Voice Leading

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the historical commentary on musical composition throughout anchors the volume within a social context.

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.

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.