Auditory Illusions Demonstrating That Tones Are Assimilated to an Internalized Musical Scale

Judgments of relations between tones in a sequence derived from the major diatonic scale (do, re, mi, . . .) by systematic distortions (either equalization or stretching of intervals) reveal that Western listeners interpret the tones relative to that musical scale even when they try to judge the purely physical relations between the tones.