Psychologist

Some people are content merely to enjoy music. Others cannot rest content until they have explained, or tried to explain, why they enjoy it. Such malcontents have included sensitive critics, brain-wrenching philosophers, precise, rubber-gloved scientists. But the question, Why people enjoy music, still remains unanswered.

One of the foremost of today's musical scientists is 72-year-old, white-haired Psychologist Carl Emil Seashore, dean emeritus of the Graduate College of Iowa State University. Last week, Dean Seashore published a highly technical volume* containing the results of a lifetime's research in musical psychology. Psychologist Seashore's volume explains the psychological nature of consonance and dissonance, of accentuation in piano playing, of a singer's vibrato. "One is at once impressed," admits Psychologist Seashore, "with the appalling task which this inceptive science has assumed for itself, and how undeveloped the work is within this field." Dr. Seashore goes after his needle-in-a-haystack task in impressive fashion. But he does not succeed in explaining why people like music.

* PSYCHOLOGY OF Music--McGraw-Hill ($4).

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