Musical scales and timing: implications from music psychology for Eastern-European ethnomusicology and vice versa

ENMusical scales and timing have long been topics attracting tremendous attention among East-European ethnomusicologists, resulting in vast studies. These topics are also relatively frequent in the contemporary cross-cultural research of music perception. In addition, basics of music perception (such as categorization and the emic/etic problem) and a number of psychoacoustical phenomena (such as masking and roughness, relevant for the present study) are well known. The studies of music perception, however, are largely unknown in Eastern-European ethnomusicology and vice versa. The present paper examines how findings in music perception could contribute to Eastern-European ethnomusicological research and vice versa. In the paper, certain paradigms and attitudes characteristic of Eastern-European ethnomusicological research on musical scales and timing are discussed. The transcriptions are considered indispensable data for the revelation of perceptual phenomena. Understanding of categorization and collision of emic systems is shown to result in dissolution of “aural ghosts”, such as false categorization of pitch and time, “chromaticisms”, and ostensible Ancient Greek modes found in ethnomusicological studies. Psychoacoustical roughness is shown to be responsible for some cases of scale formation in Schwebungsdiaphonie cultures. As a majority of cross-cultural studies of music perception employ “exotic” musical cultures, it is shown that some “exotic” elements in “non-exotic” (e.g., East-European) cultures are typically overlooked. The phenomena found in these cultures could shed a light on, for instance, questions of the universal of asymmetries in musical scale, patterns and varieties of tonal hierarchies, non-isochronous pulse, nonaccented meter, ametrical structures, and so on.