Abstract
The purpose of this study is to answer two problems. (1) Which attribute is the most important in the similarity judgments of classical music? (2) Are there differences in the salience of particular dimensions between the music students and the nonmusic students? Forty female subjects were asked to rate nine musical stimuli on semantic differential scales. They were asked again to rate similarity among all possible pairs of the same nine stimuli. Individual difference multidimensional scaling (ALSCAL) yielded two common stimulus dimensions, which were interpreted as affective dimension and historical dimension. There were significant differences between the music students and the nonmusic students in the weight of these dimensions. Perceptual judgments of nonmusic students are dominated only by affective dimension, while those of music students judgments are dominated by both affective and historical dimensions.
