音楽への生理学的アプローチは可能か？∼ケーススタディ:ハイパーソニック・エフェクト∼

抄録

In the Western modern framework, which had Cartesian dualism as one of its vital origins, music, which induces beauty and pleasure in human mind, and physiology, which illuminates physical mechanism of human body, were considered to belong to exclusively independent domains. Physiological approaches to music, therefore, are basically challenges against the paradigm dating back to Descartes and inevitably involve essential difficulties in practice. As a successful instance of physiological approach to music, I will examine the discovery of the "hypersonic effect" in this presentation. The hypersonic effect is the phenomenon that imperceptible high-frequency component of air vibration above human audible range activates neural circuit of beauty and pleasure, and makes the sound more comfortable to hear. Regarding the phenomenon, there had long been a serious disagreement between artists and researchers. It may be easy to recognize that the critical factor for the discovery of the hypersonic effect, beyond this historical conflict, was the fact that the discoverer, Tsutomu OOHASHI, was a distinguished artist, Shoji YAMASHIRO, at the same time. Sharing scientific ability and artistic sensibility in one single personality, however, was just a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for this discovery. This paper will introduce "Eiffel-Tower, Pyramid, and volcanic-islands models of human activity" that realized the physiological approach to music. [J Physiol Sci. 2006;56 Suppl:S32]