Walter Coppola

Summary In human civilisation, music has always represented a powerful means of communication. Our perceptual system, based on mechanisms of great complexity and extraordinary functionality, allows us to grasp the infinite melodic and harmonic combinations, the changes in the dynamic and agogic patterns, the infinitesimal subtleties of timbre that musical language offers us. The process of acquiring and fruition of the musical message lives through three distinct phases: the perceptive, the elaborative and the emotional. The perceptual phase is based on the acquisition mechanisms of the sound waves that are picked up and sent to the brain; this is where the elaborative phase occurs and the sound message is given a clear, precise and identifiable structural dimension; the third phase concerns that process that is in some ways still mysterious thanks to whicht he sound language develops all its expressive power and arouses in us a whole range of emotions. My contribution will focus above all on the elaborative phase, referring to the principles formulated by Max Wertheimer in a famous article of 1923, in which he describes the ways in which the human mind organises and interprets visual perception. These real ‘laws’ can also be applied, with rigorous and unquestionable correspondence, to auditory perception. Through the analysis of the most significant contributions of the scholars who have dealt with this subject, I want to highlight the absolute scientific and cultural importance that the Gestalt theory has acquired in the panorama of the psychological schools of the last century. Even today, however, this current of thought represents an essential point of reference not only in the analysis of perceptual phenomena, but also in the understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying musical language and its engaging artistic and communicative function.

Summary A pupil of Köhler and von Hornbostel in Berlin, Arnheim published an article in the Musical Quarterly in 1984, where he applied the principles of visual composition to the musical form. In a painting, for example, the forces of visual composition are essential for aesthetic enjoyment; in music, sounds are essential as they are always occurring in time, and this constitutes the main dynamic vector of music. Starting with the tetrachord of ancient Greek music and analysing the relationships between notes in the major and minor scales, Arnheim identifies what in the Western musical tradition represents the basis on which each note must relate: the tonal centre, the attractive motor that determines the perceptual dynamics of musical expression. Two examples, taken from Schubert and Béla Bartók, show us how the structure of the melodic construction is essential in generating different states of mind; Arnheim, however, does not stop at the simple eliciting of an emotion, but situates the musical structure in a more general framework, which refers to perceptual patterns belonging to any sphere, mental or physical, thanks to which we experience our reality.

We ran a pilot experiment to explore, using a new psychophysical method, the hypothesis proposed by Zietz and Werner in the ’30s, that a sound presented simultaneously with an afterimage can change its phenomenal appearance in non-synaesthetes. The method we adopted is able to directly collect and visualise the apparent changes in intensity of the afterimages, by recording observers’ interactions with a physical feedback mechanism (the paths that the observers generated by moving a cursor), without referring to verbal descriptions. These first findings support some of the most meaningful observations reported by Werner (1934) and Zietz (1931), according to which the colours of the afterimages ‘disintegrate’ at the hearing of a low sound and ‘concentrate’ for a high sound. This relationship is particularly evident with the Yellow stimulus, where the perceived colour intensity of its afterimage seems to have a faster negative change with a low-pitched tone sound, and an increase in intensity and duration when perceived simultaneously with a soprano sound. These data are also coherent with the crossmodal correspondences between both pitch and loudness in audition and lightness and brightness in vision reported in the literature.

Summary The famous essay by Christian von Ehrenfels, Über Gestaltqualitäten (1890), opens up, as is well-known, an important seam not only in the psychology of perception but also of aesthetics, of the psychology and philosophy of music, art and language. Here, in fact, the form understood as ‘Gestalt’ is something concretely audible and visible and not simply a formal abstraction. It is about a pioneering programme rich in ideas and original connections. The author does not mean simply to define the meaning of the concept of Gestalt, but he also sets out a fertile variety of extraordinary applications. In the first place – following a suggestion of Ernst Mach’s – he indicates an application in the field of music, in particular in the exemplary case of melody. In this sense the melody, as a temporal Gestalt, is a more fitting illustration of Gestalt than a spatial Gestalt (e.g. of a geometric figure). But in other cases, as for instance in the case of perception of movement, both temporal and spatial Gestalts are admitted. And a characteristic example is provided by dance. In this article, we shall investigate the comparison between sound movement and visual–gestural movement, and we shall also be discussing the matter by having recourse to the experience of professional dancers.