Huron has written a brilliant and eminently readable synthesis of decades of empirical work on the cognitive and auditory principles that underlie polyphonic compositional techniques. This book is an ideal entry point for musicians interested in the field of music cognition, as Huron carefully leads the reader through the process of investigating musical knowledge through scientific experiments.
Ian Quinn, Professor of Music, Yale University
In this captivating book, David Huron provides a compelling account of the extraordinary capabilities and intricacies of the human auditory system, and how they are artfully navigated and exploited in the practice of multipart music composition. Drawing on over a half a century of interdisciplinary research on human audition, Huron demystifies and expands upon the traditional rules of voice leading, linking them to perceptual and cognitive principles freighted with rich aesthetic and evolutionary significance. This book is a revelation.
William Forde Thompson, Director, Centre for Elite Performance, Expertise, and Training, Macquarie University; author of Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music
"Voice Leading brings a new appreciation to the complexity of our sensory system and the care with which strong composers play to the rules of human auditory perception."
Quarterly Review of Biology
"Huron's book is a remarkable achievement, intertwining encyclopedic knowledge of auditory science with a deep understanding of voice-leading theory and practice. Fascinating and novel questions, insights, and perspectives fly like sparks from the pages. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not be provoked, engaged, or inspired by the breadth of his endeavor.... Everyone, whether beginning college music students, experts in music theory and auditory science, or interested members of the general public, could find the book readable and interesting. By bringing these groups together to think about the relationship between science and musical experience, Huron's contribution has the potential to advance the field in important ways."
Journal of Music Theory
"The greatest strengths of Voice Leading are both its extensiveness and its comprehensibility... Voice Leading is thus ideally suited for a broad audience lacking prior knowledge of empirical research on music perception, a convenient read for musicians, music theory scholars and teachers, and a general audience interested in music's psychological background."
Music Theory and Analysis
"Huron has written a brilliant and eminently readable synthesis of decades of empirical work on the cognitive and auditory principles that underlie polyphonic compositional techniques. This book is an ideal entry point for musicians interested in the field of music cognition, as Huron carefully leads the reader through the process of investigating musical knowledge through scientific experiments."
Ian Quinn, Professor of Music
Yale University
"Everyone, whether beginning college music students, experts in music theory and auditory science, or interested members of the general public, could find the book readable and interesting."
Journal of Music Theory
"In this captivating book, David Huron provides a compelling account of the extraordinary capabilities and intricacies of the human auditory system, and how they are artfully navigated and exploited in the practice of multipart music composition. Drawing on over a half a century of interdisciplinary research on human audition, Huron demystifies and expands upon the traditional rules of voice leading, linking them to perceptual and cognitive principles freighted with rich aesthetic and evolutionary significance. This book is a revelation."
William Forde Thompson
Centre for Elite Performance, Expertise, and Training, Macquarie University
"...the historical commentary on musical composition throughout anchors the volume within a social context."
Kasey Fowler-Finn
Quarterly Review of Biology
"David Huron, at Ohio State University, has pursued during his remarkable academic career a musicological study on voice leading from perceptual and cognitive standpoints, which he has now synthesized in a lucid book."
Gilberto Bernardes
Portugese Journal of Musicology
"David Huron's book on voice leading is the state-of-the-art account of the psychological principles that govern the perception of individual voices in a piece of music."
Fabian Moss
Music Theory and Analysis
“This very readable and informative book is, to my knowledge, one of the first to examine the conventional rules of voice leading from the perspective of psychoacoustics and music cognition. The writing style is informal, avoiding jargon, and many useful and sometimes humorous metaphors are employed to explain perceptual phenomena regarding voice-leading and auditory scene analysis. This book would serve not only as a great introduction to music perception and auditory scene analysis for music students or naïve readers but also as a useful reference and a source of inspiration for researchers in the field of music cognition.”
Psychology of Music
“One might argue that David Huron's last book, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, which won the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in 2007, is a tough act to follow....although Voice Leading is intended to be narrower in scope, it is a worthy successor.... In summary, Voice Leading is a book that offers fascinating insights into how music is fundamentally experienced and how that experience is beautifully reflected in a particular style of composition.”
Music Theory Specrtrum
