Richard Parncutt

Richard Parncutt (born 24 October 1957 in Melbourne) is an Australian-born academic who specializes in the psychology of music. He has been Professor of Systematic Musicology at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz in Austria since 1998.

Parncutt studied music and physics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and physics at the University of New England, Australia. In 1987, he was awarded a PhD in psychology, physics and music by the University of New England. He was guest researcher or postdoc with Ernst Terhardt (Munich), Johan Sundberg (Stockholm), Annabel Cohen (Halifax, Canada), Al Bregman (Montreal), and John Sloboda (Keele, England). From 1996 to 1998 he held a permanent position as Lecturer in Psychoacoustics at Keele University (England).

Parncutt's research addresses the perception of musical structure (pitch, consonance, harmony, tonality, tension, rhythm, meter, accent), the psychology of music performance (especially piano performance), and the psychological origins of tonality and of music.

The psychoacoustic model of harmony proposed by Parncutt in 1989 assumes that the auditory system treats all acoustic input similarly, whether it is a single tone or a musical chord. That is, the "input" to his model is a spectrum that can be a single complex tone, or any simultaneity such as a chord. The psychoacoustic effects of auditory masking are then taken into account before a "template" of the harmonic series is compared with the input spectrum. This comparison yields a number of properties of the sound, including tonalness, multiplicity, and salience. Tonalness is the degree to which a sound evokes the sensation of a single pitch. As such, individual tones, octave dyads, and major chords are quite high in tonalness. Multiplicity is an estimation of the number of tones in the sound. Intriguingly, for most chords the multiplicity values are less than the actual number of constituent tones – a prediction that has been validated empirically. Finally, pitch salience is the prominence of a given pitch sensation. For example, the root of a major chord in root position has greater pitch salience than other tones in that chord. Parncut also considers how we perceive successions of sounds, such as chord progressions, and his model makes testable predictions about musical phenomena such as consonance.

In research on the origins of music, Parncutt suggested that the emotional connotations of pitch-time-movement patterns in music may have originated from the relationship between a mother and her fetus or infant. Research on motherese or infant-directed speech already suggests that the mother-infant relationship could account for aspects of the origin of music, since this kind of communication is similar to music in many respects (melody, rhythm, movement). The emotional vocabulary of motherese could in part be learned before birth as the fetus is exposed to the internal sounds of the mother's body (voice, heartbeat, footsteps, digestion), all of which depend on the emotional state of the mother.

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