Musical Intervals

Attneave and Olson:

• believed an appropriate pitch representation could be found by examining subject's ability to perceive/produce pitch patterns under transposition.
• their representation corresponds to the log frequency scale, which, unlike mel scale, musical (and microtonal) intervals are preserved under transformations.

Log scale does not represent the fact that octaves and perfect fifths, are special.

Octaves and (to some degree) fifths are culturally universal:

• though scales may differ culturally, they almost always contain an octave (and fifth) relationship;
• tonal relationships of octaves show increased generalization over other intervals;