American music psychology

In Europe, American psychology is often equated with the behaviorism of John Broadus Watson and Burrhus Frederic (alias B. F.) Skinner, who elevated the stimulus/response scheme to dogma. The actual founder Watson in particular has achieved rather sad fame. He carried out ethically highly questionable experiments with a small child: The poor boy was “trained” to have a lifelong fear of white rats – precisely to prove that such a thing was feasible and could be explained by pure reflexology.

One of the foundations of the Watson/Skinner edifice of thought is the strict rejection of introspection and the preoccupation with such elusive things as consciousness, thinking and feeling. This is a major reason why music psychology has never really warmed to the pure behaviorist doctrine, because experiencing and understanding music is simply inconceivable without imagination and introspection. Anyone with even a rudimentary musical training tends to think in terms of experience, inner listening and resonance.

This also applies to Carl Emil Seashore (1866 – 1949), the actual founder of American music psychology. The pioneer, who was born in Sweden and migrated to the USA as a small child, shows a remarkable independence in his work, which selects the best from all the theoretical frameworks of the time.

Seashore grew up in Iowa as the son of a Protestant preacher and carpenter and, faced with the choice of going to China as a missionary or pursuing an academic career, opted for the latter. His entry into the Department of Psychology at Yale University coincided with its official founding day. Travels took the young student to Germany (to Wilhelm Wundt) and France, and with his knowledge of continental European methods, he prepared the ground for American music psychology as a student of Yale professor George Ladd at the University of Iowa.

His test to measure musical talent, published in 1919, became famous and was widely introduced in American schools. Seashore also developed an audiometer, which he sold commercially from 1909. Due to the war, he remained active into old age. Although he retired in 1937 – after a rich life as a researcher and administrator in the Iowa school system – he had to return to school in 1942 for administrative duties due to the war. It was not until 1946, at the age of 80, that he finally retired.

His standard work «Psychology of Music» seems extremely modern in places, even zeitgeisty. One almost gets the impression that the will to take a scientific approach is in conflict with his undoubtedly artistic nature. Now and again, the latter breaks through and the pioneer becomes almost emphatic. For example, in an exposition of the principles of music psychology, he invokes the fact that music works above all with deviations from fixed and clear rules and that the appeal lies precisely in these impurities. He also speaks – Goleman sends his regards – of the fact that there must be something like an «intelligence of feeling», elsewhere he speaks of a hypothetical musical intelligence quotient, which he even abbreviates to «MIQ». In addition, he sees one of the major problems of music psychology as being the translation of the physical structures of music into the conceptualization of psychological experience with musical meanings, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

Seashore even explicitly opposes the behaviorist school:

Perhaps the most striking feature of the musical mind is auditory imagination, the ability to hear music internally in the creative process and to recreate the actual physical sounds. This fact has received too little attention in recent years, mainly because of the extreme behaviorist attitude that ignores the existence of mental imagery, but also because the phenomenon defies exact psychophysical measurement. For the latter reason, it is omitted from tests used to analyze musical talent. However, I myself would like to give it a central place.

Seashore, however, is also an experimental psychologist through and through – with the declared conviction that music aesthetics would become an applied, normative science based entirely on experiment and measurement. His merits and originality in this field are underappreciated today because the technical possibilities for measuring music have literally exploded since his work and many of the revolutionary insights of the time now seem trivial or have become commonplace.

To observe sound, Seashore uses a process that has fallen into oblivion today: fonophotography. This involves making sound waves photographically visible. The photos can then be elaborately measured and the exact frequency and frequency changes over a certain period of time can be determined (today, any child can do this with a software audio sequencer).

Seashore exemplifies his idea of scientific music psychology using the example of vibrato, the late Romantic espressivo par excellence. In keeping with the zeitgeist of the still young 20th century, he describes vibrato as the most important of all ornaments. (Presumably he is not aware that he is thereby being unfaithful to his own scientific principles. Such an assertion would of course have to be empirically proven. What is considered the subject of scientific investigation and what is considered common sense is simply part of the irrational aspects of science).

Fonophotography is used to research the vibrato. On its basis, a diagram can be created in which the pitch and amplitude fluctuations can be precisely represented over time. The scientific ideal of measurability is thus also achieved for a musical stylistic device.

Seasahore comes to these conclusions when studying singers:

1. Pitch vibrato is found in every note.
2. It is also found in the portamenti and the attack and decay phases.
3. The fluctuation is about a semitone.
4. The frequency rate of the vibrato averages 6.5 vibrations per second.
5. The modulation curve comes close to a sine curve.
6. The pitch range of one semitone is remarkably constant.
7. The frequency rate is also remarkably constant.
8. Intensity vibrato (changes in volume), albeit very weak, can be heard about a third of the time.
9. The intensity vibrato is weak, irregular and very rare at the beginning of a tone or when the tone changes.
10. The intensity vibrato is subordinate to the pitch vibrato.
11. The intensity vibrato has roughly the same frequency as the pitch vibrato.
12. Peaks in the intensity vibrato tend to coincide with those in the pitch vibrato, without any real regularity being recognizable.
13. The average pitch largely coincides with the exact physical pitch.
14. The singer does not sing a single note at the actual, exact pitch.
15. If there is beauty to be found in pitch intonation, it is in the artistic deviation from the exact pitch.

Seashore also presents a list of key figures (frequency and range of pitch modulation) for the vibratos of famous singers of his time, which could be seen as a fingerprint (or vocal cord print) of the respective artist.

The scrupulous measurements actually lead Seashore to psychologically interesting conclusions. Much weaker modulations are heard than are actually produced. Where modulation occurs in the space of a semitone, the listener only believes to hear the range of a fifth tone. Seashore also takes a close look at musical expressivity. He comes to the conclusion that the vibrato shows no connection with the expression of feelings: whether the singer is expressing love, hate, anger or rage, the vibrato is always the same. Seashore thus comes to the paradoxical conclusion that although vibrato is a highly expressive stylistic device, it contributes nothing to the differentiation of expressive qualities.

A passage in the «Psychology of Music» is interesting in that it vividly demonstrates that even conscientious researchers can stumble over prejudices and that the ideal of the objective scientist, as repeatedly invoked by the American behaviorist tradition, belongs in the realm of legends.

Firstly, Seashore distinguishes between the physiological limit of a sensory organ, given by the physical and physiological nature of the body. On the other hand, he sets cognitive limits to the human mind. For example, the ear can physically and biologically distinguish differences in frequency up to a certain fineness. Similarly, we can hear to a certain degree of subtlety whether two tones have the same or different pitches. The two aspects do not always coincide in experiments: the ear hears more subtly than the mind perceives (it is more difficult to see the reverse because the mind has to invent subtleties that do not exist in the physical world). Seashore does not simply accept this gap. Instead of assuming that certain bodily reactions occur unconsciously, he dogmatically claims that in such a case the experimental set-up was inadequate and that one only needs to measure better to eliminate the difference[8]. In other words, even Seashore ignores results if experimental data does not fit his concept.

Otherwise, we have the dry Seashore to thank for one of the funniest passages in the music psychology literature:

When Dr. Stanton wanted to measure certain phases of the talent of all living members of six of the most conspicuous American musical families, he found that one of the brothers of a protagonist of one of these families claimed to have no musical talent at all. This also seemed to be the opinion of the family. However, the experimenter proved that the man had exceptional abilities in the five elementary skills that were measured as standard, even surpassing his famous brother. The subject subsequently admitted that the conviction of his unmusicality was the result of the fact that all the music he had heard up to that point had seemed so poor that it had caused him intolerable earache.