u2019s simply because you haven\u2019t learnt to listen by their rules<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers used 66 volunteers with a range of musical training and tested their ability to hear combinations of notes to determine if they found the combinations familiar or pleasing.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we found was that people needed to be familiar with sounds created by combinations of notes before they could hear the individual notes. If they couldn\u2019t find the notes they found the sound dissonant or unpleasant,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis finding overturns centuries of theories that physical properties of the ear determine what we find appealing<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Coauthor on the study Associate Professor Sarah Wilson also from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences said the study found that trained musicians were much more sensitive to dissonance than non-musicians.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they couldn\u2019t find the note, the musicians reported that the sounds were unpleasant, whereas non-musicians were much less sensitive,\u201d Assoc. Prof Wilson said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis highlights the importance of training the brain to like particular variations of combinations of sounds like those found in jazz or rock.\u201d<\/p>\n Depending on their training, a strange chord or a gong sound was accurately pitched and pleasant to some musicians, but impossible to pitch and very unpleasant to others.<\/p>\n \u201cThis showed us that even the ability to hear a musical pitch (or note) is learnt,<\/strong>\u201d Assoc. Prof Wilson said.<\/p>\n To confirm this finding they trained 19 non-musicians to find the pitches of a random selection of western chords. Not only did the participants ability to hear notes improve rapidly over ten short sessions, afterward they reported that the chords they had learnt sounded more pleasant \u2013 regardless of how the chords were tuned.<\/p>\n The question of why some combinations of musical notes are heard as pleasant or unpleasant has long been debated.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe have shown in this study that for music, beauty is in the brain of the beholder,\u201d Assoc. Prof McLachlan said.<\/p>\n The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University of Melbourne press release via HealthCanal: Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability \u2013 a new study… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,60],"tags":[42,67],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10922"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11111,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10922\/revisions\/11111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"the](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/BrainMusic.jpg\")
Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability \u2013 a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found. <\/strong><\/p>\n