Researchers have found...

I think I'm turning into a crank about so-called 'scientific' research into music. Every time I read an article, like this in the Wall Street Journal about Adele, I want to scream, or crush an acciaccatura! I guess they publish stuff like this to increase circulation, just as the scientists involved are doing this kind of research to show how relevant they are. But really! Let me share with you the remarkable 'secret' all those researchers turned up: appoggiaturas add expression which has an effect on the listener. Uh-huh. And every single musician has known this fact for, oh, the last seven or eight hundred years. What do you think all those textbooks on harmony talk about? How to polish your tuba? Here is how the WSJ adroitly puts it:

researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners ... British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura." An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

 Was all musical knowledge suddenly sucked out of the universe recently and someone forgot to tell me? How can this possibly quality as 'news' or 'research'? Are these scientists this utterly ignorant of the simplest facts about the structure of music? If so, why for Pete's sake are they qualified as researchers into music? In my favorite textbook on harmony, which is 650 plus pages long, the appoggiatura is first discussed on page 43. It is as if these 'researchers' have almost complete ignorance of the basic materials of music.

Pathetic!