My first encounter with the theory of harmony was during my last year at
school (1975). This fascinating system of rules crystallized the
intuitive knowledge of harmony I had acquired from years of piano
playing, and facilitated memorization, transcription, arrangement and
composition. For the next five years, I studied music (piano) and
science (Physics) at the Univer- sity of Melbourne. This "strange
combination" started me wondering about the origins of those music
theory "rules". To what extent were they determined or influenced by
physics? mathematics? physiology? conditioning? In 1981, the supervisor
of my honours project in musical acoustics, Neville Fletcher, showed me
an article entitled "Pitch, consonance, and harmony", by a certain Ernst
Terhardt of the Technical University of Munich. By that stage, I had
devoured a considerable amount of (largely unsatisfactory) material on
the nature and origins of harmony, which enabled me to recognize the
significance of Terhardt's article. But it was not until I arrived in
Munich the following year (on Terhardt's invitation) that I began to
appreciate the conse- quences of his "psychoacoustical" approach for the
theory of harmony. That is what this book is about. The book presents
Terhardt's work against the broad context of music perception research,
past and present. Music perception is a multidisciplinary mixture of
physics, psychology and music. Where different theoretical ap- proaches
appear contradictory, I try to show instead that they complement and
enrich one another.