Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire
On Show 2020
Peter Jones

Is it possible to expand a person’s concept of what they consider to be in-tune? This pilot study investigated, through experimental methods, whether or not participants responded to deceases in the prevalence of in-tune musical scales by expanding their concept of ‘in-tune’. Participants listened to a series of 500 C Major Scales ranging from very in-tune to very out of tune and were tasked with deciding on whether each scale was in-tune or out of tune. Upon listening to 100 scales the prevalence of in-tune scales was gradually decreased for the remaining 400. Results indicated that when in-tune scales became rare, participants began to classify out of tune scales as in-tune, thus expanding their concept of ‘in-tune’. The presence of PICC in musical scale proposes potential evolutionary reasoning for the homogeneity of current musical systems, while additionally advocating that PICC might be used to reverse this uniformity of musicality and/or expand western tonal systems.