Pauline Larrouy-Maestri – Does this melody sound right ?

Speaker: Dr Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Title: Does this melody sound right ?

Listeners can easily say if a singer sounds “right” or if a music performance is “correct”. What is behind such judgment? This question can be addressed at different levels, from the molecular to the philosophical/psychological level. In this presentation, I will focus on the acoustical level (i.e., information used by the listener) and the cognitive one (i.e., processes involved in the perception of correctness). Recent findings and on-going experiments will be discussed with the objective to better understand what drives music perception.