Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound: An Introduction to Psychoacoustics by Perry R.

Cooke
Review by: Francis Rumsey
Notes, Second Series, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Jun., 2000), pp. 980-981
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/899868 .
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980
virtue of his nineteenth-century childhood
-Pablo
Casals) seem suspiciously selfconscious, as if intended to add historical
weight. While it would be naive to expect
anything "new" here, the authorial voice
is often overwhelmed by its old, familiar
sources. Fortunately, Kenneson does not
linger; the later entries are more compelling.
One of the book's most refreshing features is the inclusion of lesser-known figures. Kenneson's chapter on his teacher
Horace Britt, a colleague of Casals, is an insightful account of a turn-of-the-century
cello prodigy. Indeed, the author's observations about string playing in general are imbued with an attractive empathetic energy.
Also, in the case of Britt, much of the information is drawn from personal interviews.
Kenneson's presentation of his own interview material is admirably self-effacing,
and throughout the book, these firsthand
encounters invariably provide the liveliest
entries. The interview with former boy soprano Bejun Mehta, which serves as an epilogue, is a case in point.
All musical prodigies must eventually
face the loss of their "special" identity. The
boy soprano's situation is doubly poignant,
for as he ages, his vehicle of expression disappears. Fortunately, Mehta reveals an extraordinary talent not only for music, but
for personal reinvention. He has had adult
careers as a cellist and a Grammy Awardwinning record producer, and he has recently emerged as a much-acclaimed
countertenor. It is Mehta's account of the
failure of his childhood voice, however,
that stands out in the context of this book,
for moments of failure in Musical Prodigies
are as rare as the quality of "prodigy" itself.
It is telling that all of Kenneson's prodigies established highly successful musical
careers as adults. Musical Prodigies celebrates "the perilous, glorious journeys of
prodigies in music" (p. 12), and in the
spirit of celebration, there is no mention of
travelers along this road who did not complete the trip. Many readers, especially
those from the "general-interest" audience,
will find satisfaction and pleasure in these
stories of what appear to be unusually
graced lives. Those who hope to discover
of exceptional
the commonalities-outside
musical talent-that
provided a platform
for all of this success will have to look else-

NOTES, June 2000

where. The prodigy's transition from child
wonder to fulfilled adult musician remains
as mysterious and individual as the prodigies themselves.
JOHNMCGINNESS
State Universityof New Yorkat Potsdam
Music, Cognition, and Computerized
to PsychoSound: An Introduction
acoustics. Edited by Perry R. Cooke.
Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Cambridge,
[xi, 372 p. + 1 compact disc. ISBN 0262-03256-2. $50.]
Music, Cognition, and ComputerizedSound
is a substantial new book from MIT Press.
Edited by Perry R. Cooke, it contains chapters contributed by a number of authors
who have been associated with Stanford
University's Center for Computer Research
in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), including well-known figures such as Max
Mathews, Roger Shepard, andJohn Pierce,
as well as Cooke himself. As the editor indicates in the introduction, the book takes
its inspiration from a course that has been
taught at CCRMA since the eighties, and
the chapters are structured so that each
might serve as the basis of a lecture (although some are much shorter than others). There are twenty-three chapters in all
-a convenient number for a two-semester
course with weekly lectures, exercises, and
examinations-followed
by suggested laboratory exercises, questions and problems,
and a list of the tracks contained on an accompanying compact disc. The disc contains many examples of the phenomena
described in the text, together with some
C-code and MIDI files for those wishing
to experiment with the stimuli themselves
using a computer.
The approach is refreshingly simple, yet
well informed by research in the field. The
contributions are accessible to the interested musician having little prior knowledge of acoustics or psychoacoustics. Nonetheless, the technical level varies somewhat
from chapter to chapter, and a modicum of
technical and mathematical knowledge
would certainly be helpful for understanding some of the material; the Fourier transform equations appearing suddenly in
chapter 4, for example, might frighten the
unwary. The contributors vary in style:

Book Reviews
Mathews is informal and expansive,
whereas Pierce is formal and concise.
The text covers a wide range of topics,
including aspects of cognitive grouping
and streaming, haptics, and human-voice
acoustics, as well as the more traditional
psychophysics fields of pitch, loudness, and
space perception. While many of these topics are treated separately elsewhere, it is
rare to find them collected together in one
place and explained in relation to music at
an accessible technical level. The editor deserves considerable credit, therefore, for
drawing together such a wide range of material and then distilling the essence of it
for the relative novice. This is always a difficult task, and whereas edited books by contributing authors nearly always suffer from
some lack of thematic continuity, Cooke
has done a fine job in this regard. There is
some repetitiveness-Shepard tones appear
a few times, for example-and some material is introduced in an unusual order, but
the overall result is satisfying.
Though I found few factual errors, I
question some uses of terminology. For example, Mathews uses the term "intensity"
somewhat interchangeably with "soundpressure level" in chapter 6 ("What Is
Loudness?"); he says that the latter is a
measure of sound intensity (p. 73), whereas
in strict acoustical terms it is not. ("Intensity" has a specific acoustic meaning that
may result in the statement being incorrect
in some circumstances.) Some psychophysicists might object to occasional oversimplifications, but it is always difficult to end up
on the right side of the boundary between
simplification and oversimplification when
writing books at an introductory level. In
this collection, the efforts made to reach a
wide readership are nearly always well intentioned and well informed. The only unsatisfactory section is the brief chapter 22,
"Storage and Reproduction of Music," an

981
odd collection of material that does not
seem to have a clear purpose.
The section on the precedence effect in
spatial hearing (pp. 92-95) does not distinguish adequately between the perception
of a single source by two ears (resulting in
no more than the maximum binaural time
delay) and the perception of multiple, spatially separated sources by two ears (resulting in a delay dependent on their relative
distance and direction); this is crucial to
the difference between
understanding
stereo sound reproduction on headphones
and on loudspeakers, and to understanding
time-intensity trading in auditory perception. On page 102, the threshold of hearing is said to be around 10 watts per square
meter at 3,000 Hz for people with acute
hearing. In fact, this is guaranteed to be
highly audible, if not deafening, even to
people with less than acute hearing; perhaps some factors of ten went missing
somewhere in the word processor. On page
179, a cent is said to be a thousandth of an
octave in the text and a twelve-hundredth
of an octave in the accompanying table.
(The latter is correct.) But overall, the material is highly accurate.
The text itself, or appendix C ("Sound
Examples on CD"), should provide considerably more information about what is illustrated on the compact disc and how it relates to specific chapters. For example, the
tracks pertaining to chapter 1 are not described at all, and the notes in appendix C
are not sufficient for some readers to work
out what is being demonstrated or why.
That said, the lecturer who has time to
study the compact-disc material and work
out its relationship to the book will find it
extremely useful for setting up classroom
demonstrations.
FRANCIS RUMSEY

Universityof Surrey